Part of the difficulty in thinking about African philosophy arises from historical and polemical features of the intellectual practice of philosophy itself. Periodic ideas regarding the nature of philosophy have been deeply influenced by a succession of concurrent practices as well as by the polemical diversity of its brands. Indeed, even in our own day, the Western world has been beset by the contrasts and divergences huddling under the general rubric of the analytic tradition and the perhaps even more general rubric of the continental tradition. This fact of the variability of the idea of philosophy makes it possible to construe and to recognize philosophy at different places on its evolutionary tree without reliance on paradigms. Indeed, much of what we admire as Ancient Greek philosophy would not bear scrutiny under several contemporary acceptations of that term. The fact is that a history of philosophy, as of any disciplinary field, is hardly possible without a flexible and ample view of its subject. Two general approaches to such an ample view seem evident: the one, ex post facto, relies on a survey and conspectus of what has come to be accepted as philosophy; the other, more venturesome, requires a foundation of theory.