The subject of this paper is the relationship between religion and sport. The aim of my considerations is to criticise the position presented by the American philosopher Eric Bain-Selbo, according to which sporting experiences may quite rightly be described as religious experiences. In the first part of the article, I reconstruct Wayne Proudfoot’s concept of religious experience that underlies Bain-Selbo’s analysis. I then discuss the research conducted by Bain-Selbo and the conclusions he draws from it. In the next part of (...) the article, referring to Charles Taylor’s hermeneutical approach, I show that Proudfoot’s and Bain-Selbo’s methodology leads to a theoretically unjustified reductionism. I argue that an in-depth articulation of individual self-interpretation allows for an insight into the dynamics of sporting and religious experiences, and thus to see the differences that separate them. In the last part of the article, I invoke the considerations of William James, John Hick and Robert Roberts and try to show that, given the moral consequences of our experiences and their phenomenological description (intentionality), the experiences evoked by sport and religion can by no means be identified with each other. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to assess in a critical way the views presented by Graeme Smith in his book _A Short History of Secularism_ as well as in his paper _Talking to Ourselves: An Investigation into the Christian Ethics Inherent in Secularism_. According to Smith, secular Western societies are underpinned by Christian ethics. An example of a moral norm that – in Smith’s opinion – derives from medieval Christianity and shapes the moral condition of the members of contemporary (...) societies, is the concern about the poor. My criticism of Smith’s thesis is based on the distinction between moral norms and the ways of justifying them. Referring to this distinction, my objective is to show that certain norms which appear to be the same cannot be treated as identical due to the significant differences in their justification. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to assess in a critical way the views presented by Graeme Smith in his book A Short History of Secularism as well as in his paper Talking to Ourselves: An Investigation into the Christian Ethics Inherent in Secularism. According to Smith, secular Western societies are underpinned by Christian ethics. An example of a moral norm that – in Smith’s opinion – derives from medieval Christianity and shapes the moral condition of the members of contemporary (...) societies, is the concern about the poor. My criticism of Smith’s thesis is based on the distinction between moral norms and the ways of justifying them. Referring to this distinction, my objective is to show that certain norms which appear to be the same cannot be treated as identical due to the significant differences in their justification. (shrink)

W artykule rekonstruuję podstawowe elementy koncepcji „sekularyzmu otwartego” przedstawionej przez Jocelyna Maclure’a i Charlesa Taylora w książce Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (2011). Wskazuję, że jedną z wyróżniających cech ich teorii jest opowiedzenie się za tzw. działaniami dostosowawczymi, których celem jest ochrona wolności sumienia. Następnie zarysowuję główne stanowiska w sporze o status przekonań sumienia i na tym tle przedstawiam „subiektywną” koncepcję wolności sumienia, jaką proponują Maclure i Taylor. W dalszej części artykułu przedstawiam zarzuty, jakie pod adresem kanadyjskich filozofów wyraziła Cecile (...) La- borde, a także odpowiedź na nie udzieloną przez Maclure’a. W ostatniej części artykułu staram się pokazać, że subiektywna teoria przekonań sumienia, w tej postaci, w jakiej została przedstawiona w Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, pozostaje w sprzeczności z leżącą u jej podstaw Taylorowską koncepcją „silnych wartościowań”. (shrink)

Czy określenie współczesnego świata zachodniego mianem świeckiego jest zasadne? Biorąc pod uwagę upadek „tezy sekularyzacyjnej”, zakładającej ścisły związek między powstaniem nowoczesności a atrofią wiary, a także obserwowane w wielu społeczeństwach zachodnich zjawisko „deprywatyzacji” religii, taka diagnoza współczesności musi wydać się co najmniej wątpliwa. Dlaczego zatem Charles Taylor, uważany za jednego z najwybitniejszych współczesnych filozofów, w taki właśnie sposób określa czasy, w których żyjemy? Czy bliższy prawdy nie jest – głoszony przez przedstawicieli nauk humanistycznych i społecznych – pogląd o nastaniu porządku (...) postświeckiego? Prezentowana książka omawia podstawowe cechy współczesnej kultury, które, w przekonaniu kanadyjskiego myśliciela, świadczą o jej świeckim charakterze. Zwraca się tu szczególną uwagę na wyartykułowany przez Taylora filozoficzny wymiar świeckości, który dotyczy nie tyle naszych przekonań, ile warunkującego je i tym samym bardziej od nich podstawowego „kontekstu rozumienia”. Autor pokazuje, że takie ujęcie problemu pozwala Taylorowi wyjść poza negatywne rozumienie świeckości, postrzegające ją jako residuum powstałe wskutek upadku religii, i nie tylko wskazać na wzajemne zapośredniczenie tych kategorii, lecz także odsłonić historyczny, moralny i społeczny wymiar tego, co świeckie. Uchwycenie historycznego oraz strukturalnego powiązania świeckości z religią umożliwia także dokonanie krytyki niektórych wersji postsekularyzmu. (shrink)

