Mythological Foundations of Philosophy: A Critical Response

Abstract

This critical response to the mythological foundations of philosophy focuses on the relationship between mythology and philosophy with particular reference to Africa and the West. Some Western scholars like Martins holds that mythology domiciles in the West; and if at all  Africa has philosophy, it did not arise from any mythological foundation. This study will prove such a position unfounded; because long  before African philosophy began, Africans have had their mythology attributing almost everything about them to the gods, who were  according to them, influential in human affairs right from creation. Similarly, philosophy is not an exclusive inheritance of the Western  world, as Jones argues, but a patrimony of the entire humanity. And so, I strongly argue that mythology is the basic foundation upon  which philosophy develops not only in the West, but also in Africa. Though the concern of this research is neither to give an exhaustive  analysis of mythological foundations of philosophy in Africa nor in the Western, it attempts to showing the inevitability of mythology in  philosophical discourse across diverse ages and cultures. It is the contention of this work that every people and culture have their own mythology upon which their world view is critiqued, enlightened, made critical, and developed into philosophy. Mythology serves as a  launch pad or instrumentum laboris philosophicum, and any attempt to deliberately deny any culture of mythology and philosophy is  considered in this research as epistemic injustice. Analytic, conceptual, contextual, historical, and textual methods of inquiry were  adopted in this discourse.