This article adopts Benoit’s functional theory of campaign discourse and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive theory in discussing two gubernatorial debate sessions in Nigeria. The selected debate sessions are recovered from YouTube files and transcribed. However, only utterances from candidates in the two major political parties in Nigeria, namely, Action Congress of Nigeria ) and the People’s Democratic Party, are subjected to content analysis. Context models in the aspects of discourse meaning and argumentation are also considered. Findings reveal that first, candidates’ utterances (...) range from acclaims to attacks and defenses. Second, topics help to derive candidates’ ideologies which are further exemplified within the ambience of shared background knowledge. Finally, candidates adopt legal/illegal jargons, explanations, statements of evidence, examples and illustrations to explicitly exemplify their mental dispositions and beliefs. We conclude by stating that candidates’ utterances were found to be relevant within the context of the debates and, by extension, the prevalent socio-political problems in Nigeria. (shrink)

Steve Biko is one of the most important liberation activists of his time. Yet, his theoretical contribution is not well understood or appreciated. This article reconstructs Biko’s political ideas and introduces a new integrated reading and interpretation of his writings, speeches, and recorded interviews. It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal should not only be read as engaging an activist movement or programme but, also, as encompassing an original theoretical framework grounded in a communalist ethos of Biko’s own conceptual development. (...) It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal sought to relate racialised oppression to a historically centred communalist solution framed by two interlocking structural elements—rightful power and free community. The article argues that only by a theoretical and normative consideration of these elements, on Biko’s own conceptual terms, do we get a coherent understanding of Biko’s distinctive view of free postcolonial society. (shrink)

The promotion of conservation agriculture for smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa is subject to ongoing scholarly and public debate regarding the evidence-base and the agenda-setting power of involved stakeholders. We undertake a political analysis of CA in Zambia that combines a qualitative case study of a flagship CA initiative with a quantitative analysis of a nationally representative dataset on agricultural practices. This analysis moves from an investigation of the knowledge politics to a study of how the political agendas of the actors (...) involved are shaping agrarian practices. From its initial focus on CA as soil conservation and sustainable agriculture, the framing of the initiative has evolved to accommodate shifting trends in the policy arena. In tandem with the increased focus on climate adaptation, we see an increased emphasis on private sector-led modernisation. The initiative has shifted its target group from the poorest smallholders to prospective commercial farmers, and has forged connections between its farmer-to-farmer extension network and private input suppliers and service providers. The link between CA and input intensification is reflected in national statistics as a significantly higher usage of herbicides, pesticides and mineral fertilizer on fields under CA tillage compared to other fields. We argue that the environmental and participation agendas are used to buttress CA as an environmentally and socially sustainable agricultural development strategy, while the prevailing practice is the result of a common vision for a private sector-led agricultural development shared between the implementing organisation, the donor and international organisations promoting a new green revolution in Africa. (shrink)

This article argues that despite its claim to be most concerned with the nature of law in the generality of cases, legal positivism’s almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American law has prevented the tradition from adequately answering the question of law’s authority. This article argues that much positivist analysis either ignores, or takes for granted, the participation of the local population in the historical development of any given society’s law and legal system. This failing means that positivism, and much of analytical (...) jurisprudence, does not provide a truly general, non-circular explanation of authority that accounts as equally for post-colonial legal systems as it does for the Anglo-American systems with which positivism has been most concerned. I argue that the conceptual inadequacies in the explanations of law and legitimate authority offered by those such as H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are most clearly exposed by post-colonial cases, such as Nigeria. (shrink)

