In this article, I demonstrate that the term ‘ ubuntu ’ has frequently appeared in writing since at least 1846. I also analyse changes in how ubuntu has been defined in written sources in the period 1846 to 2011. The analysis shows that in written sources published prior to 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a human quality. At different stages during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly: definitions included (...) ubuntu as African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, and as a worldview. Furthermore, my findings indicate that it was during the period from 1993 to 1995 that the Nguni proverb ‘ umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ’ (often translated as ‘a person is a person through other persons’) was used for the first time to describe what ubuntu is. Most authors today refer to the proverb when describing ubuntu , irrespective of whether they consider ubuntu to be a human quality, African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, or a worldview. (shrink)

In this article, I describe and systematize the different answers to the question ‘What is ubuntu?’ that I have been able to identify among South Africans of African descent (SAADs). I show that it is possible to distinguish between two clusters of answers. The answers of the first cluster all define ubuntu as a moral quality of a person, while the answers of the second cluster all define ubuntu as a phenomenon (for instance a philosophy, an ethic, African humanism, or, (...) a worldview) according to which persons are interconnected. The concept of a person is of central importance to all the answers of both clusters, which means that to understand these answers, it is decisive to raise the question of who counts as a person according to SAADs. I show that some SAADs define all Homo sapiens as persons, whereas others hold the view that only some Homo sapiens count as persons: only those who are black, only those who have been incorporated into personhood, or only those who behave in a morally acceptable manner. (shrink)

It has frequently been argued that the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was committed to restorative justice (RJ), and that RJ has deep historical roots in African indigenous cultures by virtue of its congruence both with ubuntu and with African indigenous justice systems (AIJS). In this article, I look into the question of what RJ is. I also present the finding that the term ‘restorative justice’ appears only in transcripts of three public TRC hearings, and the hypothesis that the (...) TRC first really began to take notice of the term ‘restorative justice’ after April 1997, when the South African Law Commission published an Issue Paper dealing with RJ. Furthermore, I show that neither the connection between RJ and ubuntu nor the connection between RJ and AIJS is as straightforward and unproblematic as often assumed. (shrink)

In his tragedy Philoctetes, Sophocles has firmly tied the fundamental conflicts to the characters, more precisely to the triangular relationship Ulysses - Neoptolemus - Philoctetes. In the prologue, he sets up the relationship of the older, designing Ulysses to the young, executive Neoptolemos as a problematic one through ambivalent formulations. These traces laid out by the poet are crucial for the interpretation of the entire tragedy. The connotation of the term ξυνεργάτης (v. 93), with which Neoptolemos describes the role Odysseus (...) has intended for him, has been rather neglected so far by scholars but appears to be of particular significance: Parallels in Euripides show that its divergent meanings ‘helper’ and ‘accomplice’ reflect the general conflict of the young hero in nuce. (shrink)

In this article, I demonstrate that the term ‘ubuntu’ has frequently appeared in writing since at least 1846. I also analyse changes in how ubuntu has been defined in written sources in the period 1846 to 2011. The analysis shows that in written sources published prior to 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a human quality. At different stages during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly: definitions included ubuntu as (...) African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, and as a worldview. Furthermore, my findings indicate that it was during the period from 1993 to 1995 that the Nguni proverb ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ (often translated as ‘a person is a person through other persons’) was used for the first time to describe what ubuntu is. Most authors today refer to the proverb when describing ubuntu, irrespective of whether they consider ubuntu to be a human quality, African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic, or a worldview. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

This book explores the influence of ubuntu on South Africa’s post-apartheid transitional justice mechanism, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and—in contrast to ethnophilosophy—takes differences, historical developments, and social contexts seriously.

