Epistemology and informal logic have overlapping and broadly similar subject matters. A principle of methodological symmetry is: philosophical theories of sufficiently similar subject matters should engage similar methods. Suppose the best way to do epistemology is in highly formalized ways, with a large role for mathematical methods. The symmetry principle suggests this is also the best way to do the logic of the reasoning and argument, the subject matter of informal logic. A capitulation to mathematics is inimical to informal logicians, (...) yet formal methods and mathematical models are an emerging force in epistemology. What is to be done? What’s sauce for the goose of epistemology is sauce for the gander of informal logic. (shrink)

This article argues that within the context of settler colonialism, the goal of transitional justice must be decolonisation. Settler colonialism operates according to a logic of elimination that aims to affect the disappearance of Indigenous populations in order to build new societies on expropriated land. This eliminatory logic renders the death of Indigenous peoples “ungrievable”. Therefore, this article proposes a decolonising transitional justice premised on a politics of grief that re-conceptualises Indigenous death as grievable, posing a challenge to the logic (...) of elimination and advancing a “decolonisation of the mind”, and resists a purely affective concept of grief in order to mobilise grief as a political resource to demand transformative structural justice. This article consider deaths at Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as a case study of ungrievability under settler colonialism and the Project of Heart as an illustration of a decolonising form of informal transitional justice. (shrink)

This paper examines the importance of reconciliation in post-conflict state-building. We argue that while the economic and political aspects are vital components of the state-building tool-kit, states can hardly be reconstructed without the support of the society. Individuals and communities are central to the re-establishment of peace and democracy. We will conduct a case study analysis focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter Bosnia). After more than 10 years of international supervision, Bosnia remains fragmented by ethnic tension, and continues to need (...) the guidance of the United Nation’s Office of the High Representative and European Union Special Representative. The Dayton Accord provided little direction for how to proceed with reconciliation beyond a state-centered peace-agreement and constitution. This study suggests that the peacebuilding process that has taken place in Bosnia over the past decade has been unable to foster reconciliation and re-create social trust, two necessary elements for ensuring lasting peace in the aftermath of conflict. (shrink)

This article examines the role of commemorative processes as a form of symbolic reparation and their potential use in deeply divided societies. After discussing definitions and contexts of symbolic reparation, it will then explore the tensions inherent in this process as it speedily encounters hybridisation, the construction of narratives of ethnic identity and the political contestation of memory in deeply divided societies. An overarching question will be how symbolic reparation might meaningfully allow for the seeding of human rights norms and (...) values in divided societies, and thus aid the recasting of both inter-communal relations and engagement between citizen and state. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

In 2008, the governments of Australia and Canada apologized to indigenous peoples of each respective country for past wrongs, while the United States House of Representatives offered an apology to African peoples and their descendants for slavery. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the three national moments to explore the capacities for language-based argumentation to invite forgiveness, mitigate historical social injustices, and promote inter-cultural accord that weaves temporal sinews of reconciliation.

Particular conceptions of reconciliation vary across a number of dimensions. As section 1 explains, the kind of relationship at issue in a specific context affects the type of improvement in relations that might be necessary in order to qualify as reconciliation. Reconciliation is widely taken to be a scalar concept. Section 2 discusses the spectrum of intensity along which kinds of improvement in relationships fall, and indicates why, in particular contexts, theorists often disagree about the point along this spectrum that (...) is morally or politically most significant. Section 3 provides an overview of the processes commonly cited as contributing to reconciliation. These processes are often controversial; those praised by some commentators as appropriate and constructive responses to past conflict are dismissed by others as undermining the moral or political conditions for just and peaceful relations. Section 4 concentrates on the relationship between reconciliation and justice. While some see these values as compatible and mutually supporting, others argue that, especially in the immediate wake of conflict, parties must often choose between reconciliation and justice. (shrink)

Trudy Govier worked closely with Wilhelm Verwoerd and Desmond Tutu in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This paper shares her insights regarding the meaning and importance of concepts such as acknowledgment, apology, forgiveness and reconciliation. The paper goes on to focus on the topic of reconciliation in the works of two philosophers. Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka had a great concern for reconciliation and restorative justice. He critiqued criminal justice systems that focused on punishment as retribution or deterrent. He (...) wrote in the 1960s and 70s that punishment as a concept and as a practice should be abolished. Instead, society should address the causes of social disharmony that lead to crime. His interview with sage Paul Mbuya Akoko shows that such an approach was one advocated by elders in Oruka’s Luo ethnic community, and by implication, in other parts of Africa as well. Oruka also wrote about Gandhi’s philosophy, suggesting that the nonviolent methods may be more fruitful than those counseled by Fanon. Also, Gandhi’s emphasis on the interdependence of all life is a fruitful basis for an ecological ethics. The philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi is then covered, with emphasis on his methods of conflict resolution. Gandhi’s methods steer a middle course between harmony and confrontation, and with a measured use of “compromise.” Gandhi advocated careful listening, and put it into practice while trying to quell riots in Calcutta. The paper ends by comparing and contrasting Oruka and Gandhi’s philosophical insights. (shrink)

Adherents to reconciliation, restorative justice, and related approaches to dealing with social conflict are well known for seeking to minimize punishment, in favor of offenders hearing out victims, making an apology, and effecting compensation for wrongful harm as well as victims forgiving offenders and accepting their reintegration into society. In contrast, I maintain that social reconciliation and similar concepts in fact characteristically require punishment but do not require forgiveness. I argue that a reconciliatory response to crime that includes punitive disavowal (...) but not necessarily forgiveness is supported by an analogy with resolving two-person conflict and by relational facets of human dignity. I also specify a novel account of the type of penalty that is justified by reconciliation, namely, burdensome labor that is likely to foster moral reform on the part of wrongdoers and to compensate their victims, which would serve neither retributive nor deterrent functions. I illustrate this conception of punishment in contexts that include having cheated on an exam at a university, engaged in criminal behavior such as robbery, and committed atrocities during large-scale social conflict. (shrink)

While the mechanisms of apology, forgiveness and reconciliation receive considerable scru-tiny, little attention has been afforded the non-apology. This counterfeit, confected typically by false substi-tution or mis-direction, adds moral insult to moral wrong. The paper elucidates the normative structural relationship among apologiser, the apologetic disposition, and the apology and defends the view of the non-apology as the pretended willingness to recalibrate the moral positional relationship among apologiser, wronged, and wrong without actually doing so.