The focus of Hountondji’s studies in France during the 1960s was on Edmund Husserl. The 1960s were also the years when Louis Althusser was writing and publishing some of his most important work on the interpretation of Marx. Hountondji’s thinking about the relationship between philosophy and science (and the idea of philosophy as a theory of science, i.e., a Wissenschaftslehre) was deeply influenced both by his work on Husserl and his encounters with Althusser. Moreover, the 1960s were also years of political instability which culminated in the events of May 1968 in France, and, as I have pointed out in Chap. 1 , the 1960s was a period of intense activity on the African continent, with the newly independent nations trying to chart a developmental path that would rid them of the shackles of colonialism. Thus, while the debate about the relationship between philosophy and science seems quite technical, it was not, as I will show, isolated from questions of development and the political and social contestations which marked life in the newly independent African states.