Human dignity, even when analyzed through the lens of human rights, has received surprisingly little attention in the Journal of Religious Ethics, in contrast to a resurgent global interest in it. This article examines some possible reasons for this diminutive interest and makes a case for dignity's integration into the mainstream of religious ethics scholarship. A social conception of human dignity understands it as a conferment that entitles its holder to certain respectful treatments unavailable to those without it. As a (...) naturalistic conception, human dignity assumes certain features to be inherent in human nature. An emancipatory theory of dignity offers a fuller accounting of the concept as it is informed by a grassroots human rights praxis and social movements across a spectrum of historical periods and cultural and political contexts. (shrink)

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio-economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

The violent encounter between Africans and the forces of globalization raises the question of whether Africans should capitulate to these forces or seek to morally transform them, notwithstanding the uncertainty of achieving success. This essay argues that an exclusively existentialist interpretation of the African predicaments is inadequate because it erects a false dichotomy between African religious and moral sensibilities. It proposes instead an ethic of responsibility that affirms the interdependence of not only these two realms of life, but also of (...) communal well-being and individual's subjectivity. (shrink)

Contemporary discourse on human rights in Africa constitutes an important and controversial aspect of the general discourse on African society and culture. I begin by examining the idea of human rights as a moral category and discuss its pertinence to African cultural and political life. I then analyze and discuss the two dominant positions in the current debate, namely, the communitarian and the individualist theses. I argue that both positions are inadequate because they dissociate dimensions of life that need to (...) be interpreted in their interplay. Drawing upon samples of traditional African religious and ethical traditions, I propose a personalist theory of human rights that affirms the intrinsic individuality and sociality of the human status. (shrink)

The filial relationship between Christian ethics and Comparative Religious Ethics (CRE) need not be perniciously distortive and can be salutary for comparative work. I suggest that the suspicions about CRE as a disguised form of a “Christian ethical enterprise” are overstated and that we can appreciate the value of the legacy of Christian ethics for comparative work in the focal themes of emancipatory criticism and common morality. Both of these themes, even if influenced by Christian ethics, reflect more universal social‐moral (...) problems that can be discerned in cross‐cultural contexts. (shrink)

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio‐economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

Post-colonial Africa's political stability, economic growth, and human development have been impeded by a vicious circle of ethnic rivalry and civil wars. This article examines the various attempts in Africa to move beyond the traditional lens of pacifism and just war theory in curtailing the deleterious effects of war. These attempts, which are also consistent with the theoretical proposal of just peacemaking, have had mixed results on the continent. The article focuses on Liberia and Rwanda to illustrate the strengths and (...) weaknesses of just peacemaking theory, and concludes with a few suggestions on how its vision might be better pursued in Africa. (shrink)

The first annual Alchemy Lecture brings four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation captures and expands those conversations in insightful, passionate ways. Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) calls attention to the complexity of Black infrastructures, questioning how "the environments that surround us condition the possibility of our being." Poet Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O'otham) writes: "Like (...) story, migration is the sensual movement of knowledge," and asks, "What is the language we need to live right now?" Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) suggests there is no diasporic life "without the dynamics of fabulation, where we pass down, from generation to generation, the stories of our ancestors who walked barefoot for many months." And cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) asks us to consider inheritances beyond white supremacist logics: "What might it mean to live a life, if we can't risk desiring and working towards utopia?" As each Alchemist considers the legacies of anticolonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life, their essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something startling and revelatory: a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be. (shrink)

The need for an indigenous croplocally grown by subsistence farmers that willhelp bring direct economic benefits to thosewho need it most is very important. Cassava hasa great potential for this purpose if certainproblems are solved, because cassava has playedvital roles in the diet of many Africancountries especially the grassroot people, yetthe utilization of the crop in diversifiedforms has been very limited. There are few foodproducts from cassava that are processedindustrially with added value that will be ofhigher nutritional value and have (...) longer shelflives. There are a number of traditionallyprocessed staple foods from cassava in Nigeriaand other African countries that needimprovement. Most of these foods can beimproved on if the market for them is assuredby the end users, a market that is currentlylacking. It will be necessary to create morepublic awareness within Nigeria and otherAfrican societies to increase the acceptabilityof such novel products and this requires amultidisciplinary approach to interpret whatscientists and technologists are doing to theold crop in the present age. (shrink)

