Paulin Hountondji and the Critique of Ethnophilosophy

Paulin Hountondji was born in 1942 in Abidjan to a Beninese family and trained in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied under Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida before returning to teach in Benin, chiefly at the National University of Benin (now the Université d'Abomey-Calavi), and later serving as a UNESCO official and government minister. His most influential book, published in French as Sur la "philosophie africaine" (Maspero, 1976) and in English as African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Indiana University Press, 1983, revised 1996), delivered one of the most consequential internal critiques in the history of twentieth-century African philosophy.