Discussion of sexuality in African cultures has a long history, but since the 1990s ethical reflections on homosexuality on the continent have often degenerated into furors and provoked a spate of anti-gay legislation in several countries. Refutations of homophobic dispositions encounter as barrier a pervasive belief in African cultures, that childbearing for community replenishment is a cherished moral duty. Several philosophers consider these to be exaggerated inhibitions that unjustifiably impede social acceptance of homosexuality, and have proposed as a solution what (...) they consider to be self-justifying political-moral principles, that terminate in value-pluralistic ideas such as the acceptance of the equality of sexual orientations and vindication of the right to the freedom to choose and satisfy sexual desire. I question the adequacy of such self-justificatory normative principles and consider the solutions they proffer as depreciating the moral point of the African pro-natalist position. Consequently, I develop a moral argument grounded in the ontology of Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarian theory of personhood as the most persuasive justification for homosexuality. (shrink)

In this paper I present a critique of some aspects of Thad Metz’s attempt to develop an African moral theory grounded on the value of ubuntu. I question the sense in which this theory is African, as well as his attempt to ground human rights on his single value theory of ubuntu. In a number of publications Thad Metz has given a clear, analytic account of what ubuntu is. Metz’s work on ubuntu does two things: 1) explains the content of (...) ubuntu: what the value/virtue is; 2) presents a moral theory according to which appealing to ubuntu as a basic value enables us to explain what makes all actions right or wrong. He calls this an African moral theory. It is the second part I am skeptical about. He makes it plausible that ubuntu is an important value. And he shows how we can give it some clear content. However, I argue that he does not make plausible a single-value ethical theory based on ubuntu; it is not plausible as an ethical theory, and it is not plausible that such a theory is African in any significant sense. (shrink)

Liberal democracy is often considered to be unstable, consisting of two markedly different ideals that remain in tension. Yet the thesis regarding the alleged insta...

Patrick Lenta’s Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment provides a thorough, well-researched, accessible, and philosophically convincing examination of the normative status of the corporal...

Patrick Lenta’s Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment provides a thorough, well-researched, accessible, and philosophically convincing examination of the normative status of the corporal...

Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural, social, and symbolic capital have not only enriched sociological theory; they have also clearly established themselves in interdisciplinary and transdiscipli...

The history of the methodology of African philosophy can be divided into two periods: the nascent stage that’s characterized by a rigor-demand, and the contemporary stage that’s characterized by a relevance-demand. In this, paper, I argue for one way to strike the appropriate balance between relevance and rigor in African philosophy. Specifically, I argue that the unconscious rejection of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method by contemporary African philosophers played a major role in how African philosophy came to be characterized (...) by a relevance-demand. Consequently, I submit that even though being only or excessively relevance-oriented is not bad, African philosophy would become rich enough to compete with other regional philosophies—Western, Chinese, and so on—if it re-installs conceptual analysis as part of its methodology. (shrink)

This paper analyses regret. On the basis of a number of examples, the case is made that regret is a negative affective state that has a perceived past choice as its object. More precisely, S regret...

There is an alternative to the type of moral standing that hypothetically supervenes on other, base or subvenient, properties. Attributed moral standing results when people who have a naturally sel...

In the paper, I propose a novel approach to Frege’s view on the principle of compositionality, its relation to the propositional holism and the formation of concepts. The main idea is to distinguish three stages of constructing a logically perfect language. At the first stage, only a sentence as a whole expresses a Thought. It is impossible to assign meaning to less complex units. This is the stage of an ordinary language. The second phase concerns the proper level of construction (...) of a logically perfect language. We are forced to discriminate syntactic and semantic parts of sentences to account for the inference relations. We can distinguish senses and references of parts of sentences. Furthermore, it is possible here to choose between different ways of analysing the given Thought. Finally, at the third stage, every expression of the language has an unambiguous sense and this sense determines a unique reference. The logically perfect language is ready. We may view Thoughts as composed from primitive elements. Moreover, the senses of parts of a sentence correspond to the parts of a Thought, so that the structure of the sentence serves as the image of the structure of the Thought. The principle of compositionality is met and we can discern how understanding of the infinite numbers of Thoughts is possible and how languages are learnable. The main advantage of the presented view is that it allows accommodating some aspects of Frege’s philosophy that are often seen as mutually incompatible. Furthermore, I submit extensive textual data in favour of the discussed views and conceptions. (shrink)

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which (...) she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger. (shrink)

Where lies the boundary between the natural and social worlds? For the local constructionist, who wants to say that whilst global constructionism is false, nonetheless there remains a domain of soc...

I argue that the use of the separateness of persons in the debate between the priority view and the competing claims view is deeply flawed. In making the case, I argue for three points. First, that...

In this commentary I give an overview of the book "What is Race?: Four Philosophical Views," outlining the arguments each author makes in formulating and defending their respective views. I present some challenges to these views and argue that the scope of the book is an important consideration in our assessment of its contribution.

If we know one thing about Karl Marx, it is that he denounced the modern economic system that we now call ‘capitalism’1 for being immoral and unjust, didn't he? To question whether Marx thought, an...

The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 brought severe disruption to our public and our private lives, and also to ordinary normative boundaries we maintain between the two which we had previously taken fo...

The tension between the public and the private spheres is not new: while feminists have long called for public protection to be extended to the private sphere, liberals argue for the...

Many anticipated that the formal demise of public apartheid would free black citizens of South Africa from systematic racial oppression; but apartheid was privatized and carries on, with the aid of...

Alongside the public and private, the sacred can represent a third social-political dispensation, as Raymond Geuss notes. The modern liberal public/private divide represents a historical anomaly, w...

In this paper, we attempt to provide starting points for a discussion on immediate and longer term consequences of COVID-19-induced uses of digital technologies for the distinction of the public an...