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play in political violence are identified and evaluated. (...) In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the notion of intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebras under homomorphism and Cartesian product and investigate several properties. We study the homomorphic image and inverse image of the intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebras of a PMS-algebra, which are also intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebras of a PMS-algebra, and find some other interesting results. Furthermore, we also prove that the Cartesian product of intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebras is again an intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebra and characterize it in terms of its level sets. Finally, we consider (...) the strongest intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-relations on an intuitionistic fuzzy set in a PMS-algebra and demonstrate that an intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-relation on an intuitionistic fuzzy set in a PMS-algebra is an intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebra if and only if the corresponding intuitionistic fuzzy set in a PMS-algebra is an intuitionistic fuzzy PMS-subalgebra of a PMS-algebra. (shrink)

Sumner B. (Barney) Twiss, who died in 2023, was for ten years a General Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE). He was a frequent contributor of articles, a member of the JRE Editorial Board, and a member of the journal's Board of Trustees. In this article, colleagues and students reflect on some of his many contributions, not only to the JRE but to the broader discursive fields of comparative religious ethics and human rights.

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder is an inherited long-living and neurological disorder that starts in the early age of childhood with complicated causes. Autism spectrum disorder can lead to mental disorders such as anxiety, miscommunication, and limited repetitive interest. If the autism spectrum disorder is detected in the early childhood, it will be very beneficial for children to enhance their mental health level. In this study, different machine and deep learning algorithms were applied to classify the severity of autism spectrum disorder. Moreover, (...) different optimization techniques were employed to enhance the performance. The deep neural network performed better when compared with other approaches. (shrink)

Resenha: SKA, Jean-Louis. O Antigo Testamento explicado aos que conhecem pouco ou nada a respeito dele. São Paulo: Paulus, 2015. 163p. ISBN: 978-85-349-4182-2.

At forstå med kroppen – Udvalgte dele af Løgstrups kritik af Kant.

In the late 1920s, the American obstetrician Joseph DeLee brought the motion-picture camera into the birth room. Following that era's trend of adapting industrial efficiency practices for medical environments, DeLee's films give spectacular and unexpected expression to the engineering concept of ‘streamlining’. Accomplishing what more tangible obstetric streamlining practices had failed to, DeLee's cameras, and his post-production manipulation, shifted birth from messy and dangerous to rationalized, efficient, death-defying. This was film as an active and effective medical tool. Years later, the (...) documentarian Pare Lorentz produced and wrote his own birth film,The Fight for Life(1940). The documentary subject of the film was DeLee himself, and the film was set in his hospitals, on the same maternity ‘sets’ that had once showcased film's remarkable streamlining capacity to give and keep life. Yet relatively little of DeLee was retained in the film's content, resulting in a showdown that, by way of contrast, further articulated DeLee's understanding of film's medical powers and, in so doing, hinted at a more dynamic moment in the history of medicine while speaking also to the process by which that understanding ceased to be historically legible. (shrink)

That the political and moral concept of human rights originated in the West warns us to be watchful for Western biases in human rights discourse, but the concept must be set in the context of the West's attempt to address the universal struggle of individuals and groups to secure justice in the face of claims against them. Thus, the correction of Western bias requires not a rejection of the notion of human rights but a thick description of that struggle as (...) it is manifest in other times and cultures. African experience is richly instructive. Because African nation - states did not emerge from civil societies associated with a particular people, some have represented the communalism of traditional peoples as a distinctive African perspective on rights. Though such claims deserve careful attention, African communalism requires the critical scrutiny that is appropriate to all stances that have the potential to foster coercive and exclusive practices. (shrink)

Construo esta pesquisa para dar visibilidade ao corpo estranho como produtor de arte, cultura e conhecimentos, quando esse encontra sua casa, o “seu corpo”, na escola. Esta se desenvolve epistemologicamente em Arte-educação descolonial a partir da condição na qual sempre fui colocado, de corpo estranho, por ser imperfeito ao modelo de corpo colonial imposto no ocidente, sempre em relação a um Outro. Continuamente, por isso, vivo sendo posto na categoria de “Ser menos”, na cultura, na vida, no aprendizado, como outros (...) tantos corpos estranhos também vivem: ocupando o fundo da cena para deixar a coreografia em dança bonita ou as apresentações teatrais ou musicais harmônicas. (shrink)

Las "Cuestiones Sicilianas" son el primer texto conservado del filósofo y sufí Ibn Sab'in de Murcia (c. 614/1217-668/1270). Aunque el prólogo del texto pretende que se trata de respuestas a preguntas mandadas por Federico II al mundo árabe, parece más probable que se trate de un manual introductorio para estudiantes árabes de filosofía, discutiendo cuatro problemas específicos y controvertidos como manera de presentar conceptos generales de la filosofía aristotélica. Este artículo analiza la estructura y la manera de argumentar en las (...) Cuestiones Sicilianas. Dedica su atención en particular a la relación entre el Sufismo y la filosofía y a las fuentes del texto, sobre todo los textos filosóficos de Ibn Rusd. Interpreta a Ibn Sab'in y sus Cuestiones Sicilianas como un reflejo del ambiente intelectual en el Oeste del Mediterráneo durante los últimos años de los Almohades. El texto fue posiblemente compuesto en un contexto que tenía que ver con los t.alaba, y refleja también unos aspectos claves de la ideología Almohade. (shrink)