Prior research has demonstrated that accountants differ from the general population on many personality traits. Understanding accountants’ personality traits is important when these characteristics may impact professional behavior or ability to work with members of the business community. Our study investigates the relationship between Machiavellianism, ethical orientation, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias in Canadian accountants. We find that Canadian accountants score much higher on the Machiavellianism scale than U.S. accountants. Additionally, our results show a significant relationship between Machiavellianism and (...) relativism, idealism, anti-intellectualism, and social desirability response bias. Our results indicate that professional Canadian accountants may not share the same personality characteristics as U.S. accountants. We extend previous research investigating Canadian accountants, by explicitly recognizing the impact of social desirability response bias, and by including anti-intellectualism. (shrink)

According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings, who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be (...) available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both. (shrink)

Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because (...) deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

Aims To examine the understanding of the ethical dilemmas associated with Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) among Jordanian medical students, physicians in training, and senior practitioners. Methods We implemented a literature-validated questionnaire to examine the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of the target population during the period between April and August 2023. Themes of ethical debate included privacy breaches, consent, ownership, augmented biases, epistemology, and accountability. Participants’ responses were showcased using descriptive statistics and compared between groups using t-test or ANOVA. (...) Results We included 466 participants. The greater majority of respondents were interns and residents (50.2%), followed by medical students (38.0%). Most participants were affiliated with university institutions (62.4%). In terms of privacy, participants acknowledged that Big Data and AI were susceptible to privacy breaches (39.3%); however, 59.0% found such breaches justifiable under certain conditions. For ethical debacles involving informed consent, 41.6% and 44.6% were aware that obtaining informed consent posed an ethical limitation in Big Data and AI applications and denounced the concept of “broad consent”, respectively. In terms of ownership, 49.6% acknowledged that data cannot be owned yet accepted that institutions could hold a quasi-control of such data (59.0%). Less than 50% of participants were aware of Big Data and AI’s abilities to augment or create new biases in healthcare. Furthermore, participants agreed that researchers, institutions, and legislative bodies were responsible for ensuring the ethical implementation of Big Data and AI. Finally, while demonstrating limited experience with using such technology, participants generally had positive views of the role of Big Data and AI in complementing healthcare. Conclusion Jordanian medical students, physicians in training and senior practitioners have limited awareness of the ethical risks associated with Big Data and AI. Institutions are responsible for raising awareness, especially with the upsurge of such technology. (shrink)

Bernard Matolino argues that the communal foundation of classical African communitarianism should be discarded if communitarian theories would be of any use to modern African political theory. He sets out to propose a theory of communitarianism that not only suits modern African realities but would also be useful to any people including non-Africans. I argue that what he ends up doing is proposing cosmopolitanism, calling into question the “Afro” designation of the title of his theory. I also argue that his (...) position on the relationship between the individual and the community is technically not communitarianism of any sort, calling into question the “communitarian” appellation in his theory. His attempt to divorce communitarianism from communalism is unsuccessful, making communitarianism as unsuitable as a theory of world relations as Matolino claims it is unsuitable for contemporary multiethnic African societies. (shrink)

L’argument de base de cet article est que le débat consensuel n’a pas été une notion très significative jusqu’à présent parce que le consensus n’a pas été étudié de manière approfondie en tant que concept et que la délibération n’a pas été étudiée précisément en termes de sa propension à parvenir à un accord commun. En particulier, la délibération et les problèmes qui en découlent n’ont pas été classées en plusieurs niveaux afin d’exposer les différents défis qui se posent lorsque (...) l’on tente de parvenir à un accord et les types d’approches délibératives impliquées dans chaque catégorie. La présente recherche propose une telle catégorisation dans le but de clarifier davantage le débat. (shrink)