International law codifies the principle of non-combatant immunity, which traces its origins to a religiously supported moral imperative. The principle of non-combatant immunity has evolved to become a crucial underpinning of just war theory. Western societal norms have complicated our understanding and application of the principle of non-combatant immunity by depicting combatancy in terms of innocence and guilt: those viewed as innocent deserve legal protection. Child soldiers and female suicide bombers exemplify today's complex and expanding parameters of combat. Consequently, in (...) practice, authorities in conflict zones cannot rely on existing legal distinctions; instead, they are forced to make subjective judgements when deciding whom to protect. This article calls for a critical evaluation of: existing legal definitions concerning non-combatants; how conceptions of combatancy are applied in protective policy and humanitarian evacuation; and the resulting consequences and policy implications. (shrink)

This article questions whether enmity is always bad and trust always good. In the borderlands between Ikland in northern Uganda and Turkanaland in Kenya, sometimes violent enmity combines with friendly barter relations between the Ik, a subsistence agricultural people that also hunts, and their goat-and-cattle herding neighbors, the Turkana and Dodoth peoples. “Half-trust,” as some of the Ik call it, works to prevent the escalation of conflict. While the Ugandan groups have been disarmed by their government, the Kenyan Turkana, armed (...) with AK-47s, are allowed into Ugandan territory for pasture during drought, and some Turkana take violent advantage of this power imbalance as they leave. Paradoxically, intervention by Ugandan state institutions that, in the name of peaceful coexistence, welcome the Turkana in Uganda has led to the escalation of conflict, while tribal “half-trust” has kept it relatively limited. (shrink)

This essay investigates the troubled status of the concept of the index and its concomitant notion of evidence within the context of a global, visual culture. Specifically, the essay centres on the notion of the index in an era, where the use of digital images claiming to truthfully represent war and conflict has become an increasingly important part of warfare. Focusing on two documentary works by respectively performance artist Rabih Mroué and visual artist Abu Lawrence Hamdan, the article shows that (...) whilst both artists rely on material documents, which in each their way index back to conflictual events, the crucial point is not so much the status of the evidentiary material per se. Instead, enabled by fictitious strategies, the artists invite us to pay attention to the differing statuses and meanings assigned to documents depending on the particular knowledge systems and spaces of appearance within which they are perceived. In this way, the essay argues, the works of Mroué and Hamdan help us move beyond the discourses within documentary theory, which tend to conform to either a postmodernist relativist position or a realist epistemology. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis, that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take (...) precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions. (shrink)

The book brings together leading contemporary thinkers of war to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare across art, technology, and politics.

Relativamente ao ius gentium deparamo-nos com três questões relacionadas: existe na antiga Roma um Direito internacional? Pode dizer-se que sim em dois aspectos: ao estabelecer-se o direito das embaixadas e da guerra e ao regular os pactos internacionais. Internamente, contudo, existirá um directo étnico, um reconhecimento e um respeito pelas diferenças culturais que se verificavam entre as diversas nações e cidades do Orbe? E, mais concretamente, até que ponto é que Roma era tolerante com as diversas religiões das distintas culturas (...) ou, então, proselitista? O ius gentium aplica-se a cada um destes níveis. Estudamos o caso da relação Roma-Gades e os dados com que contribui para a resolução destas questões. (shrink)

Causal Bayes nets (CBNs) can be used to model causal relationships up to whole mechanisms. Though modelling mechanisms with CBNs comes with many advantages, CBNs might fail to adequately represent some biological mechanisms because—as Kaiser (2016) pointed out—they have problems with capturing relevant spatial and structural information. In this paper we propose a hybrid approach for modelling mechanisms that combines CBNs and cellular automata. Our approach can incorporate spatial and structural information while, at the same time, it comes with all (...) the merits of a CBN representation of mechanisms. (shrink)

Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...) for its foundations, Gebharter’s argument appears to cast significant doubt on interventionism’s anti-reductionist credentials. In the present article, we both (1) demonstrate that Gebharter’s CBN-theoretic formulation of the exclusion argument relies on some unmotivated and philosophically significant assumptions (especially regarding the relationship between CBNs and the metaphysics of causal relevance), and (2) use Bayesian networks to develop a general theory of causal inference for multi-level systems that can serve as the foundation for an anti-reductionist interventionist account of causation.1. (shrink)

