Description: The Struggle for Meaning is a landmark publication by one of African philosophy's leading figures, Paulin J. Hountondji, best known for his critique of ethnophilosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this volume, he responds with autobiographical and philosophical reflection to the dialogue and controversy he has provoked.
Review Quotes: "As an object of philosophical discourse, Africa has been constructed, indeed invented according to some, as the 'Other' of thought, reason, and history. Today, Africa itself is the site of origin of plural and open discourses on its ancient traditions of thought, modes of knowledge, and on the inexhaustible meanings of the discipline of philosophy ... Paulin Hountondji, whose African Philosophy: Myth and Reality had a considerable impact on African Studies in general, has played an important role in the critical framing and conceptualization of these issues and discourses. In The Struggle for Meaning, he returns to a personal, intellectual itinerary of exemplary value, not for reasons of memory, but for the future; above all for the task of unblocking the horizon, of inscribing issues of identity and culture on a platform of action: notably that of the re-appropriation of the sciences."--Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University