In his plea for consensual democracy in Africa, Kwasi Wiredu recommends unanimity about what is to be done, not what ought to be done, or unanimity on action rather than unanimity of values, beliefs and opinion. I caution the use of this procedural instrument by showing that some issues are so value-laden that a group decision cannot be value-neutral. It may sometimes be more productive to entertain value differences to keep them from going underground and becoming dangerous. However, the ability (...) to locate some common interest or ground seems to be crucial for such value confrontation. (shrink)

Prevailing literature argues that arguing is the only appropriate mode of deliberation. The literature acknowledges bargaining, story telling, and other forms of communication, but is unwilling to describe these as deliberation, properly speaking. The claim is that describing them as such would amount to concept stretching. In this article I argue that arguing exhausts neither the legitimate modes of deliberation nor the modes for effective deliberation. To do this I delineate two basic categories of issues we normally deliberate upon, and (...) demonstrate that arguing is more appropriate for one category, not so appropriate for the other. (shrink)

Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decisionmaking and that, for a decision to (...) be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people’s opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly ‘common good’ decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. (shrink)

Samizdat, the underground circulation of unofficial and forbidden literature in the Soviet Union, is an example of how censorship can backfire. Ideological restrictions produced walls of monotony in libraries and bookstores, propelling readers to search for more interesting fare. Sensitive texts on religion, philosophy, human rights, and current events, as well as literary works, passed from hand to hand clandestinely from around 1960 until censorship was abolished in the late 1980s. Von Zitzewitz's study is itself interesting fare, uncovering the workings (...) of samizdat as both a distribution network, comparable to that of print culture, and a social network that developed bonds between people who shared a defined purpose outside the public space. By no means did they all think of themselves as dissenters. For many people who lived ordinary Soviet lives, it was simply that “reading samizdat increased [their] individual feeling of freedom and represented a personal act of resistance.”One merit of this book is its point-by-point comparison of the samizdat distribution network to the print-culture production chain of author-publisher-printer-shipper-bookseller-reader. Samizdat had an analogous chain, in which a text made its way from author to reader through a network of people, each performing a specific function—procuring manuscripts, housing them, typing (or photographing) multiple copies, and delivering copies to readers. There were others who served as compilers, translators, collectors, and even editors and “librarians” (although accepting this designation requires abandoning the notion of a library as a stationary physical repository).Since all participants in the network strove to hide their traces from the prying eyes of the security police, samizdat researchers are hampered by a lack of records and evidence. To help fill the information gap, von Zitzewitz (in collaboration with Memorial's Gennadii Kuzovkin) designed a sixty-three-question survey targeting former samizdat participants and posted online in 2017. Tables display statistics (from the first 122 respondents) on demographics (respondents’ gender, place and decade of birth, and education level) as well as information on which authors, genres, and subject matter were most read. Other survey questions were designed to elicit recollections that help us understand what it felt like to participate in samizdat culture, whether as an author or reader, or in some aspect of acquisition or distribution. The many quotations from the survey responses bring to life the intensity of this activity. Receiving a sought-after text with an injunction to return it (or pass it on) the next day might mean reading all through the night to get through hundreds of pages. And while it is intuitive to think of samizdat as walled off from official culture, this study argues persuasively that they were intertwined. There were plenty of gray areas and fuzzy boundaries, too. One owner of samizdat books had several of them confiscated during a KGB search of his apartment, only to find them later for sale in a bookshop.Having begun as a clandestine, makeshift response to the institution of censorship, samizdat became more sophisticated over time, evolving into an institution itself. It arguably contributed to the perestroika reforms and became unnecessary when censorship was given the heave-ho. Subsequently, samizdat activists who had managed the covert production and circulation of entire journals published full accounts of their activity and the operation of their networks. Von Zitzewitz makes good use of these sources and shows admiration for the role these men played. She notes, though, that their detailed descriptions omit names of any of the typists who gave up their leisure hours and nightly sleep for the pleasure of hammering out multiple carbon copies of forbidden literature, usually for no pay. The word typist, given its lowly connotation in both Russian and English, is unfortunate. Typists were samizdat's printing press, and without their commitment and sacrifice the whole enterprise would have collapsed. Von Zitzewitz suggests that it may never have occurred to the samizdat heavyweights to acknowledge them by name. They were just... women. On the other hand, the menial typist designation had its upside. It seems to have resulted in a shorter prison sentence for at least one of them.Von Zitzewitz argues strenuously that samizdat was first and foremost a social network. If you wanted to get hold of, say, The Gulag Archipelago, you needed to know someone with the connections to help you get it. To call samizdat a social network is, of course, to wade into comparisons with today's online social media networks. Von Zitzewitz notes parallels, but she finds that the differences overwhelm the similarities. Samizdat was a social network, but one that depended on mutual trust. (shrink)