There has been a strong impetus to set the definitional parameters of study in African political philosophy and theory. Many scholars advance the idea of a discipline intended to provide lessons that stem from “original” African moral, ideological, and political traditions. Often, these traditions and their ideas are presented as holding categorical moral substance in so far as they are seen to be specific to a culturally essentialist understanding of “Africa.” In turn, an influential part of the literature estimates the (...) normative value of the intellectual ideas and arguments afforded by a varied historical, socio‐cultural and economic African geography by the degree to which, in being tethered to a seemingly homogenous, “culturally African” influence, these ideas can be opposed to a “Western” equivalent. In this article, I argue that the effects on the discipline of attending to, and being defined by, this cultural essentialism are at best unclear, at worst detrimental. I aim to contribute to the side of those who advocate a universalist perspective to the study of African political philosophy and thought, and who argue for jettisoning an unhelpful dichotomy between “West” and “African,” in favour of a methodological, conceptual and historical specificity that allows the discipline to be truly useful to itself and to others. (shrink)

Consistency of choice is a fundamental and recurring theme in decision theory, social choice theory, behavioral economics, and psychological sciences. The purpose of this paper is to study the consistency of choice independent of the particular decision model at hand. Consistency is viewed as an inherently logical concept that is fundamentally void of connotation and is thus disentangled from traditional rationality or consistency conditions imposed on decision models. The proposed formalization of consistency takes two forms: internal consistency, which refers to (...) the property that a choice model does not generate contradictory statements; and semantic consistency, which refers to the idea that a theory’s predictions are valid with respect to some observed data. In addressing semantic consistency, the relationship between theory and data is analyzed in terms of so-called duality mappings, which allow a passage between the two universes in a way that consistency is preserved. The formalization of consistency concepts relies on adapting the revealed preference theory to the context-dependent setting. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the proposed framework and how it relates to classical revealed preference theory and other formalizations of the relationship between the theory and reality of choice. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the question of the hybridity of the religious and the secular through the example of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his psychoanalytically inspired notion of the undead. The undead is Žižek's rendering of the Freudian death drive, and as the undead is instantiated in the popular culture cliché of the zombies, we need to look no further than to George A. Romero's classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead from 1968. Thus, this article (...) proceeds in three steps: first, I trace the concept of the death drive from Freud to Žižek, supplemented, for their theological importance, by two contemporary philosophers, Jonathan Lear and Eric Santner. Second, I discuss the zombie in contemporary popular culture, with a focus on Romero's movies, and whether such cinematic representations can function as a kind of cultural critique. In conclusion, I return to the question of theology by showing what Žižek means by theology and contrasting as well as comparing his philosophy to Augustine's anthropology. Despite Žižek's atheistic confession and his dismissal of all pre‐modern philosophy and theology, I show that Augustine's anthropology is structurally similar to Žižek's, thus suggesting that the relationship is more complex than Žižek allows. Both are united in rejecting any superficial and transparent understanding of self, and become, consequently, an example of the ambiguous relationship between religion and secularity in contemporary times. (shrink)

Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular their writing on Franz Kafka, this article stakes out the ground for a creative critical writing practice beyond the confines of literature. Exploring the notion of writing in relation to affect constellations, what causes one to write, and expressions without content, how one begins to write, the argument put forth is that in rethinking the distinction Deleuze and Guattari tend to make between artistic practice and philosophical thought, a (...) space is opened up for transversal lines that may cross between these fields in practices that are creative and critical and involve what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as aesthetic figures as well as conceptual personae. These practices, it is argued, provide a potential link between aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics and politics, on the other. (shrink)

In this article I analyse some of the reasons for a recent, resurgent interest in religion and theology by political philosophers and relate this interest to an inherent instability in modernity itself. In the first part I describe the landscape of current political philosophy with a particular emphasis on radical philosophers. In the second part I describe how the liberal distinction between religion and politics generates a theological instability due to the effective disappearance of the social embodiment of religion within (...) modernity. In the third part I draw some conclusions regarding the challenges the new post-secular condition presents to theology. (shrink)

