Placide Tempels 1906 – 1977

Placide Frans Tempels was a Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Belgian Congo and the author of Bantu Philosophy, published in 1945, the first book to argue at length that the peoples of central Africa possessed an articulated philosophical worldview rather than a merely primitive religion. Working among the Baluba of Katanga, he proposed that Bantu metaphysics is centered on the concept of vital force and that the moral life is ordered by the strengthening or weakening of force. His book provoked decades of debate, both as the founding text of what would be called ethnophilosophy and as the principal target of the critique of ethnophilosophy by Hountondji and others.