Religion is approached from an African point of view but is as accessible to readers who belong to non-African societies as it is to those who have grown up in ...

In African society today, ubuntu as a notion of African humanism has been, and still is, subject to critical discussion. In African literature, philosophy, ethics, anthropology and theology, ubuntu plays a vast role and scholars in Africa and globally find the notion highly debated. The concept of identity development on the African continent has been written about broadly. This article unpacks the ubuntu philosophies of Augustine Shutte, Kwame Gyekye and John Mbiti. The views of these scholars will be (...) contrasted to critically engage the conceivable commonalities for identity development through cultures. The question addressed herein is: What are the similarities and dissimilarities of ubuntu as a cornerstone for identity development in modern Africa? This article also examines the divergent definition and historical development of ubuntu culture, ubuntu philosophy of identity development, environmental development and various thinkers’ understanding of this African worldview in current Africa and further afield. Contribution: This research contributes to African theological ethics of the new landscape identity and explores the ubuntu worldviews as a developmental process of identities across cultures. Since identity development across cultures is highly dynamic, the hermeneutical interpretation of the principles of ubuntu is crucial. (shrink)

Purpose: To reawaken the consciousness of all Africans to the implications of the metaphysical trajectory of time in Africa, which John S. Mbiti presents, in relation to personal and collective human development in Africa. Methodology: This work is expository, critical, and evaluative in its methodology. Findings: In Western thought, there is mathematical and linear time, as dominant ideas. Dominant because some philosophers, in particular Bergson, have their notion of time as mainly inclined to be lived, organic. It is (...) linear time in the sense that, it is an imagined line through which the distant past, present and infinite future is figured. Linear time as such does not exist, but it is a metaphysical notion existing in our minds. Linear time is unidirectional and mathematical. In Africa, African Philosophy is still fledgling. That is, it is not fully developed and documented. Consequently, even the field of “time” lacks a robust written commentary. Unique Contribution to theory, practice and policy (recommendation): Within the traditional African milieu, according to Mbiti, time is a two dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present and virtually no future. This is contrary to the linear time concept in western thought, with an indefinite past, present and future. This work is expository, analytical and critical in its methodology. The first part of the discussion is concerned with the nature of time (and its constituent elements) as a metaphysical concept. The second part focuses on the ordering of time as found among the Africans. Finally, the third part discusses some of the different activities (in customs and traditions), which point to the future. These include the meaning of life, rites of passage, painting and divination, etc. In the conclusion, a fundamental question is raised regarding, whether or not, the present organization of time, in Africa, as presented by John S. Mbiti, be perpetuated or changed, taking into account the pros and cons it bears. (shrink)

In this book, John Dryzek criticizes the dominance of instrumental rationality and objectivism in political institutions and public policy and in the practice of political science. He argues that the reliance on these kinds of politics and to technocracies of expert cultures that are not only repressive, but surprisingly ill-equipped for dealing with complex social problems. Drawing on critical theory, he outlines an alternative program for the organization of political institutions advocating a form of communicatively rational democracy, which he (...) terms discursive democracy, that stresses the importance of active citizenship and public discourse. He draws out the limitations of instrumental rationality and investigates how policy analysis and political science may be reformed to help constitute and comprehend democracy. Discursive Democracy examines how the political process can be made more vital and meaningful. At the same time it shows how such an invigorated process will serve as a more effective agent for social problem solving. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy puts communication and talk at the centre of democracy. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance takes a fresh look at the foundations of the field, and develops new applications in areas ranging from citizen participation to the democratization of authoritarian states to the global system.

Deliberative democracy puts communication and talk at the centre of democracy. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance takes a fresh look at the foundations of the field, and develops new applications in areas ranging from citizen participation to the democratization of authoritarian states to the global system.

This is a book about how politics, government - and much else - needs to change in response to the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities.

Contending discourses underlie many of the worlds most intractable conflicts, producing misery and violence. This is especially true in the post-9/11 world. However, contending discourses can also open the way to greater dialogue in global civil society and across states and international organizations. This possibility holds even for the most murderous sorts of conflicts in deeply divided societies. In this timely and original book, John Dryzek examines major contemporary conflicts in terms of clashing discourses. Topics covered include the alleged (...) clash of civilizations; societies divided by ethnicity, nationality, or religion; economic globalization versus resistance; plus an in-depth discussion of the 'war on terror'. Dryzek concludes by highlighting the limitations of current neoconservative and cosmopolitan approaches, arguing that only deliberative global politics offers unprecedented new possibilities for democratic engagement in the international system. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, politics, philosophy, and sociology. (shrink)

Some implications of Tomasello et al.'s theory derive from incorporating a variant of a common assumption that humans are biologically adapted to take an intentional stance in relation to conspecifics. I argue that, rather than being cued, intentions and other dispositional states may be inferred logically from an evolved commitment to determinism and evidence of state-dependent behavior.