El trabajo doméstico y las labores domésticas se asocian, incluso hoy, con “lo femenino”, desde una perspectiva esencialista del género. Gracias a la obra de Beauvoir podemos indagar el género como una construcción social que asigna los roles y papeles que cada quien debe cumplir en una sociedad, para comenzar a señalar que la idea del “ama de casa de tiempo completo”, no es en absoluto una categoría que ha existido siempre, sino que está situada dentro de un contexto histórico (...) que sirvió para impulsar el desarrollo capitalista, como señala Silvia Federici. La perspectiva del feminismo materialista de Christine Delphy ofrece una crítica al marxismo clásico que ignora las condiciones de opresión y explotación de las mujeres. Presentamos un análisis sobre la manera en que el desarrollo del capitalismo y, al mismo tiempo, del patriarcado, ha atado a las mujeres a situaciones de violencia a partir de la dependencia económica. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James K. Mish'alani KAFKA: TEXT'S BODY, BODY'S TEXT LONG BEFORE it appears in its own life as a bio-anatomical object, the body itself is integrally lived; and after it makes its appearance, lying or standing there ready for scrutiny, dissection, examination, it yields itself thus in its objectivity only to kindred bodily probing, wherein the hands that search, press, palpate and die roving eyes, the patient, closeheld ear, (...) are not encountered, but lived as modes of access to their object. Generally, the lived body is for itself transcendence toward the world as that within which diings are to be met, and the world, disclosed in an implicit understanding of what things one can behave toward and how one can variously behave toward diem, thus stands in correspondence to the body. As limit, die world determines the specific ways in which things are to be dealt with. As access, the body on its side projects through the lived articulation of limbs and organs those paths toward, by and about things whereby die very complexion ofdie world is always revealed. The body is world-revelation. ] But as die presence of diings in the lighting of revelation is not uniform or indifferent, but variegated, so is die body differentiated, articulated, variously organed and limbed, outfitted, equipped, and geared. The window lets in the light ofday and opens out on scenes only for die seeing eyes of a creature of vistas and distances. The hammer, standing out toward nails and wood, as toward all that they may be nailed togedier for and all diat diey may be brought togedier from, does so only insofar as it is ready for die hand diat lifts it. The pair of shoes suited to the earth, gathering about it die doorsill to die country path, the windswept fields, sun, rain, grain, bread, evening, dawn, die hearth and floorboards by childbed or deadibed, does all this in its humble reliability for the tread of the peasant woman whose footedness releases her through it to the security of a simple world. Thejug mat comes to full presence asjug in the outpouring ofa gift 56 James K. Mish'alani57 in which, be it water or wine, earth and sky together dwell by a marriage of soil and rock to rain and sun in spring or vine — this jug does its manifold-simple gathering of the world's extremities for the hand that pours the outpour, toward the lips for whom a refreshing drink is given, or before the faces lifted up in thanks to the gods for whom a libation is poured.2 Thus are things in most essential ways rooted in the body; and as primal ground the body in turn remains matrix to the world, not an object found in it.3 Nor does the other's body appear in the manner of an object in my encounter with him or her, whose features, glances, gestures, and movements all point beyond themselves and thus turn me with them toward that which occupies them and in relation to which I must assume a specific stance if only to reject it or, deciding it does not concern me, pass it by. The other's body lights up the world for me no less than mine does, in a co-transcendence toward a common horizon of meaning consensually confirmed, and ever renewed, laying for us a shared ground of world engagement without which even error, disagreement, and dissension become impossible. As the equipment through which I ordinarily pass in my projects does not stand out as an object until it breaks or is lost, so the other's body and mine do not obtrude and call attention to themselves in pure anatomical objectivity unless a radical breakdown occurs occasioned by some such disruption as disease, death, or a chaos of incoordination. Otherwise and until then, the other and I continue to be co-workers at world-disclosure, passing through each other's attitudes and movements as through unobstructed space. The human shape that comes toward me from the opposite direction reveals that part ofmy path I have left behind. The open hand thrust out from that tattered sleeve... (shrink)

Taking its cue from the renewed interest in theology among Marxist and politically radical philosophers or thinkers, this study inquires into the reasons for this interest in theology focusing on the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek as two contemporary prominent Marxist thinkers.

