Department of Philosophy and Classics
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Item Temporal relations vs. Logical reduction: A phenomenal theory of causality(Axiomathes, 2008-09) Papa-Grimaldi, A.Kant, in various parts of his treatment of causality, refers to determinism or the principle of sufficient reason as an inescapable principle. In fact, in the Second Analogy we find the elements to reconstruct a purely phenomenal determinism as a logical and tautological truth. I endeavour in this article to gather these elements into an organic theory of phenomenal causality and then show, in the third section, with a specific argument which I call the "paradox of phenomenal observation", that this phenomenal determinism is the only rational approach to causality because any logico-reductivistic approach, such as the Humean one, would destroy the temporal order and so the very possibility to talk of a causal relation. I also believe that, all things said, Kant did not achieve a much greater comprehension of the problem than Hume did, in his theory of causality, for he did not free a phenomenal approach from the impasse of reductivism as his reflections on "simultaneous causation" and "vanishing quantities" indeed show, and this I will argue in Sect. 4 of this article. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.Item The presumption of movement(Axiomathes, 2007-07) Papa-Grimaldi, A.The conceptualisation of movement has always been problematical for Western thought, ever since Parmenides declared our incapacity to conceptualise the plurality of change because our self-identical thought can only know an identical being. Exploiting this peculiar feature and constraint on our thought, Zeno of Elea devised his famous paradoxes of movement in which he shows that the passage from a position to movement cannot be conceptualised. In this paper, I argue that this same constraint is at the root of our incapacity to conceptualise the unseen movement at the micro-level and that the aporetic idea of super-position far from opening the gate on a deeper reality is a symptomatic word for this lack of understanding. © 2007 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.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 “A Worldly View of Worldview Metaphysics.” In: Worldviews and Cultures(Germany: Springer Science, pp. 103-128, 2009) Lauer, H.The mental realm remains obscure; the causes of reprehensible behaviour remain elusive despite the plethora of socio-psychological research and modelling of intentional group behaviour. When the construct called social or ethnic worldview is added to the narrative mix of beliefs, social norms, principles of action, peer pressures, religious mandates, traditions, and customs to explain someone’s inexplicable behaviour, we are only adding to the obscurity surrounding protracted self-destructive violence. It will be shown that talk of divergent atomized worldview deflects attention from the more pernicious features of our interdependent social reality which provoke some people into defensive postures of intractable distrust and protracted combatItem Relationship between Religion and Science: An Overview. Keynote Address delivered at conference organized by the Faculty of Science and the Department of Religious Studies of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology on 17-19 June 2008 on the theme “Relationship between Religion and Science in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond(Legon Journal of Humanities (20): 1-22, 2009) Gyekye, K.This paper presents an overview of the relationship between religion and science. It points out that historically religion preceded science, as the limitations of human intelligence in a bizarre world led man very early to postulate a being considered ultimate, supreme and worthy of human obeisance and worship. Like religion and philosophy, science began in wonder: to explore the wonders of nature—of the physical world. Religion and science are related in that both of them have perspectives on cosmic reality, even though there are several differences in their interpretations of reality. It is the different interpretations as well as their methods of arriving at their truths and conclusions that eventuated in conflicts, conflicts that actually came to the fore with the emergence of experimental science in and after the seventeenth century of our era and led to the condemnation by the Catholic Church of Galileo, the acknowledged founder of modern science. Scientific theories such as the evolution theory, quantum physics and some theories of neuroscience presented challenges to religious doctrines of creation, cosmic order and intelligibility, divine sovereignty, and human nature. However, there are areas of integration such as natural theology and design, order and regularity of nature that provide evidence of the existence of God—evidence that is supported by most scientists. The paper concludes that religion and science are different languages that ultimately express the same reality or at least present complementary accounts of reality, and that, given the wonders and mysteries of the created universe and the limitations of human intelligence, religion and science will continue to be bedfellows in the twenty first century and beyond.Item Rome’s first pacification of Asia Minor: the Syrian war (191-188BC): A naval perspective Flash(Journal of Philosophy and Religion 1(2): 32-27, 2009) Grant, P.K.TItem The Logical Limits to Misunderstanding(Legon Journal for the Humanities. (XVIII): 107-118., 2007) Lauer, H.A widely shared mistake about human experience is that it is irredeemably gender-specific, in the sense that there are things only women, or only men, can understand. As will be shown in brief measure, this is logically unsustainable. One cannot intelligibly both insist there exists a strict dichotomy between gender viewpoints and maintain there is no way to conceive of a gender viewpoint other than one’s own. Further, society at large is disadvantaged by invalidating women’s experience and their voice as a source of authority through the fiction that women’s sensibilities and intuitions are inherently beyond men’s capacity to appreciate.Item The Womb as Target: Linking Procreative Sex with Premature Death and Epidemics in Modern Day Ghana(Studies in Gender and Development in Africa 1(1): 1-20., 2007) Lauer, H.This essay will reveal that the source of public health policy over the last two decades in Ghana and South Africa—widely divergent cultures and political economies in other respects—has been shaped by political history and current global economic forces. The dualistic juxtaposition of African tradition with Western modernity functions nowadays in the international domain to build a dual impression of the need for foreign direction and expertise in the building of health care delivery, and yields a perpetuation of Victorian racist stereotyping as the basis for forwarding a non-scientific agenda, and promoting the multinational pharmaceutical industry’s profits, at the expense of coherence and effectiveness in domestic health care policies of African nations, with specific focus on modern Ghana .Item Depreciating African Political Culture(Journal of Black Studies 38(2): 288-307., 2007) Lauer, H.The global arena is dominated by the popular conviction that Africans require foreign direction in the socio-economic management of their own societies. This essay challenges the belief that economic development in Africa is impeded by bad governance.Item Must We Share True Beliefs to Understand Each Other’s Intentions?(Legon: Universitas, pp. 157-170., 2007) Lauer, H.This paper critically examines Donald Dvidson’s model of intention. Its posits that pro-attitudes and beliefs in combination constitute the cause of an intentional action.