There have been two parallel views regarding the role of voting in deliberation. The first is that deliberation before the fabrication of balloting was completely devoid of voting. The second is that voting is, not just part of deliberation, but is standard to deliberation. I argue in this article that neither of these views is correct. Implicit voting has always existed across time and space but only as a last resort in the event of a failure of natural unanimity. What (...) is relatively modern is the establishment of what I call explicit voting, namely, balloting, outside deliberation and often without deliberation. I also distinguish between natural and artificial unanimities, and clarify that artificial unanimities are products of implicit voting. I demonstrate these clarifications with some examples of deliberation. I deploy these clarifications to rid a certain debate of confusion regarding the precise role of voting in consensual deliberation. (shrink)

To the question,“what is sports”, or what is a good sports activity or event, I am sure Plato would know what to say, using references to his philosophical division of man into three parts, namely: the appetite soul; the emotional soul and the reasonable soul. Plato would have said that sports comes from the human person and being, and so, for any particular sports to be accorded the accolade of goodness it must have the correspondence of the three constituent parts (...) of man’s true nature. The concept of the soul in Plato is what exploring just as that of Professor Maduabuchi Dukor’s expositions concerning the African philosophical concepts of soul, mind, spirit and body as they affect philosophy of sports and the discipline of physical education. The article will therefore analyze the link between Plato concept of the good sports, Professor Dukor’s ontological ideas about the African core values as they affect the balance, harmony and health both the mind and body of the human being. The central point here is the analytical framework of enquiry which Plato sustained in his Dialogues when he queries people:“what is this?”. By this he wants people to appreciate the fact that when they are in search of truth, they usually have the impression that they have all when, actually, they have only half-baked understanding of issues. It is important therefore to understand the issues involved in the disciplines of physical education, philosophy of sports, ethics and the ontological frame of African philosophy as profiled under Professor Dukor theistic humanism of African philosophy. Centrally, the dialectical link between Plato and Dukor will expose the ethical dimension to sports development since every thing is not wining and money or drugs should not be the ultimate motivation for sports and physical exercises. The exercise of sports should lead to the dual development and balance of both mind and body; the highest being the competition of the soul with itself and not with others in which laurels, gold or money is won or lost. The man who wins is the one, like in the communal spirit of the African ontology, who has conquered over his selfishness and sacrifices for the good of the community. (shrink)

Violent conflicts in emerging democracies or societies in transition threaten the stability of state governance institutions, which brings about insecurity of lives, property and deepens the vicious cycle of poverty and criminality in Africa. The first responsibility of any government is to provide security of lives and property. At no time since Nigeria’s civil war has the country witnessed the resurgence of violence and insecurity that claims hundreds of lives weekly. It is a sectarian insurgence of multiple dimensions. This article (...) makes the case that Boko Haram is not just a religious phenomenon but a reflection of a so- cio-political, economic and ethnic problem caused by bad governance. As a result, Boko Haram has witnessed a cross-border influence and impact which has expanded its frontiers beyondNigeriato neighboring countries in the West African region. The theoretical framework employed in this article posits that Boko Haram has its roots fundamentally in poverty caused by bad governance in the Northern Moslem bend, in Nigeria and the West African Region where corruption, human rights violations, marginalization of cultural, political and religious groups have created the situation whereby weak state structures have abysmally failed to deliver on the development promises made during elections. So the emergence of Nigeria’s Boko Haram violence, as a result of the street poverty and the rise of unemployed street beggars, popularly known as Almajiris, and their use for electoral and party violence, was encouraged by the neglect and abandonment of the masses by the governors and other elected leaders. The expansion and consolidation of the Boko Haram insurgence to other parts of the country and neighboring West African nations was made possible by the already existing failed state institutions, bad governance and corruption and the existing band of small criminal sectarian groups that depend upon their survival on aids from Al Quaeda, drug gangs and sea piracy. The religious dimension is a marginal factor fueled by fundamental socio-economic and political variables which have been thrown up in the first place by bad governance and leadership in Nigeria. (shrink)

In this interview with curator Cécile Bourne Farrell, artist Jananne Al-Ani discusses her aerial films Shadow Sites I (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011) and the representation of landscape, from the Middle East to the American south-west, in relation to Kitty Hauser’s book Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, & the British Landscape 1927–1955 (2007) a study on the emergence of aerial archaeology and the role of the sun’s movement in materializing latent histories embedded in the landscape. A French translation of the (...) interview first appeared in issue 59 of the journal Multitudes. (shrink)

