Socrates and Ọ̀rúnmìlà

Introduction

Sophie Oluwole’s last book, published by Ark Publishers in Lagos, compares two founders of philosophy who wrote nothing themselves: Socrates, known through Plato and Xenophon, and Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the sage of the Yoruba Ifá tradition, whose teachings survive in the verses of the Ifá divination corpus. She sets their views on knowledge, ethics, society and the place of women side by side and argues that the Ifá corpus deserves to be read as classical philosophy. The book sums up her long argument against the view that oral cultures cannot have philosophy.