Las relaciones entre la fe y la razón afectan a realidades que son esenciales para el ser humano: la existencia de Dios, el origen y fin de las personas, la vida en el más allá, la realidad del mal, el significado de la ciencia, etc. Por eso, el vínculo entre fe y razón se presenta como una encrucijada de la que depende la orientación de la propia vida. De ahí la importancia de dilucidar esas relaciones, que es el objetivo de (...) este libro; en primer lugar, mostrando que quienes se apoyan en la ciencia, o en otros ámbitos de la razón, para refutar la fe, no se basan en la razón humana, ni en la ciencia como tal, sino en el cientificismo o en un error racional. Pero también, evidenciando la complementariedad entre fe y razón, como señalaba el Card. Ratzinger: La razón no se salvará sin la fe, pero la fe sin la razón no será humana (Sobre la situación actual de la Fe y la teología). (shrink)

Temor y Temblor, de Kierkegaard, escrito bajo el seudónimo de Johannesde silentio, nos ofrece una recreaciónpoética de la historia bíblica de Abraham. Johannes alaba a Abraham como el más eminente caballero de la fe, pero nuestro análisis encuentra que las caracterizaciones que hace de Abraham, como decidido y al mismo tiempo angustiado por el sacrificio de Isaac, entran en conflicto y se mantienen sin resolver. Esto, sumado a la reconocida ignorancia de Johannes en cuestiones de fe, hace que la (...) representación de la fe en Temor y Temblor no sea convincente. Sólo en sus obras tardías Kierkegaard concilia estas dificultades introduciendo una condición "metaestable" de la fe. (shrink)

Tendo por base os pensamentos de dois importantes intelectuais franceses do século XX, este trabalho pretende perguntar pelo lugar da preguiça em tempos em que todos são cobrados por sua alta performance. Foucault mostra, em diferentes momentos, que tanto do ponto de vista moral como em relação aos processos econômicos, a preguiça foi reprovada, vigiada, controlada. Vemos isso, por exemplo, em seu curso “A sociedade Punitiva”, que a preguiça clássica dos séculos XVII e XVIII, vista como vício indolente e antiprodutivo (...) e combatida com força policial, passa, a partir do século XIX, para um tipo complexo de ilegalismo, que compromete a maximização da produção e do lucro e é contida com trabalho intenso e contínuo e com a vigilância moral sobre o trabalhador. Como se vê em Vigiar e punir, é a sociedade disciplinar e vigilante, que, atuando sobre os corpos, deve eliminar todo tipo de preguiça, a fim de que se possa extrair deles a maior utilidade possível. Já no curso “Nascimento da biopolítica”, ele nos ajuda a perceber que o modelo neoliberal deve banir a preguiça, na medida em que o que se busca, na economia de mercado, é a máxima eficiência. Concomitantemente aos cursos de Foucault, dedicados a questões do liberalismo e do neoliberalismo, Roland Barthes, numa entrevista intitulada “Ousemos ser preguiçosos”, de 16 de dezembro de 1979 ao jornal Le Monde, nos provoca a pensar que houve, no Ocidente, a perda da “instituição preguiça” em vista, principalmente, de certa obrigação de diversificação do tempo. Por isso mesmo, para nós, torna-se intolerável o “não fazer nada”; é preciso, a todo momento, inserir algo à vida. Palavras-chave: Preguiça. Tempo. Michel Foucault. Roland Barthes. (shrink)

Comments on: “Just War Theory in Comparative Perspective: AReview Essay” by Simeon O. Ilesanmi Journal of Religious Ethics 28.1 (Spring 2000).

This paper aims to clarify the relation between art and reconciliation in Herbert Marcuse's thought, according to some of his writings concerning the subject. These works employ the term "reconciliation" with two meanings: it means the possibility of effectuating within material relations the sublimed cultural themes and this would result in the disappearance of the art; on the other hand, it means the image of a harmonic world which art preserves in itself and that stays away from social order. Under (...) this aspect, art remains utopia.O artigo pretende explicitar a relação entre arte e reconciliação no pensamento de Herbert Marcuse, considerando-se vários de seus escritos que tocam no tema. Ao longo deles, percebe-se que o uso do termo reconciliação assume um duplo significado: por um lado, significa a possibilidade de que os temas sublimados da cultura possam ser efetivados no plano das relações materiais, o que implicaria o desaparecimento da arte; por outro, significa a imagem de um mundo harmonizado que a arte preserva em si e que se distancia da ordem social. Sob esse aspecto, a arte permanece utopia. (shrink)

