Department of Philosophy and Classics
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Item Moderate Communitarianism and the Idea of Political Morality in African Democratic Practice(Diametros, 2018-09-30) Majeed, H.M.This paper explores how moderate communitarianism could bring about a greater sense of political morality in the practice of democracy in contemporary Africa. Moderate communitarianism is a thesis traceable to Kwame Gyekye, the Akan philosopher. This thesis is a moderation of the infl uence of the community in the Akan, an African social structure. In ensuring good political morality in the Akan, and therefore the African community, Gyekye proposes moral revolution over the enforcement of the law. I perform two main tasks in this article: (i) I reinforce the view that in a democratic framework (such as the framework within which many African states now fi nd themselves), moderate communitarianism offers lessons on political morality, and (ii) I challenge the notion that moral revolution has greater prospects for bringing about political morality than law enforcementItem Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor(Axiomathes, 2019-11-08) Kwesi, R.In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one thing as another thing—involved in understanding them as metaphors. According to Davidson, seeing-as is not seeing-that. This verdict is aimed at dislodging metaphor from the position of being assessed with the semantic notions of propositions, meaning, and truth. I will argue that the phenomenological or perceptual experience associated with metaphors does not determine the propositional contentfulness or truth-evaluability of metaphors. Truth-evaluability is not inconsistent but compatible with a perceptual model for metaphors. I argue for this partly by showing that seeing-as does not constitute understanding of metaphors when understanding is appropriately construed in terms of being able to use an expression.Item Reincarnation, resurrection and the question of representation(Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, 2019-05) Majeed, H.; Ramose, M.This article discusses critically the problems and significance of the concepts of reincarnation and the resurrection. It focuses on the contemporary debate on this topic between Robert Almeder and Stephen Hales. The Akan understanding of these concepts is invoked showing the contrast and,even comparison between the African and the Western understanding of the concepts. It is suggested in this article that the arguments for these concepts could still be ameliorated. This point is taken up by Ramose’s focus on the issues that arise from the critical discussion. Ramose points out that the concept of immortality requires a special place in the discussion since it is the axis around which both reincarnation and resurrection revolve. He complements the discussion accordingly. He further argues that the topic is as relevant today as it was since the dawn of humankind. Any attempt to exclude or discard the topic from philosophy is both questionable and an arbitrary limitation of the scope and meaning of philosophy.Item On the Non-worshipping Character of the Akan of Africa(Sophia, 2019-06) Ani, E.I.According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings (including the Supreme Being), who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both.Item The Consensus Project and Three Levels of Deliberation(Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review, 2018-03) Ani, I.E.The basic argument is that the consensus debate has not been very meaningful until now because consensus has not been closely studied as a concept, and deliberation has not been studied precisely in terms of the propensity to reach common agreement. In particular, deliberation—as well as issues for deliberation—has not been categorized into different levels with a view to exposing the varying challenges of reaching common agreement and the kinds of deliberative approaches entailed in each category. In this research, I attempt to provide this categorization in order to clarify the debate. Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2018Item 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 Wiredu and eze on good governance(Philosophia Africana, 2012-09) Lauer, H.Item A critique of the concept of quasi-physicalism in Akan philosophy(African Studies Quarterly, 2013-11) Majeed, H.M.One important feature of recent African philosophical works is the attempt by writers to interpret some key concepts from within the context of specific African cultures. The interpretations of such writers, however, particularly in connection with Akan thought, have not been without problems. One such concept is the concept of a person. From the largely general position that a completely physical conception of the person is inconsistent with Akan cultural beliefs, the precise characterization of the non-physical constituent of the human being has been a source of great controversy. An expression that has of recent times been put forward as descriptive of that constituent is the "quasi-physical." The notion of quasi-physicalism is the brainchild of an Akan philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, and is strongly held also by Safro Kwame, another Akan philosopher. This article attempts an explanation of the notion and argues that it is conceptually flawed in diverse ways, and as such philosophically indefensible. © University of Florida Board of Trustees, a public corporation of the State of Florida.