The idea that technologies can change moral beliefs and practices is an old one. But how, exactly, does this happen? This paper builds on an emerging field of inquiry by developing a synoptic taxonomy of the mechanisms of techno-moral change. It argues that technology affects moral beliefs and practices in three main domains: decisional (how we make morally loaded decisions), relational (how we relate to others) and perceptual (how we perceive situations). It argues that across these three domains there are (...) six primary mechanisms of techno-moral change: (i) adding options; (ii) changing decision-making costs; (iii) enabling new relationships; (iv) changing the burdens and expectations within relationships; (v) changing the balance of power in relationships; and (vi) changing perception (information, mental models and metaphors). The paper also discusses the layered, interactive and second-order effects of these mechanisms. (shrink)

Oxford Handbooks of Political Science are the essential guide to the state of political science today. With engaging contributions from 51 major international scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides the key point of reference for anyone working in political theory and beyond.

"--Joel Cracraft, American Museum of Natural History "This is not the potted history that one usually finds in texts and review articles.

The reviews of this book which greeted its appearance in America, where it won a Catholic Press Association Religious Book Award, speak for themselves. 'The real core of the book is the question that is raised - the demanding bone-crushing question we all face - alone - at one time - the question of death/life and immortality. In these few pages we set out on a journey - one that winds its way among ancient stories and myths ... one's constant (...) disturbing companion is death - a reality that keeps breaking in upon our imes, our friends, our dreams and hopes and even our changing and becoming. The richness of the book lies in the questioning and some of the answers other men's times have given in attempt to live with this probing. We meet Kazantzakis, Homer, Melville, Hegel, Dante in their humanness in the face of death and in their timeless answers' (National Catholic Reporter). From the Protestant side, Martin Marty commented how John Dunne, 'perhaps the most intuitive and natively talented Catholic around, has cast a new spell', and The Critic remarked: 'As a meditation ought to be, it is simple and profound at once. And it is beautifully done, in some ways the richest of John Dunne's works.' All of which amounts to an invitation to join the author as he poses the timeless dilemma of the human condition and seeks to resolve it through stories of adventures, journeys and voyages inspired by man's encounter with death; stories of childhood, youth, manhood and age; and finally stories of God and of man wrestling with God and the unknown. (shrink)

The central dogma of biology holds that genetic information normally flows from DNA to RNA to protein. As a consequence it has been generally assumed that genes generally code for proteins, and that proteins fulfil not only most structural and catalytic but also most regulatory functions, in all cells, from microbes to mammals. However, the latter may not be the case in complex organisms. A number of startling observations about the extent of non-protein-coding RNA (ncRNA) transcription in the higher eukaryotes (...) and the range of genetic and epigenetic phenomena that are RNA-directed suggests that the traditional view of the structure of genetic regulatory systems in animals and plants may be incorrect. ncRNA dominates the genomic output of the higher organisms and has been shown to control chromosome architecture, mRNA turnover and the developmental timing of protein expression, and may also regulate transcription and alternative splicing. This paper re-examines the available evidence and suggests a new framework for considering and understanding the genomic programming of biological complexity, autopoletic development and phenotypic variation. BioEssays 25:930-939,2003. (C) 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This book contains some rare combinations: first, an author who is as concerned with conceptual clarification as he is with the absolute truthfulness of the biblical text; second, an argument that avoids the common "either-ors" and contends for the importance of both divine sovereignty and divine solicitude in equal measure; third, an approach that espouses divine determinism and divine temporality. No One Like Him takes on the most intractable intellectual challenges of contemporary evangelical theology. Kevin Vanhoozer , Research Professor of (...) Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School John Feinberg judicially reconstructs aspects of the classical view of God in a way that proves more faithful than process and openness of God theisms. Arguably, this is the best study of theology proper in print. Bruce Demarest , Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Denver Seminary Feinberg reads theology with a philosopher's eye and writes it with a philosopher's sensitivity to illogic and incoherence. J. I. Packer , Professor of Theology, Regent College A magisterial work, one that truly deserves to be called a magnum opus....It reveals its author as...perhaps the only modern scholar whose work, like that of Carl. F. H. Henry, can compare in size, detail, comprehensiveness, and intellectual acuity with the accomplishments of the late Karl Barth.... It is not risky to predict that Feinberg's No One Like Him will come to be a milestone in evangelical theology. Harold O. J. Brown , Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary. (shrink)

PART VII: PUBLICS AND MOVEMENTS. - PART VIII: GOVERNMENT RESPONSES. - PART IX: POLICY INSTRUMENTS. - PART X: PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS. - PART XI: GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. - PART XII: RECONSTRUCTION.

