约翰·S. 姆比蒂

Agora

约翰·S. 姆比蒂

1931–2019

初步了解有意简化——人物介绍讲得更多

在非洲人的生活中，宗教无处不在，而个人只有通过共同体才存在：“我在，因为我们在。”

定位

非洲与非洲裔哲学 · 撒哈拉以南非洲 · 宗教, 形而上学, 社会与历史

肯尼亚神学家和圣公会神父：非洲的宗教应当得到与其他世界宗教同样的尊重。他的“因为有我们，所以有我”成为一句口号；他关于非洲时间几乎不知道遥远未来的论断，则招致持续的批评。

核心思想

“因为有我们，所以有我；因为有我们，所以我存在”
Sasa 与 Zamani（时间）
非洲宗教作为本身自成一格的宗教

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影响

影响了 1

伊凡约·门基蒂

影响了
Menkiti took up Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ and concluded personhood is attained in community, not given at birth (‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’, 1984). I. A. Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought”, in R. A. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction (3rd ed., 1984); J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
依据: AI 草稿
伊凡约·门基蒂 › 1940–2019

批评

受批评于 3

奥考特·庇代克

受其批评
Okot p’Bitek objected that Mbiti and other African theologians had “Hellenised” African deities by describing them as omnipotent, omniscient and eternal. O. p’Bitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970); Masolo 1994; S. O. Imbo, Oral Traditions as Philosophy (2002)
依据: AI 草稿
奥考特·庇代克 › 1931–1982
夸梅·吉耶基

受其批评
Gyekye read Mbiti’s ‘I am, because we are’ as radical communitarianism without room for individual rights, and proposed a moderate version (‘Person and Community in African Thought’, 1992). K. Gyekye, “Person and Community in African Thought”, in K. Wiredu & K. Gyekye (eds.), Person and Community (1992); Tradition and Modernity (1997), ch. 2; J. S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (1969)
依据: AI 草稿
夸梅·吉耶基 › 1939–2019
亨利·奥德拉·奥鲁卡

受其批评
Odera Oruka placed Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) under ‘ethnophilosophy’, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection by individual thinkers. H. Odera Oruka, “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1978; publ. 1981); Sage Philosophy (1990), introduction
依据: AI 草稿
亨利·奥德拉·奥鲁卡 › 1944–1995

作品

1969非洲宗教与哲学
对非洲宗教整体的概览——包含箴言“因为我们存在，所以我存在”，以及指向过去的时间观的论点。

立场

African Religions and Philosophy was written against the missionary view that African religions were superstition or devil worship. Mbiti presented them as a coherent whole, with a belief in one God, intermediaries such as spirits and the “living dead”, rites of passage and an ethics bound to community, and asked that they be studied with the same respect as Christianity or Islam: “Africans are notoriously religious.” Two theses from the book became widely known. The first is his summary of African views of the person: “I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” The second, drawn from the verb tenses of Kikamba and Gikuyu, holds that time in African thought has two dimensions: a lived present (sasa) that flows into a long past (zamani), with almost no distant future. Both met strong criticism. Okot p’Bitek, in African Religions in Western Scholarship (1970), accused him of dressing African gods in the attributes of the Christian God. Kwame Gyekye, D. A. Masolo and others argued from Akan and other languages that the claim about time was false, and noted that the Swahili terms themselves are loanwords from Arabic. Henry Odera Oruka placed his work under “ethnophilosophy”, a description of collective beliefs rather than critical reflection. His formula about the community, on the other hand, became a starting point for the debate on personhood with Ifeanyi Menkiti and Gyekye.

生平与背景

John Samuel Mbiti was born in 1931 at Mulango in Kitui, Kenya, into a Kamba family. He studied at Makerere College in Uganda and at Barrington College in Rhode Island, and in 1963 took a doctorate in theology at Cambridge with a study of New Testament eschatology, the basis of his later book on that subject in an African setting. In the same year he was ordained an Anglican priest. From 1964 to 1974 he taught religion and philosophy at Makerere University, where he wrote African Religions and Philosophy (1969). In the 1970s he moved to the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Institute at Bossey near Geneva, which he directed until 1980. He then served as a parish minister in Burgdorf in Switzerland until 1996 and taught at the University of Bern. He was married to Verena Mbiti-Siegenthaler. In retirement he translated the New Testament from Greek into his mother tongue, Kikamba. He died in Switzerland in 2019.