Henry odera oruka biography of nancy

Email this article Login required. Font Size. Journal Help. Open Access Subscription or Fee Access. What is Global Justice? Abstract Henry Odera Oruka was one of the most prolific philosophical thinkers in Africa in the twentieth century. His work opened up new ways for modern philosophizing in Africa, beyond the question of what African philosophy should or should not be.

Well known is his Sage Philosophy project. Unfortunately, less known is Odera Orukas work on Ethics. This paper highlights Odera Orukas ethical approach, especially his term of global justice. He divided the meaning of appearance into three parts. In the first part, he describes a reliance on outward appearance as a disease of most people in the society.

The second meaning is appearance as it is manipulated by business tycoons and others in power to boost their rank and influence. In the third part, the philosophical level, appearance becomes an obstacle to intellectual activity. This type of appearance is prominent in the field of education, where people are taught styles rather than substance.

The result is not knowledge but prejudice, racism, tribalism, sexism and irrational indifference to other cultures. This prompted him to analyse concepts to arrive at generally accepted truth rather than relying on mere appearance. There has been considerable and often acrimonious debate about the pre-Western existence of an independent African philosophy and what its nature might be.

Odera Oruka identified four trends or approaches in this discussion. Describes the worldview or thought-system of particular African communities as philosophy. This type of philosophy sees the African way of thinking as "communal thought" and describes its emotional appeal as one of its unique features. Mbiti , and Alexis Kagame. Consists of works of founding-fathers and statesmen in Africa, whose social-political theories were based on traditional African socialism and family values.

This is the position generally taken by professionally trained students or teachers of philosophy. They reject Ethnophilosophy and instead adopt a universalistic point of view. In their opinion, African philosophy should be approached with the same forms of critical analysis applied to mainstream Western philosophy. A descriptive approach, by itself, is more appropriate to the field of anthropology and applies different standards to African thought.

Bodunrin , and Odera Oruka. Philosophic Sagacity is Odera Oruka's research project begun in the early s designed to preserve the philosophical thoughts of traditional Kenyan sages. The basic principle of Philosophic Sagacity is that in both traditional and modern Africa there exist women and men, illiterate and literate, who commonly engage in philosophical reflection on various problems of human life and nature in general.

Unlike ethnophilosophy, which emphasises communal thinking, Philosophic Sagacity searches for individual thinkers in the traditional community. These "sages" express and defend their philosophical thoughts and opinions on various issues of nature and human life.

Henry odera oruka biography of nancy

Some of these thoughts even if not philosophical in the strict sense could nevertheless constitute raw data for technical philosophical reflections by professional or trained philosophers. Oruka wanted to point out that there is and was a philosophy in Africa in the fullest sense of the word: a philosophy that deals with daily human problems and issues which are common to every human being, such as the existence of a Deity, life, knowledge, death etc.

Such issues are not the sole domain of literate people but are usually best addressed by the few who can "transcend" the communal way of thinking. Odera Oruka distinguished between two wings of Sage Philosophy: 1 being the folk or popular sagacity, and 2 being the philosophic sagacity. While the former expresses well known communal maxims, aphorisms and general common sense truths, the latter expresses the thoughts of wise men and women that transcend popular wisdom and attain a philosophic capacity.

The novelty of Odera Oruka's project is to be found in philosophic sagacity since the folk sagacity dimension of sage philosophy would be a fallback to ethnophilosophy. Odera Oruka and his colleagues went with tape recorders into villages of different ethnic communities in Kenya to engage those who were thought by their own communities to be wise.

The discourses were held in the native language of the presumptive wise men or women. Each "wise statement" was challenged by the interlocutors. It was believed by this method true philosophy could be separated from popular wisdom. Philosophic Sagacity is not philosophy is the main argument of D. Based on Socratic method , his analysis shows how frequently tradition and opinion are based on insufficient reasoning.

For him, true philosophy relies on analysis, definition, and explanation. Pre-Socratic knowledge has no place in strict philosophy. Philosophic sagacity, he believes, falls into the category of pre-Socratic philosophy. A mere discussion of a topic does not have the high degree of abstraction, conceptual analysis, and relation which, according to him, are the essence of strict philosophy.

Masolo also objects to the Afrocentric perspective inherent in Odera Oruka's approach to treating pre-literate African men and women as proto-philosophers. For Odera Oruka, Philosophic Sagacity lies between ethnophilosophy and professional philosophy and is simply a starting point in determining the nature of African Philosophy. Bodunrin rejects Odera Oruka's notion that philosophic sagacity is philosophy because, for him, literacy is a necessary condition for philosophical reflections.

His second, related, objection is one common to anthropology: the influence of the observer. If a philosopher interviews a "sage", is the result really the work of the "sage" or a joint product? Who is the actual creator of the "philosophy"? Both involve the acquisition and usage of skills, but they are not identical. The majority and dominant staff at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies which had been launched in at the University of Nairobi were priests and lay theologians, and they had little time for "African Philosophy.

After years of sustained and bitter struggle spearheaded by Odera Oruka, Philosophy separated from Religion in July, and he was appointed the founder-Chairman of the new Department of Philosophy. Unfortunately for the Department, the death of Odera Oruka was accompanied with a marked decline in the international profile of Philosophy at the University of Nairobi.