Paulin Jidenu Hountondji (11 April 1942 – 2 February 2024) was a Beninese philosopher, politician and academic considered one of the most important figures in the history of African philosophy.

Paulin J. Hountondji was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, graduating in 1966, and taking his doctorate in 1970 (his thesis was on Edmund Husserl).

After two years teaching in Besançon (France), Kinshasa and Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of the Congo), he accepted a post at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, where he long taught as Professor of Philosophy.

Hountondji's philosophical influences include two of his teachers in Paris, Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida.

He argued that such an approach confuses the methods of anthropology with those of philosophy, producing "a hybrid discipline without a recognizable status in the world of theory" ([1997], p. 52).