This paper focuses on the issue of identity, primarily (though not exclusively) in relation to Africana women. The author argues that female identity in Africa today has been both negated and fractured, and that this fracture comes about through the “globalization of woman” and the universalization of both the experienceof women and of female “identity.” She goes on to argue that the ghost of universalism continues to hover over our conceptions of woman, especially the Other woman (that is, the non-white, non-heterosexual, non-middle class woman), despite the postmodern call for the acceptance of difference. According to the author, African female identity has been negated and fractured not only through various cultural practices, but also through colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism.

Prof. H. Odera Oruka started the sage philosophy project, in which he interviewed wise elders in Kenyan rural areas to show that Africans could philosophize. He intended to create a “national culture” by drawing upon sages from different ethnic groups and he downplayed religious differences, as did Kwame Nkrumah, who had a similar goal of building “national culture” in Ghana. Both projects were secular insofar as they preferred to emphasize rationality and downplay religious belief or “superstition” as backward and needing to be cast off. I deal with one apparent counter-example: at the burial trial for S. M. Otieno, Odera Oruka seemed to defend the traditional Luo belief of spirits. I note, however, that Odera Oruka is evasive and indirect in how he answers the questions and his responses could be due to his wanting to appear connected to his rural compatriots, a value explained by Frantz Fanon in his treatment of the topic of national culture. The paper concludes by alluding to extensive interviews done with the sages from Kenya on topics related to religious beliefs and practices, during which sages subject those beliefs and practices to rational scrutiny.

El presente trabajo se propone reflexionar acerca del modo en que algunas corrientes de pensamiento latinoamericano, más allá de sus matices y diferencias, se han replanteado tempranamente sus posturas epistemológicas a la luz de la articulación de los aportes de la fenomenología, la hermenéutica y la teoría crítica, desafiando con ello la lógica bipolar que opone “comprensión del sujeto social” a “transformación del mundo social”. En esta alternativa integradora, cuyos antecedentes se remontan a los años 70, ha tenido vital importancia la capacidad y la creatividad para articular dos categorías acuñadas como antagónicas en el marco de la Teoría Social: “Agencia” y “Emancipación”, entendiendo el primero como el énfasis en la capacidad de los sujetos para conocer y decidir sobre su vida social, y el último como la conciencia de que esos mismos sujetos requieren, para su desarrollo, de la construcción de una identidad aliviada de coacciones. Aun cuando este modelo epistemológico presenta aun desafíos a superar, al menos en tres frentes: Institucional, económico y político, invita en la actualidad a la reflexión científica tanto del rol de los científicos sociales como de los sujetos, en el proceso participado y recursivo de construcción del conocimiento social.

This paper discusses Aristotle’s description of philosophia in a way of how it should be understood? It seems like philosophy begins with wonder. In this sense, it consists of an inquiry. Hereby, inquiring about the “things” and “beings” and constantly pursuing knowledge indicates an endless process. And this process may not be sufficient for philosophical activity itself. Besides the inquiry process, philosophical activity consists of active thinking and the ability to practice active thinking in our daily lives. In this context, philosophy is not a debate of abstract concepts, or describing the concepts. For Aristotle, philosophia was a way of active living throughout our entire lives. That means that not only pursing knowledge is necessary to achieve that state, but also thinking about, and transforming that knowledge in our lives. This paper focuses on the active part of philosophy; which can be seen as an important part towards the understanding of philosophia.

Perhaps for the first time in history, the turn of a millennium is directly reflected in philosophy-as an apocalyptic end of philosophy. Recently, an attempt to channel apocalyptic into messianic has been undertaken by Derrida in his Spectres of Marx. However, Derrida's endeavor does not relate directly to philosophy and thus does not alter its apocalyptic landscape. Considering the critical state of contemporary philosophy, it is unclear whether such an alteration can be performed in the West. A radical reinterpretation appears to be much more probable when undertaken from an outside position. It may be that this is the case with the Philosophia Universalis developed by the Russian-American David Zilberman (1938-1977) from classical Hindu philosophies and applied, as a new synthesis, to Western philosophy. Major ideas of the Philosophia Universalis as well as its principal results and achievements comprise the content of this presentation.

This research attempts to throw light on and show the fundamental similarities and differences between the African and Western ethical conceptions by examining the foundation of ethics and morality in the two systems, using the Golden rule principle in African ethics and Kant’s categorical imperative in Western ethics as tools of comparative analysis. The African indigenous ethics revolves round the “Golden Rule Principle” as the ultimate moral principle. This principle states that “Do unto others what you want them to do unto you”. This principle compares favourably with Immanuel Kant’s whose main thrust is found in his “Categorical Imperative”, with the injunction for us to “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative becomes for Kant, the principle of universalizability, which according to Kant, is categorical and must be equally binding on everyone. This idea of Kant, we argue, compares with the “Golden Rule Principle”. Both are rationalistic and social but the limitations of Kant which we hope to point out, make it quite insufficient as the foundation of morality. The Africans’ which is more humanistic describes morality and is better served. The main difference between the two ethical systems lies in the fact that whereas the “golden rule” starts from the self and considers the consequences on the first before others, the universalizability principle on the other hand considers the consequences on others first before self.