This research aims to determine what is meant by the terms Praise and thanksgiving the difference between them, and the relationship that brings them together in the light of Arabic dictionaries and the Holy Qur’an. This research also aims to show the extent to which the relationship between praise and thanksgiving has been affected by the transition from the limited linguistic framework to the horizons of the Holy Qur’an. This research is based on a combination of induction, analysis and conclusion. (...) Among the most important findings of the research are the following: First- Praise and thanksgiving are not synonymous linguistically or idiomatically. Second- The relationship between Praise and thanksgiving in linguistic dictionaries is about generality and particularity relationship; and it is the same in the Holy Qur’an, but that relationship has revolved in linguistic dictionaries in a limited horizon. However, when I studied the difference from Quranic perspective, I found a wider range of differences, not limited by time or place and the aspects of that relationship multiplied. Third- Praise is for the blessings He has bestowed upon us, and for the attributes of perfection with which He has been characterized. As for thanksgiving, it is only for the blessing. (shrink)

This research aims to determine what is meant by the terms Praise and thanksgiving the difference between them, and the relationship that brings them together in the light of Arabic dictionaries and the Holy Qur’an. This research also aims to show the extent to which the relationship between praise and thanksgiving has been affected by the transition from the limited linguistic framework to the horizons of the Holy Qur’an. This research is based on a combination of induction, analysis and conclusion. (...) Among the most important findings of the research are the following: First- Praise and thanksgiving are not synonymous linguistically or idiomatically. Second- The relationship between Praise and thanksgiving in linguistic dictionaries is about generality and particularity relationship; and it is the same in the Holy Qur’an, but that relationship has revolved in linguistic dictionaries in a limited horizon. However, when I studied the difference from Quranic perspective, I found a wider range of differences, not limited by time or place and the aspects of that relationship multiplied. Third- Praise (to Allah Almighty) is for the blessings He has bestowed upon us, and for the attributes of perfection with which He has been characterized. As for thanksgiving, it is only for the blessing. (shrink)

Everyday teaching involves emotional and relational irrationalities, and these aspects of pedagogical sensitivity and sense are critical for beginning teachers as they develop their practice. The complex elements of what it means to teach are often impossible to grasp from an instrumental approach to teacher education, which emphasizes subject matter knowledge and practical behavioral know-how. Increased educational standardisation and a new teacher training paradigm in Sweden have resulted in positioning future teachers as responsible only for communicating official school knowledge and (...) assessing their learning process. This narrowed understanding of teachers’ practice requires another perspective of teaching to be articulated. This article explores the internships of beginning teachers from a phenomenological perspective, drawing on storytelling in teacher education as a way to reveal student teachers’ lived experiences. These beginning teachers are learning professional ways of being, which reveal the complexities of teaching, and their accounts have the potential to counter the dominance of neoliberalism in education. (shrink)

本书共八章,分为上下两篇。上篇围绕张先生所提出的新哲学观而进行阐述;下篇论述张先生关于中西哲学、文化之发展及其比较研究。.

This book offers a case study of children and young people in Groruddalen, Norway, as they live, study and work within the contexts of their families, educational institutions and informal activities. Examining learning as a life-wide concept, the study reveals how 'learning identities' are forged through complex interplays between young people and their communities, and how these identities translate and transfer across different locations and learning contexts. The authors also explore how diverse immigrant populations integrate and conceptualize their education as (...) a key route to personal meaning and future productivity. In highlighting the relationships between education, literacy and identity within a sociocultural context, this book is at the cutting edge of discussions about what matters as children learn. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to problematize Slavoj Žižek’s use of the apocalyptic tradition in his political philosophy, especially focusing on the consequences it has for his understanding of hope. Especially, I find his strong emphasis on the disjunction between the state before and after the radical event implies a radical discontinuity between the present state and the state of emancipation, that the possibility falls away of any kind of criteria for a useful distinction between authentic and inauthentic events. Such (...) a lack of a more developed hermeneutics of discernment opens up for a potential ‘decisionism’ in Žižek’s work despite itself; decisionism in the sense of the evental decision itself provides the criteria for what counts as a legitimate emancipation rather than any preconceived criteria. (shrink)