The basic thesis of this essay is that the progressive development of any discipline is propelled by incessant constructive criticisms, creative emendation and articulate reconstruction of established positions and received opinions in the discipline. Accordingly, the essay argues that the method and canons of Conversational Philosophy are very significant to the progressive development of African philosophy. This is because they are fundamentally articulated to promote the constructive criticism, creative emendation, and articulate reconstruction of established positions or received opinions in African (...) philosophy. It buttresses this point using Mesembe Edet’s conversation with Innocent Onyewuenyi on the question of the African belief on reincarnation. This choice stems from the explicit admittance of Edet that his conversation with Onyewuenyi adopts the method of conversationalism and the method of conversationalism is undergirded by the canons of CP. Specifically, this essay explicates how the conscious adoption of conversationalism and adherence to the canons of CP enabled Edet to engage Onyewuenyi in a very critical and creative conversation on the African belief in reincarnation which eventually led to a novel reconceptualization of reincarnation in African philosophy. It unveils the significance of conversationalism and the canons of CP in practice. It is therefore a conversational, expository and argumentative essay. Keywords : Conversationlism, Conversational Philosophy, Interrogative theory, Onyewuenyi, Reincarnation. (shrink)

Nous soutenons que l’enseignement de la philosophie à travers le monde est encore hanté par une «politique» de marginalisation des traditions moins favorisées comme la philosophie africaine. Des travaux renommés montrent que le programme classique de philosophie utilisé dans les établissements d’enseignement à travers le monde est principalement occidental et, en tant que tel, très colonial. Nous soutenons que cela équivaut à une sorte d’«injustice épistémique» qui porte préjudice à la production de la connaissance. Nous affirmons en particulier que cette (...) «politique» doit être interrompue. Nous proposons comme alternative la tradition conversationnelle, à partir de laquelle une programme de philosophie compréhensif et inconciliable avec la politique d’exclusion pourrait être mis au point. (shrink)

O objeto da discussão se propõe a buscar na origem do pensamento conservador do XIX e na sua relação com a teologia neoescolástica à chave interpretativa da renovação eclesial e teológica proporcionada pelo Concilio Vaticano II. A vinculação entre teologia e dogmática católica e sua relação com o pensamento conservador pretendem assegurar o retorno a um ideal da cristandade através de uma oposição cerrada com uma filosofia combativa e uma teologia dogmática “antimodernista”. Por um lado, o pensamento conservador alcança seu (...) declínio e permanece a margem diante do surgimento do novo proporcionado pelo Concilio e por outro lado, a desconexão da teologia de toda a cristandade, permite uma renovação da metodologia dogmática católica. (shrink)

In this short conversation, I will engage Jonathan Chimakonam’s essay entitled “The knowledge Question in African Philosophy: A Case for Cogno-Normative Epistemology” published as the chapter four of [Atuolu Omalu: Some Unanswered Questions in Contemporary African Philosophy]. I will identify the major submissions of the essay and engage them critically with the aim of opening new vistas of thought. My method will be conversationalim. Keywords : Conversational philosophy, Jonathan Chimakonam, African philosophy, epistemology, cogno-normative.

Philosophy of mind as a branch of philosophy has been growing. With a vast array of literature stemming from Plato to Descartes, down to Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland, there is no doubt that a lot has been said in that area regarding the mind-body problem, consciousness, the role of the human brain, etc. More so, with the advancement in neuroscience, newer and more interesting discussions linking neuroscience to philosophy of mind is inevitable. Equally as interesting, is the (...) philosophical work that is done in relation to the development of Artificial Intelligence in terms of robotics, artificial intelligence systems, technology-based human enhancements, etc. In all these, the African perspective has been largely underexplored and the salient perspectives of modern and contemporary African philosophers are rarely engaged. What we do in this chapter is to present an overview of the general concerns of this book. This concern is two-fold – the first part tackles issues related to consciousness, identity, and the mind-body problem, and the second part generally deals with issues related to Artificial intelligence and human enhancement. (shrink)

