Bert hamminga   Questions about Le Penseur Africain    version date 991101

Control questions

1. The first head of the text is: "The primary African "thinking subject" is not an individual person.". What is meant by that?
2. In which aspects do Africans compare is a community to a tree?
3. What is meant in the text where it claims that African imagery (sculpture, painting), and African music and dance is not art but science?
4. What makes the "behaviour" of Le Penseur intolerable to African standards?
5. The text reads: "A person is voice in the tribe". Explain.
6. "The obvious and unassailable group membership of the African yields options for individualism unreachable for Westerners." What is meant?
7. If you ask Africans familiar with Western philosophy and science what they would primarily say about it in case they would have to explain it to fellow Africans unfamiliar with the subject, often the answer is: "It's critical". Now what does that mean if one African says that to another African in explaining the Western idea of philosophy as well as science?
8. What is the difference between a (Western) empiricist and a (Western) rationalist?
9. "The DVD player and recorder example shows that written language actually is a clumsy and unnecessary time consuming instrument that often leads you astray."