Causal Bayes nets (CBNs) provide one of the most powerful tools for modelling coarse-grained type-level causal structure. As in other fields (e.g., thermodynamics) the question arises how such coarse-grained characterisations are related to the characterisation of their underlying structure (in this case: token-level causal relations). Answering this question meets what is called a “coherence-requirement” in the reduction debate: How are different accounts of one and the same system (or kind of system) related to each other. We argue that CBNs as (...) tools for type-level causal inference are abstract enough to roughly fit any current token-level theory of causation as long as certain modelling assumptions are satisfied, but accounts of actual causation, i.e. accounts that attempt to infer token-causation based on CBNs, for the very same reason, face certain limitations. (shrink)

This paper has two main parts. In the first part, we motivate a kind of indeterminate, suppositional credences by discussing the prospect for a subjective interpretation of a causal Bayesian network, an important tool for causal reasoning in artificial intelligence. A CBN consists of a causal graph and a collection of interventional probabilities. The subjective interpretation in question would take the causal graph in a CBN to represent the causal structure that is believed by an agent, and interventional probabilities in (...) a CBN to represent suppositional credences. We review a difficulty noted in the literature with such an interpretation, and suggest that a natural way to address the challenge is to go for a generalization of CBN that allows indeterminate credences. In the second part, we develop a decision-theoretic foundation for such indeterminate suppositional credences, by generalizing a theory of coherent choice functions to accommodate some form of act-state dependence. The upshot is a decision-theoretic framework that is not only rich enough to, so to speak, ground the probabilities in a subjectively interpreted causal network, but also interesting in its own right, in that it accommodates both act-state dependence and imprecise probabilities. (shrink)

_The assessment of institutional quality and its influence on economic performance is highly relevant in Nigeria due to the country's constantly changing governmental institutions, dynamic market circumstances, and diversified socioeconomic atmosphere. Thus, the study aims to investigate the impact of institutional quality on the economic performance of Nigeria. This study employed ex post facto research, while time series data was used, which spans from 1996 to 2021, sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). (...) The study employed unit root tests, Johansen cointegration, and the Error Correction Model as estimation techniques. However, post estimation tests such as normality, serial correlation, heteroskedasticity and stability tests were carried to ascertain the level of statistical accuracy outcome of the variables used. The findings suggest that there is a sustained nexus between the quality of institutions and characteristics related to economic growth. Also, it was equally found out that political stability has a significant impact in the short run. This suggests that a unit increase in political instability would definitely amount to a decrease in economic performance in Nigeria during the period under investigation. The study suggests enhancing accountability, transparency, administrative efficiency, and law adherence to improve Nigerian institutions. This can be achieved through reform implementation, capacity building, and good governance mechanisms, while reducing political unrest and fostering stability._. (shrink)

A general introduction by John Dillon, a Russian translation, annotations and indices by Eugene Afonasin. The first annotated Russian translation of the fragments by Neopythagorean philosopher Moderatus of Gades.

K.E. Løgstrups disputats fra 1942 – nu i revideret udgave med Løgstrups senere tilføjelser og rettelser. Redaktion og efterskrift ved Kees van Kooten Niekerk. Den transcendentalfilosofiske Problemstillings Forstaaelse af Livet i sig selv som formløst og skikkelsesløst deler Teologien ikke. Den jødisk-kristne Livsforstaaelse er den modsatte: at Livet er noget bestemt, før og uanset den Skikkelse det vinder i Kulturen. Menneskelivet er ikke først og ikke udelukkende Kultur-Liv. I Israels Tro og i Jesu Forkyndelse er Livet i sig selv, uanset (...) hvilke Skikkelser Mennesket giver det i sin Kultur, noget bestemt, fordi det er skabt Liv.” "For Løgstrup-fortolkere er det spændende at følge Løgstrups udvikling, hvor de senere tanker om den etiske fordring som et humant begreb og de suveræne livsytringer tager sin begyndelse i disputatsen." **** Henrik Gade Jensen, Jyllands-Posten "Løgstrup starter sin videnskabelige karriere med at rydde grunden for det livtag med den sekulariserede, gudløse tilværelsesforståelse, der siden blev hans opgave tilværelsen igennem. Der er en enestående konsekvens i Løgstrups liv og tænkning fra først til sidst, en teologisk konsekvens. Det er det, der er det store ved ham." Niels Højlund, Weekendavisen. (shrink)