This book offers a first glimpse into contemporary African Philosophical thought, which covers issues related to the mind-body relationships, the problem of consciousness, the ethics of artificial intelligence, the meaning of life and other topics. Taking inspiration from the conversational tradition in African philosophy, this book not only engages with and takes inspiration from traditional African thought, but also engages with philosophical views outside the philosophical tradition in a bid to present a holistic understanding of the problems that are central (...) to the book. The volume is relevant for professional African philosophers, philosophers of mind, philosophers of AI, undergraduate and postgraduate philosophy students, and African Studies scholars. (shrink)

This paper analyzes community ecologist Charles Elton’s ideas on animal communities, and situates them with respect to the classical opposition between organicist–holistic and individualistic–reductionist ecological views drawn by many historians of ecology. It is argued that Elton espoused a moderate ecological holism, which drew a middle way between the stricter ecological holism advocated by organicist ecologists and the merely aggregationist views advocated by some of their opponents. It is also argued that Elton’s moderate ecological holism resonated with his preference for (...) analogies between ecological communities and human societies over more common ones between communities and individual organisms. I discuss, on the one hand, how the functionalist-interactionist approach to community ecology introduced by Elton entailed a view of ecological communities as more or less self-maintaining functionally organized wholes, and how his ideas on this matter were incorporated into their views by organicist ecologists Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, and Warder C. Allee et al. On the other hand, I identify some important divergences between Elton’s ecological ideas and those of organicist ecologists. Specifically, I show how Elton’s ideas on species distribution, animal migrations, and ecological succession entailed a view of animal communities as exhibiting a weaker degree of part-whole integration than that attributed to them by Clements and Shelford; and how Elton’s mixed stance on the balance of nature idea and his associated views on community stability attributed to communities a weaker form of self-regulation than that attributed to them by Allee et al. (shrink)

En este número se aborda el tema de los retos actuales de la educación inclusiva. La forma de enfocarlos es diversa: vínculo con la comunidad, neuropedagogía, evaluación, discapacidad, vulnerabilidad, etc. Veamos algunos de estos planteamientos.

This chapter critically examines various proposals for liability of a person to defensive harm. Drawing on the idea that there is an important relationship between a person’s liability to be harmed and the enforceable duties that she incurs as a result of posing a threat to others, it demonstrates that no simple account of liability will be successful. As there are many considerations that bear on the duties that a person has, there are many considerations which bear on a person’s (...) liability to be harmed. This general claim is supported through a demonstration both that culpability without causation can ground liability, and that causal contribution without culpability can ground liability. (shrink)

An approach to music as an instrument of philosophical inquiry, seeking not so much a philosophy of music as a philosophy through music.

This book offers a critical examination of those theories and advances a new argument for punishment's justification, calling it the 'duty view'.

In this article I consider the problematic that creation ex nihilo presents for Christian metaphysicans’ speculation regarding possible being. I explore Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of possibility and show that, while he attempts to remain faithful to a metaphysics of creation, encounters a metaphysical difficult when presenting his account in terms of imitation. Suárez, I argue, is mindful of this difficulty and offers a corrective that unites the approaches of Thomas Aquinas as well as that of Duns Scotus. In the end, (...) Suárez offers an original account of possible being that is faithful to the demands of a creation ex nihilo. (shrink)

part self-help guide, part college lecture, part confessional, part time travel adventure, On Purpose" uses a beautiful fantasy-filled graphic novel format to tell a story of self- discovery and personal growth that you'll never forget.

In the paper below the authors describe three super-tasks. They show that although the abstract notion of a super-task may be, as Benacerraf suggested, a conceptual mismatch, the completion of the three super-tasks involved can be defined rather naturally, without leading to inconsistency, by means of a particular kinematical interpretation combined with a principle of continuity.

In an earlier paper the authors discussed some super-tasks by means of a kinematical interpretation. In the present paper we show a semi-formal way that a more abstract treatment is possible. The core idea of our approach is simple: if a super-task can be considered as a union of (finite) tasks, it is natural to define the effect of the super-task as the union of the effects of the finite tasks it consists of. We show that this approach enables us (...) to handle two of the three super-tasks that we discussed earlier. We also argue that recent objections against our original kinematical interpretation do not hold water. One of our arguments is based on the construction of an elegant correspondence between the first of those three super-tasks and Zeno's Achilles and the Tortois. (shrink)

This book provides a systematic, philosophically informed account of criminal responsibility. It begins by providing a general account of criminal responsibility based on the relationship between the action that the defendent has performed and their character. It then moves on to reconsider some of the central doctrines of criminal responsibility in the light of that account.