Fanon’s ideas made their way across the Limpopo into apartheid South Africa in the late 1960s with US Black theology intellectuals like James Cone providing an important link between Fanon and the emergent Black Consciousness movement articulated by Steve Biko. Forty years after Biko’s articulation of Black Consciousness as a critique of the bad faith of white liberalism and his warning that a “new” South Africa could mask systematic inequality and dehumanization, a new turning point has arisen in post-apartheid South Africa marked by the terrible massacre of 34 African miners by the South African police. A Fanonian critique of post-apartheid South Africa is important. And yet it is also in the responses to the crises of contemporary South Africa and the liberation party’s social treason that the high point of the struggle that Fanonian practices can be recast. The maturity of our age means that a non-state directed politics based in what Fanon calls “the rationality of revolt,” which begins in the refusal to remain quiet and stay in place, can as be understood not simply voluntaristic but a movement emerging from and in reaction to in lived experience, understood socially. Thus rather than reducing Fanon to the past or a politics of the existential to intellectual self-reflection, perhaps we can take Fanon’s writings as interlocutions in which different historical moments and movements bring out new resonances and explicate new insights.

The appellation “Western” is, in my view, inappropriate when applied to Ancient Hellas and its greatest product, the Hellenic philosophy. For, as a matter of historical fact, neither the spirit of free inquiry and bold speculation, nor the quest of perfection via autonomous virtuous activity and ethical excellence survived, in the purity of their Hellenic forms, the imposition of inflexible religious doctrines and practices on Christian Europe. The coming of Christianity, with the theocratic proclivity of the Church, especially the hierarchically organized Catholic Church, sealed the fate of Hellenic philosophy in Europe for more than a millennium. Since the Italian Renaissance, several attempts primarily by Platonists to revive the free spirit and other virtues of Hellenic philosophy have been invariably frustrated by violent reactions from religious movements, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the bloody wars which followed their appearance in Europe. Modern science succeeded to a certain extent, after struggle with the Catholic Church, in freeing itself from the snares of medieval theocratic restrictions. Thus, it managed to reconnect with the scientific spirit of late antiquity and its great achievements, especially in the fields of cosmology, physics, mathematics, and medicine, which enabled modern science to ad-vance further. But it seems that the mainstream European philosophy has failed to follow the example of science and to liberate itself, too. As in the Middle Ages, so in modern and post-modern times the “European philosophy” has continued to play the undignified and servile role of handmaiden of something. In addition to the medieval role of “handmaiden of theology” (ancilla theologiae), since the seventeenth century philosophy in Europe assumed the role of “handmaiden of science” (ancilla scientiae) and, with the coming of the Marxist “scientific socialism,” the extra role of ‘handmaiden of ideology” (ancilla ideologiae). In this respect, the so-called “Western philosophy,” as it has been historically practiced in Christian and partially Islamized Europe, is indeed a very different kind of product from the autonomous intellectual and ethical human activity, which the Ancient Hellenes named philosophia and honored as “the queen of arts and sciences.” In this historical light, Hellenic philosophy would appear to be closer to the Asian philosophies of India, China, Japan, and Korea than to Western or “European philosophy.” So as we stand at the post-cold war era, witnessing the collapse of Soviet-style Socialism and the coming of the post-modern era; as we look at the dawn of a new millennium and dream of a new global order of freedom and democracy, the moment seemspropitious for reflection. We may stop and reflect upon our philosophical past as exemplified in the free spirit of Hellenic philosophy and its misfortunes, its great “passion” in Christian Europe in the last two millennia or so.

Philosophers often entertain positions that they themselves do not hold. This article is an example of this. While I do not advocate localized acts of violence to combat white supremacy, I think that it is worthwhile to explore why it might be theoretically justifiable for some African Americans to commit such acts of violence. I contend that acts of localized violence are at least theoretical justifiable for some African Americans from the vantage point of racial realism. Yet, I also contend that the likely detrimental consequences of engaging in such violence on economically disadvantaged African Americans outweigh its possible benefits for them; hence, it should not be used by them to combat white supremacy presently.

This paper examines and compares the ways in which the Latin Avicenna, that is the Persian thinker’s work as known in Latin translation to medieval Christianthinkers, and Aquinas alter Aristotle’s conception of the breadth and scope of the subject of metaphysics. These two medieval philosophers inherited the problem that Aristotle posed in the Metaphysics concerning the relationship between the study of being as being and the natural study of God. Both thinkers reject the idea that God is the subject of metaphysics and maintain that the one subject of this science is being qua being. They differ, however, in their analysis of the relationship between this subject and God. Avicenna does not directly address this problem, but certain passages from the Liber de prima philosophia seem to suggest, and were interpreted during the middle ages as suggesting, that God falls within the scope of being qua being. Aquinas, on the other hand, analyzes this relationship in detail and firmly denies that God falls within the scope of the subject of metaphysics.