Department of Philosophy and Classics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://197.255.125.131:4000/handle/123456789/23076
Browse
5 results
Search Results
Item An Introduction to Ancient Rome(Adwinsa Publications Ghana Ltd., 354pp, 2010) Ackah, E.K.The nearly 2000 years of the history of the Roman Empire is, without argument, one of the richest sources of information about human nature. This highly abridged version of the Roman experience, which concentrates only on the western part of the Empire, highlights aspects of the Roman experience—governance, politics, Rome’s imperialist motives, Romanisation, slavery, art and architecture, political economy, entertainment, education, philosophy, law, and religion—in order to (1) reveal creative responses to challenges of existence, and varieties of personality, disposition, and motivation that could define humanity; (2) illuminate the imperial dynamics that would implicitly account for the cultural and institutional changes in Africa as a consequence of Western imperial interventions.Item Civilisations of Antiquity(Accra : Dwumfour Publications, 162pp, 2010) Ackah, E.K.This book draws attention to two important but often ignored facts about pre-industrial antiquity. The first is that certain lifestyles and life-conditions in antiquity, along with their corresponding attitudes, motivations, dispositions, and practices do promote our physical and social-psychological well-being much more efficiently than certain modern lifestyles and life-conditions. The second is that the increasingly globalised standards of excellence in the artistic, scientific and technological enterprise have had a long gestation and are the common heritage of mankind: they date back several thousand years and are the culmination of various creative and imaginative efforts by innumerable, often anonymous, individuals from several cultures of antiquity, including African, Arabic, Chinese, Graeco-Roman, Indian, Mesoamerican, and Mesopotamian cultures. These two facts must interest all those who seek to understand how the past has shaped the present and can guide us towards the future.Item Aristotle on God(Philotheos: International Journal for Philosophy & Theology (10): 91-111, 2010) Ackah, E.K.Aristotle’s theology as expounded in his Metaphysics is seen as radically distinct from his predecessors’ and farther still from traditional religion. Contributing to this view are three apparently peculiar conceptual features of Aristotle’s God: (i) that God is solely a final cause who moves all other things as being loved or desired; (ii) that God is a self-thinking thinking; (iii) and that God is ontologically separate from the visible cosmos. No pre-Aristotelian philosopher has adduced (i)-(iii) in an argument to the existence and nature of God; and this prompts the question of how Aristotle’s theology stands to preceding thought. This article argues that, despite appearances, the fundamental assumptions and basic elements of Aristotle’s theology and religion are an adaptation of his philosophical predecessors’, and that Aristotle differs from his predecessors only by being closer to and logically more consistent with traditional religion. This conclusion is without prejudice to the acute analytical distinctions and philosophical refinements by which Aristotle transposed preceding thought into his own.Item The Trial of Socrates: A Study in Legal Moralism(‘Nigeria and the Classics’. Journal of University of Ibadan (23): 83-91., 2007) Ackah, E.K.of the law. The paper concludes that in the nature of some public morality crimes, it is desirable to leave the scope of the law empirically underdetermined, so that the Athenian criminal law in question does not fail in legality; that it was appropriate for Socrates to plead his character and to use persuasion as proof; and that it was legitimate to engage public opinion, represented by the jury, in the determination of the empirical content of the law. Based on the trial of Socrates, this is a study in legal moralism, which concerns whether the law does in fact or ought to enforce moral standards. Given that the law is sometimes used to enforce standards of public morality, as is the law against obscenity, bigamy, pornography, and so on, this paper is concerned with certain juridical problems associated with public morality law—problems about legality, and about whether in some public morality crimes the character of the accused is legitimate evidence, persuasion can constitute proof, and the jury can play a determining role in interpreting the empirical contentItem Socrates, the Moral Expert in the Crito Philotheos(International Journal for Philosophy & Theology (8): 75-88, 2008) Ackah, E.K.This article argues against the common interpretation according to which Plato’s dialogue Crito affirms the philosophic belief that there are no moral experts. It shows that Socrates’ response to the character Crito’s moral argument to escape from lawful prison on grounds of an unjust conviction articulates the structure of a moral decision far superior in rationality to Crito’s, which exemplifies the anatomy of conventional moral decision-making.