Strong emergentists face a quadruple dilemma: accept the physical closure principle and deny strong emergentism, deny the closure principle and court either substance or property dualism, accept substance dualism and kill emergentism by accepting vitalism or accept property dualism and get locked into the fallacy of reconciling upward emergence with downward causation without the help of any external agency. Strong emergentists would most likely choose, and I seek to show that it contains contradictions that kill emergentism nonetheless. This is because (...) emergentists would ultimately have to admit the role of external agency or environmental input regarding upward/downward interaction. But once this happens, there seems no need to discuss emergence, since we are no longer entirely sure that properties alleged as emergent actually emerged from the base properties from which we would say they emerged. (shrink)

I evaluate a hypothetical society of human clones. Cloning implies the production of exact copies of an organism from a replication of one of the organism’s cells without any recourse to the genealogical protocol of male and female reproduction. I thus pose the question: Can we regard a cloned copy of Mr. James as a son of Mr. James or Mr. James once again? I consider certain implications of human cloning to the concepts of individual uniqueness, and thus of genealogical (...) family tree and the future of the naming and identification of humanity? (shrink)

In his proposal for a democracy by consensus, Wiredu argued that deliberation is an activity that depends solely on the logical persuasiveness of ideas. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze and I had objected to this view of deliberation. Bernard Matolino has responded separately to Eze and me by sticking to Wiredu’s position that deliberation is a purely rational activity. In this article, I support my earlier claim that persuasion (and hence deliberation) is not an entirely logical activity, and our concern as human (...) beings is to recognize the influence of non-rational factors, for the purpose of minimizing the role of these non-rational factors. My general aim here is to explore the implications of a counterfactual situation in which we assume that deliberation is a purely rational activity, and these implications are unpalatable even to proponents of deliberation as a purely rational activity. My conclusion is that it is only by recognizing the role of non-rational factors in deliberation that we are driven to institute mechanisms to ensure that logic dominates over non-rational factors as much as practicable in either persuading or in being persuaded. Assuming that deliberation is a purely rational activity, on the other hand, forestalls any measures and allows non-rational influences to fester undeterred. (shrink)

In this short piece, I argue that Chimakonam’s Ezumezu logic bears methodological significance for African scholarship as a whole. If method rests on logic, and method accounts for the distinction of one knowledge output from another, then the formulation of a system of logic which can creditably be described as African, even if simply in cultural inspiration, would provide for methodological liberation of African scholarship trapped in western knowledge hegemony since colonial times. First, I discuss in simple terms the theory (...) of Ezumezu logic before showing its methodological significance. Keywords: Ezumezu, Logic, Chimakonam, African philosophy, Method. (shrink)

Kwasi Wiredu, arguably the most influential African philosopher, has proposed a democracy by consensus as an alternative to the majoritarian democracy African countries inherited from their colonial masters. His proposal has generated a lot of debates, and these debates have spanned several aspects of his proposal. In this paper, I focus on the debate regarding his attribution of immanence to the practice of consensus in traditional African social relations. Bernard Matolino has recently written an article defending Wiredu's employment of the (...) word immanence in describing the traditional African attitude to social relations. In this article, I find Matolino's defense to be unsustainable. (shrink)

I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s only play Les bouches inutiles reveals the centrality of failure in Beauvoir’s feminist account of political freedom. In recent years, political theorists have mobilized failure to capture the diverse ways of being and doing that stand outside of hegemonic models of political life, with some conceiving of failure as a form of negativity. Negativity, on these accounts, captures an “antisocial” form of resistance by which subjects refuse configurations of sociality in order to achieve freedom. (...) I argue, however, that this form of negativity runs counter to the collective conception of freedom in Beauvoir’s political thought. To make this case, I interpret the play as a performance manqué and demonstrate that the failures that the women encounter in Les bouches inutiles are conditional on responses from the men. This allows me to recover a conception of failure as a form of positive negativity. What Beauvoir does in her literary theory is to conceptualize that same place of negativity, to which men have consigned women, as a place from which women might disclose themselves and their unique situations. Read in this way, failure is both the foreclosure of the space of intersubjectivity between women’s appeals and men’s responses, and at the same time opens ways for women to resist those failures. I then leverage Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the periperformative to show how, by engaging in poetic practices, women re-signify the political meanings of their bodies and become free with and through others. I conclude by stepping outside of the frame of the play to evaluate its recent resignification by contemporary readers. Doing so underscores the point that resisting failure requires ongoing practices of contestation and disclosure by subjects and audiences across time to affirm the collective dimension of freedom in feminist political theory. (shrink)