A Search for God in Time and Memory is an experiment in religious thought. While Catholic in scope and in historical perspective, it bypasses religious authority and official documents to find its sources in the life experiences of individuals. "It is a search," says John S. Dunne, "which will carry us on quests and journeys through life stories, through hells, purgatories and heavens, through ages of life, through stories of God." The quest begins with an examination of one's own (...) life, with an awareness of patterns of its past and the contingencies of its future. The point of individual departure then is to seek comparison and perspective from the lives of great writers and philosophers, finding resonances between their lives and one's own and returning at last to one's own standpoint. It is in this process of "passing over" that one discovers the greater dimensions of man, those which reach beyond the self and the individual life story. This process is ultimately how man "brings time to mind, how he searches through time and memory, for passing over avails him of the time and memory of others, and coming back leaves his own time and memory enriched." In analyzing the stages of life--childhood, youth, manhood, and age--as they appear in modern autobiography, he discovers beneath these life experiences the possibilities of companionship with God in time and "the face underlying all, that of the compassionate God and the Compassionate Savior.". (shrink)

Jonathan Aldred shares our desire to promote a reconciliation between social choice theory and deliberative democracy in the interests of a more comprehensive and compelling account of democracy.1 His comments on some details of our analysis – specifically, our use of Arrow’s conditions of universal domain and independence of irrelevant alternatives – give us an opportunity to clarify our position. His discussion of the independence condition in particular identifies some ambiguity in our exposition, and as such is useful. We are (...) less impressed by the way Aldred characterizes the overall terms of the reconciliation we propose. We believe that his argument on this matter should be resisted because it provides deliberative democrats with a bad excuse to dismiss social choice theory altogether, which is surely not what he intends. (shrink)

This book is aimed primarily at the practitioners of morals such as psychiatrists,lawyers and policy-makers. My professional background is clinical psychiatry It is divided into three parts. The first of these provides an overview of moral theory, morality in non-human species and recent developments in neuroscience that are of relevance to moral and legal responsibility. In the second part I offer a new paradigm of free action based on the overlaps between free will, moral value and art. In the overlap (...) between free will and moral value we find moral responsibility and moral autonomy. Free will and art share characteristics of originality, spontaneity and creativity. Art and moral value are related by way of the moral content of art and the formal similarities of moral and aesthetic judgments. In the overlap between art, free will and moral value we find religious belief, the creation of moral value and the creation of moral identity. In the third part, I discuss the application of these ideas to common clinical conditions such as eating disorders, addictions, personality disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and the dissociative disorders. Wherever possible, I illustrate the points that are made with real-life clinical examples. I finish by considering how ideas of free will and responsibility are relevant to psychotherapy. (shrink)

Essentialism in philosophy is the position that things, especially kinds of things, have essences, or sets of properties, that all members of the kind must have, and the combination of which only members of the kind do, in fact, have. It is usually thought to derive from classical Greek philosophy and in particular from Aristotle’s notion of “what it is to be” something. In biology, it has been claimed that pre-evolutionary views of living kinds, or as they are sometimes called, (...) “natu-ral kinds”, are essentialist. This static view of living things presumes that no tran-sition is possible in time or form between kinds, and that variation is regarded as accidental or inessential noise rather than important information about taxa. In contrast it is held that Darwinian, and post-Darwinian, biology relies upon varia-tion as important and inevitable properties of taxa, and that taxa are not, therefore, kinds but historical individuals. Recent attempts have been made to undercut this account, and to reinstitute essentialism in biological kind terms. Others argue that essentialism has not ever been a historical reality in biology and its predecessors. In this chapter, I shall outline the many meanings of the notion of essentialism in psychology and social science as well as science, and discuss pro- and anti-essentialist views, and some recent historical revisionism. It turns out that nobody was essentialist to speak of in the sense that is antievolutionary in biology, and that much confusion rests on treating the one word, “essence” as meaning a single notion when in fact there are many. I shall also discuss the philosophical implica-tions of essentialism, and what that means one way or the other for evolutionary biology. Teaching about evolution relies upon narratives of change in the ways the living world is conceived by biologists. This is a core narrative issue. (shrink)

The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ (...) different approaches to scientific methodologies: Mill’s class-kinds are not formed by induction but by deduction, while Whewell’s type-kinds are inductive. More recently, phylogenetic kinds (clades, or monophyletic-kinds) are inductively projectible, and escape Mill’s strictures. Mill’s version represents a shift in the notions of kinds from the biological to the physical sciences. (shrink)

The biological species (biospecies) concept applies only to sexually reproducing species, which means that until sexual reproduction evolved, there were no biospecies. On the universal tree of life, biospecies concepts therefore apply only to a relatively small number of clades, notably plants andanimals. I argue that it is useful to treat the various ways of being a species (species modes) as traits of clades. By extension from biospecies to the other concepts intended to capture the natural realities of what keeps (...) taxa distinct, we can treat other modes as traits also, and so come to understand that theplurality of species concepts reflects the biological realities of monophyletic groups.We should expect that specialists in different organisms will tend to favour those concepts that best represent the intrinsic mechanisms that keep taxa distinct in their clades. I will address the question whether modes ofreproduction such as asexual and sexual reproduction are natural classes, given that they are paraphyletic in most clades. (shrink)

Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that evolution can be (...) expected to design systems that produce true beliefs in some domain. This reply works for commonsense beliefs and can be extended to scientific beliefs. But it does not work for moral or religious beliefs. An alternative reply which has been used defend moral beliefs is that their truth does not consist in their tracking some external state of affairs. Whether or not it is successful in the case of moral beliefs, this reply is less plausible for religious beliefs. So religious beliefs emerge as particularly vulnerable to evolutionary debunking. (shrink)