So a frenzied matron cries out to Phoebus as she rushes through an appalled Rome. In CQ 34 , 454f. I pointed out that the words primos in ortus could not here bear their normal sense ‘to the far east’ , which in view of the next line would be geographically absurd, and, distraught as the lady was, even so highly improbable. I did, however, then think R. J. Getty right in taking the expression primos ortus as simply = ‘the (...) east’, and adding ‘the epithet primos appears to be otiose’. But I now feel very doubtful about the epithet being viewed as otiose in order that the words may denote Egypt; quite different are the passages noted in OLD primus 6 ‘belonging to the rising sun, eastern’, as Stat. Silv. 1.4.73 ‘occidiias primasque domos’ in the cited Sen. Oed. 116 ‘miles… ausus Eois equitare campis / figere et mundo tua signa primo’ the literal meaning is no doubt ‘on the world's first edge’ , but its development into ‘eastern’ is readily seen. Egypt, however, as viewed by Rome, is but the bare beginning of the east, and that is what primos must indicate above : see OLD primus 10 b ‘the nearest part of, the entrance, threshold, or sim., of, noting e.g. Ov. Fast. 1.717 ‘horreat Aeneadas et primus et ultimus orbis’, Cic. Fam. 3.6.2. ‘te in prima prouincia uelle esse, ut quam primum decederes’. In a characteristic departure from their stock meaning Lucan's words primos in ortus must then mean ‘to the threshold of the east’, i.e. the delta of the Nile, as explained in the next line : contrast 7.360 primo gentes oriente = ‘the nations of the far east’ . For Egypt viewed as the beginning of the east, cf. Mela 1.9 ‘Asiae prima pars Aegyptus’, Plin. Nat. 5.47 ‘[Africae] adhaeret Asia, quam patere a Canopico ostio [Nili] ad Ponti ostium Timosthenes…tradidit’, Mart. Cap. 6.675 ‘Aegyptus… Asiae caput, 3 quae una ab ostio Canopi ad ostium Ponti habet… milia passuum’; cf. the close association of Egypt with the east in Virg. Aen. 8.687 ‘Aegyptum uiresque Orientis’. For the varied use of the word primus should be noted too Luc. 9.413f. ‘nee… plus litora Nili / quam Scythicus Tanais primis a Gadibus absunt’, ‘from Gades in the far west’ , ‘Gades the first place in the west’ , i.e. the threshold of the Mediterranean. (shrink)

The mind's arrows , by Clark Glymour, combines several of the author's previous essays on causal inference. Glymour deploys causal Bayes nets (CBNs) to provide a descriptive psychological model of human causal inference and a prescriptive model for making inferences in cognitive neuropsychology and the social sciences. Though The mind's arrows is highly original and provocative, its labyrinthine organization and technical style render it inaccessible to the uninitiated. Here we attempt to distill, package and dress some of Glymour's more interesting (...) theses. We note that the psychological model is developed with minimal attention to evidence concerning human causal inference and that his prescriptive models fail to do justice either to the many sources of evidence in cognitive neuropsychology or to the serious challenges of making causal inferences in the social sciences. Considerable work remains to be done to complete Glymour's ambitious projects and to clearly communicate them to others. (shrink)