The moral debate about open borders needs to go beyond focusing on the interests of the migrant versus the interests of the hosting state and its original citizens to focusing more on the interests of the countries that migrants are leaving. I hint at the long-term insufficiency of so-called economic remittances to the development of migrant-sending states when compared to domiciled skilled labor. But most importantly, I identify the irrelevance of current empirical research on brain drain to an open borders (...) scenario. I hint at the potential scale of brain drain in such a scenario, and I raise a moral question about the propriety of proposing open borders with a focus on the wellbeing of the individual migrant if such a focus is determined to be at the expense of the wellbeing of the migrant’s home country. I add that a preamble to opening borders would be to significantly address gross global economic disparities, world poverty, and political injustices. (shrink)

Epiphenomenalism has had a long historical tradition. It is the view that mental properties are causally inert with respect to the physical world. In this paper, I argue that this tradition faces enormous challenges and needs better arguments to defend its position, and to demonstrate this, I interrogate the strands including computationalism, the idea of the illusion of conscious will, and causal exclusionism.

Having taken note of, and critically analyzed, Professor Maduabuchi Dukor’s epochal work entitled“Theistic Humanism of African philosophy-the great debate on substance and method of philosophy”(2010), I am much encouraged and rationally convinced that he has succeeded in building the core critical and essential foundational pillars of what can safely pass for professional African philosophy, though much remains to be done by way of further research from other scholars. Based upon that conviction and the great prospects that the African philosophy project (...) breakthrough holds for every African philosopher in the global village, I am also motivated to take a closer look at, and carry out a critical exposition of the concept of justice in the context of African cultural values, using the propositions of what he calls the canons of cultural values that are native to African philosophy. These cultural values define African identity and delineateAfrica’s contributions to the advancement of the global ideas of justice, axiology, gender and globalization. The essence and methodology of this article, therefore, will lift the relevant thematic thrusts and arguments made by the erudite Professor of African philosophy to“properly locate African philosophy in the context of globalism, cosmopolitanism, science and what it could contribute to emerging global culture”(Dukor,2010:p.ix). The central point of this critical exposition is that his theistic inspired cultural humanism has enhanced the global understanding of not only justice but feminist rights and the urgent needs for African philosophy to make its contributions towards the emancipation of and empowerment of women both in the continent and globally. The feminist search for justice, according to Dukor, is“the current global pool where the African is needed urgently to intervene”, since“feminism and women liberation has truncated the equilibrium and balance of relations between man and woman. African contribution to this class struggle between man and woman is a neutral one that absorbs the man and woman to their respective natural places in the nature’s womb”. Women’s search for global justice and the struggle to have their human rights recognized as a part of mankind’s gender balancing process would be philosophically enriched by Professor Dukor’s cultural value propositions and canons of justice. (shrink)

Although a number of studies have shown that corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities often lead to greater organisational performance in western developed economies, researchers are yet to examine the strategic value of CSR in emerging economies. Using survey data from 280 firms operating in Dubai, this study examines the link between CSR activities and organisational performance. The results show that CSR has a positive relationship with all three measures of organisational performance: financial performance, employee commitment, and corporate reputation. These results (...) reinforce the accumulating body of empirical support for the positive impact of CSR on performance and challenge the dominant assumption that, given the weak institutional framework in emerging economies, CSR activities drain resources and compromise firms’ competitiveness. (shrink)

I revisit in this article the question of the possibility of political integration of the Afri- can continent, something rst proposed by Kwame Nkrumah and then re-proposed by Muamar Gaddaf . My focus here is not to examine the extent of African leaders’ willing- ness to bring about integration, nor will I concentrate on the political intrigues surround- ing it (though these will be brie y acknowledged). Further, I will not contest Nkrumah’s economic argument (which is commonsensically correct and in (...) line with mainstream eco- nomics) but will, instead, take up the more normative question of the possibility, and thus practicability, of political integration in light of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity on the continent. I argue that political integration is possible, and I support the gradualist view- point by drawing lessons from Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility and pointing out that there is almost as much heterogeneity at individual and simpler society levels as there is in ethnically diverse societies. (shrink)