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Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá Quotes
Nigeria
Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá is a Nigerian-American philosopher, legal scholar and scholar of African philosophy, particularly Yorùbá philosophy and the Ifá intellectual tradition.
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The growth of philosophy in Africa is leading to the demise of African philosophy!
The primary logic of Yorùbá language is not classical; it is intuitionistic or sortal at base, with a secondary or supplementary layer of classical logic.
Translation from Yorùbá into English and vice versa is fun! You see and understand things differently by code-switching in and out of the two languages. But at the same time, it is perilous!
All philosophy is cultural philosophy.
Many concepts, principles, actions, processes, rules and methods simply do not make sense if one thinks in Yorùbá on the basis of the spatiotemporal classical logic that is encoded into the English language.
As long as we continue to conduct philosophy in Africa solely (or mainly) in European languages, the concepts, categories, and worldviews embedded within our philosophical products will predominantly be European and not African.
The implication of the foregoing is clear: doing philosophy in the English language will yield a completely different set of rules, principles and standards from doing philosophy in the Yorùbá language because these languages individuate and identify in radically different ways.
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