  This first presumption is tempered by a second: namely, that the bio-cultural groupings of peoples African and of African descent are not homogeneous, racially or otherwise, neither individually nor collectively, but are constituted by differences and dissimilarities as well as by similarities and commonalities. All the more so as consequences of the various groups having created differing life-worlds in differing geographical, political, and historical locations prior to and as a consequence of impositions and disruptions of their lives fostered by Europeans and others on one hand; and, on the other, while living interactions and cultural exchanges with other peoples, European and European-descended peoples included, which have given rise to differences in individual and group genomes, histories, cultures, interests, and aspirations. Furthermore, identified shared similarities and commonalities are understood to be contingent, thus neither necessary nor inherent and fixed and thus the same for all persons African or of African descent. This presumption rules out any ahistorical, a priori claims regarding supposedly definitive “natural” characteristics of “the” thought of African and African-descended peoples assumed as non-contingently widely and generally shared across extended historical times and geo-cultural spaces. Africana philosophy as an ordering concept, then, is neither the promise of, nor an aspiration for, a unifying philosophy already shared, or to be shared, by all properly thoughtful persons African and/or of African descent. Judgments regarding the always-contingent distinguishing features of philosophizing thought and expression by persons African and of African descent, and of the extent to which such features are shared—to what degree, under what circumstances, to what ends—are to be achieved by way of combined efforts of philosophical anthropology, sociology of knowledge, and intellectual histories: that is, by way of historically and socio-culturally situated comparative studies of instances of philosophizing.