Department of Philosophy and Classics
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Item Africa and the prospects of deliberative democracy(South African Journal of Philosophy, 2013-09) Ani, E.I.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 decision-making 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. Copyright © South African Journal of Philosophy.Item Cashing in on shame: How the popular "tradition vs. modernity" dualism contributes to the "HIV/AIDS crisis" in Africa(Review of Radical Political Economics, 2006-03) Lauer, H.Orthodox descriptions and treatment of Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis are subject to robust controversy among research experts and clinicians who raise questions about the tests used to define the crisis, the statistics used to document the crisis, and the drugs marketed to curtail it. Despite this critical scientific corpus, fanciful misconceptions about chronic illness and mortality in Africa are sustained by ahistorical and apolitical analyses misrepresenting Africans' mporary morality, social reality, and public health care needs. © 2006 Union for Radical Political Economics.Item “Covid Cure (1)”: Anas’s Investigative Journalism and the Ethics of Uncovering Fakes in African Spaces(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Atuire, C.A.; Addison, G.; Owusu, S.A.; Kingori, P.Investigative journalists sometimes resort to the use of fake identities in order to reveal fakes and malpractice, a phenomenon that can be described as revelatory fakery. Acclaimed investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw, in collaboration with BBC Africa Eye, employs revelatory fakery to expose and prosecute wrongdoers in Ghana. From an ethical viewpoint, Anas’s revelatory fakery, a second order fakery, becomes a seedbed for an exponential level of fakery. This article poses the question whether Anas’s work is journalism or instead yet another expression of fakery that allows a prosecutor to act as a journalist. This question is contextualised within the ethics of the broader narratives created by the BBC Africa Eye investigations, which feed and promote a spectacular but “fake” narrative about Africa as a place of negatives, difference, and darknessItem Liberation Philology: Decolonizing Classics In Africa, A Native View From The South(Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2022) Schoor, D.; Ackah, K.; Asante, M.K.O.If you were a manumitted slave, the child of a slave or descendant of enslaved or dispossessed people or, say, you were a member of your society’s lowest castes and you were given the opportunity to study, and perhaps even to take up scholarship as your life’s work, your vocation, what subject would you, should you elect to learn?Item Pursuing nation building within multi-partisan fragmentation: the case of Ghana(National Identities, 2020) Atuire, C.A.Ghana has earned many accolades for multi-partisan democracy in sub Saharan Africa. This political system has also produced many social and economic benefits for the citizenry. However, political parties are also a vehicle for the promotion of ethnic fragmentation that perils nation building. This article explores how partisan politics in Ghana is undermining nation building. I propose a three-pronged approach to working towards nation building amidst the fragmentation of adversarial multi-partysm.Item The Question of Immanence in Kwasi Wiredu’s Consensual Democracy(Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, 2018-12) Ani, E.I.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.Item A United States of Africa: Insights from antifragility(Philosophia Africana, 2014-01) Ani, E.I.I revisit in this article the question of the possibility of political integration of the Afri- can continent, something first proposed by Kwame Nkrumah and then re-proposed by Muamar Gaddaffi. 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 briefly 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.