SAGE PHILOSOPHY, philosophical tradition and methodology premised on interviewing the wise and respected elders of a society.
Sage philosophy was developed in the mid-1970s by Henry Odera Oruka, a philosophy professor at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Oruka grew up learning from sages in his hometown of Ugenya before going to university in Sweden and studying Western philosophy. When he returned to Kenya to begin his professorship, philosophy departments across Africa were questioning their Western-centric curriculum and developing the study of African philosophy.
Oruka became invested in researching indigenous African traditions of thought but was critical of the primary approaches his colleagues were using at the time. Many characterized African thought as deeply rooted in myth, religion, and allegory, or else as a collection of anonymous and traditional folk maxims. Oraku argued that these characterizations echoed the colonial idea that African thought is based in superstition rather than reason and that they downplayed the role of individual thinkers.
He noted that the sages of ancient Greece, such as Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, and Socrates, shared many characteristics with the sages of his upbringing: their use of oral tradition and plain language, the way they sought to live according to their own maxims, and their commitment to bettering their community through practical wisdom.
Given that Western philosophy is founded on centuries of critical engagement with these early Greek sages, Oruka wondered what would happen if the wisdom of the sages of his community were treated in the same way.
He decided to interview Kenyan sages, commit their ideas to writing for the first time, and engage philosophically with these texts. Through this method he hoped to both explicate and grow an indigenous African philosophical tradition. These interviews covered a wide range of topics, including the nature of God, the self, freedom, justice, truth, death, and the afterlife. Oruka prioritized sages who could provide reasons and justifications for their beliefs, and he treated their opinions as their own rather than as speaking for the community. These interviews were collected and published in his book Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy (1990).
Sage philosophy offers a new methodology that challenges Western-centric assumptions about what philosophy is and can be. It also raises interesting questions about the interchange between popular wisdom, critical thought, and academic philosophy.