Western scholarship on religion and gender has devoted considerable attention to women’s entry into leadership roles across various religious traditions and denominations. However, very little is known about the dynamics of women’s religious authority and leadership in developing settings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, a region of powerful and diverse religious expressions. This study employs a combination of uniquely rich and diverse data to examine women’s formal religious authority in a predominantly Christian setting in Mozambique. I first use survey data to (...) test hypotheses regarding the prevalence and patterns of women’s formal leadership across different denominational groups. I then support and extend the quantitative results with insights on pathways and consequences of women’s ascent to formal congregation authority drawn from qualitative data. The analysis illustrates how women’s religious authority both defies and reasserts the gendered constraints of the religious marketplace and the broader gender ideology in this developing context. (shrink)

In the Spanish-Indian controversies, special attention was given to the subject of the education of the Indians, understood in a first approach as the necessary procedure to enable them to overcome their barbarianism, that is, to better adapt themselves to the natural law. This generated a philosophy of education which, in spite of being directly inspired by the circumstances of the Indians, nonetheless had permanent value by virtue of its anthropological soundness and its classical approach. This article deals with the (...) notions of barbarianism, education, natural law, and their interplay in the educational works of Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta. (shrink)

Certain distinctively patristic and medieval features may be traced in Spanish-Renaissance thought, a tradition in which Aristotelianism played an otherwise dominant role. The study of these features may help to better understand the place of Hispanic thought in Renaissance intellectual history. I focus on one such a feature, providentialism, as it can be seen in two representative authors of sixteenth-century Spanish historiography. By discussing their differing providentialist views, and their motives for adopting them in each author’s historical and political circumstances, (...) it is argued that the zeal for justice constitutes a distinctive trait of Spanish-Renaissance thought. (shrink)

v. 1. Music and the external world.--v. 2. Man the musician.

In "De anima" 3.5, Aristotle argues for the existence of a second intellect, the so-called "Agent Intellect." The logical structure of his argument turns on a distinction between different types of soul, rather than different faculties within a given soul; and the attributes he assigns to the second species make it clear that his concern here -- as at the climax of his other great works, such as the "Metaphysics," the "Nicomachean" and the "Eudemian Ethics" -- is the difference between (...) the human and the divine. If this is right, we needn't go on a wild goose chase trying to invent a role for the so-called Agent Intellect to play. God moves our intellects as he moves the heavenly spheres, "as a beloved": he constitutes the complete actualization towards which all of our intellectual striving is directed. Aristotle regards such final causation as an efficient cause, but not in a way that would make it part of what we would call the causal processes or mechanisms of human psychology. But, he would insist, it is essential for appreciating who we are and what our place is in the world. (shrink)

Interest in thought experiments (TEs) derives from the paradox: “How can findings that carry conviction result from a new experiment conducted entirely within the head?” Historical studies have established the importance of TEs in science but have proposed disparate hypotheses concerning the source of knowledge in TEs, ranging from empiricist to rationalist accounts. This article analyzes TEs in think‐aloud protocols of scientifically trained experts to examine more fine‐grained information about their use. Some TEs appear powerful enough to discredit an existing (...) theory—a disconfirmatory purpose. In addition, confirmatory and generative purposes were identified for other TEs. One can also use details in transcript data, including imagery reports and gestures, to provide evidence for a central role played by imagistic simulations in many TEs, and to suggest that these simulations can generate new knowledge using several sources, including the “extended application” of perceptual motor schemas, implicit prior knowledge, and spatial reasoning operations, in contrast to formal arguments. These sources suggest what it means for TEs to be grounded in embodied processes that can begin to explain the paradox above. This leads to a rationalistic view of TEs as using productive internal reasoning, but the view also acknowledges the historical role that experience with the world can play in forming certain schemas used in TEs. Understanding such processes could help provide a foundation for developing a larger model of scientific investigation processes grounded on imagistic simulation (Clement, 2008). (shrink)