Hi, I'm

and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast,

brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London

and the LMU in Munich, online at historyof philosophy.net.

Today's episode, outsider philosophy, the, The Cheese and the Worms.

If you've listened to the series of podcasts on Africana philosophy that I did together with

G.K. Jeffers, then you'll know that one of the major topics we covered is philosophy in oral

traditions. The idea here is that cultures with no tradition of writing

may nonetheless be studied from a philosophical point of view by looking at their sayings,

folk tales, and even the languages they speak. This endeavor, which is sometimes given the label

of ethno-philosophy, sparked intense controversy among African philosophers. Some insisted that philosophy can exist only in a context of writing.

Others defended and refined the ethno-philosophical project,

and still others suggested alternative approaches,

like the sage philosophy paradigm of Henry Odara Oruca,

which involved interviewing people from traditional communities

who were locally admired

for their wisdom. If you did listen to the relevant episodes, then perhaps you wondered, as I did

when I was working on them with Chiquet, why no one has applied this idea to European cultures?

Couldn't we look at the oral traditions of, say, Scandinavia, England, Italy, or Poland,

and extract philosophical insights from them just as has been done with the Yoruba, the Akhan,

and various Bantu peoples? There are several answers one might give to this question.

First and most obviously, less need has been felt to explore oral traditions in cultures

...