I discuss the notion of education or educatedness (paideia) involved in the ‘educated human being’ (pepaideumenos), which Aristotle presents at the beginning of his Parts of Animals and a few other passages. The competence of educated human beings makes them able to evaluate some aspects of the explanations in a given domain without having a determinate knowledge about the specific subject-matter in that domain. I examine how such a competence is possible and how it is related to other critical abilities (...) which Aristotle usually ascribes to the science of being qua being. Discuto a noção de educação ou cultura (paideia) envolvida na figura do ser humano cultivado (pepaideumenos), que Aristóteles apresenta no início do tratado As Partes dos Animais e em algumas outras passagens. A competência do ser humano cultivado o habilita a avaliar certo aspecto das explicações propostas em um dado domínio, sem requerer dele um conhecimento determinado sobre o assunto específico do mesmo domínio. Examino de que modo essa competência é possível e como ela se articula a outras habilidades críticas que Aristóteles geralmente associa à ciência do ser enquanto ser. (shrink)

“Platão, creio, estava doente” (Fédon 59 B). Esta famosa frase do Fédon, a que alude o título desta obra, traduz uma estratégia de ocultamento, pela qual Platão sinaliza claramente que sua obra escrita não pretende se apresentar como um conjunto de documentos históricos, testemunho de diálogos efetivamente ocorridos, ao mesmo tempo em que lhe permite fazer do condutor dos diálogos, na maioria deles Sócrates, uma dramatis persona de si mesmo. Assim como na tradição direta dos escritos Platão esconde-se deliberadamente, mas (...) revela seu pensamento sob a máscara dos personagens literários que criou, também na tradição indireta seu pensamento encontra-se camuflado, seja pelo caráter alusivo de muitas passagens de seus escritos, seja pelo testemunho de seus discípulos imediatos e longínquos. (shrink)

Pri Slovenski matici je izšla imenitna knjiga izbranih pisem italijan­skega pesnika Francesca Petrarce, ki je po svoji vsebini, številnih aluzijah ter idejnih odvodih v okviru antičnega izročila za ljubitelje književnosti in humanizma prava poslastica. Prevajalca Anja Božič in Brane Senegačnik sta pripravila posrečen izbor iz sicer obsežne zbirke Petrarcovih pisem domačim oziroma prijateljem (Rerum fa­miliarum libri), ki sta ga razdelila na tri dele: Prijateljem, V spodnji svet, kjer gre za antične avtorje, ter pisma V zgornji svet, namenjena Petrarcovim sodobnikom.

Resumo: Segundo a mitologia grega, quem beber ou tocar nas águas do Lete, um rio do Hades, esquece a existência anterior. O que pode ser, segundo Nietzsche, uma receita para o sofredor livrar-se do fardo de seu sofrimento, mas também um ato heroico de afirmação da vida. Assim, tanto a decisão de tocar - ou não - nas águas do Lete quanto os motivos para fazê-lo envolve a ambiguidade que é característica do termo “esquecimento” nos escritos do filósofo. Uma característica (...) do conceito que diz respeito ao diálogo constante do filósofo com suas fontes, com as nascentes do conceito, e aos diferentes usos que faz dele, os meandros que produz. Dois campos de investigação, o da origem e o da forma, que têm em comum a possibilidade de interpretação, conforme veremos, a partir das ideias de assimilação e digestão.: According to Greek mythology, whoever drinks or touches the waters of Lethe, a river of Hades, forgets his previous existence. What can be, according to Nietzsche, a recipe for the sufferer to get rid of the burden of his suffering, but also a heroic act of affirmation of life. Thus, both the decision to touch - or not - the waters of Lethe and the reasons for doing so involve the ambiguity that is characteristic of the term “forgetfulness” in the philosopher’s writings. A characteristic of the concept that concerns the philosopher’s constant dialogue with his sources, with the nascent of the concept, and the different uses he makes of it, the meanders he produces. Two fields of investigation, that of origin and that of form, have in common the possibility of interpretation, as we will see, from the ideas of assimilation and digestion. (shrink)

Este texto visa questionar as construções racistas que fundamentaram discursos sobre a irracionalidade de não europeus. Apontamos alguns posicionamentos de filósofos que corroboraram para a construção do racismo científico. A metodologia utilizada foi a pesquisa bibliográfica. O objetivo foi, por meio de propostas decoloniais, mostrar que africanos inventaram o objeto matemático fração, bem como sua notação atual. Os mais antigos registros históricos sobre esse objeto são os antigos papiros keméticos, sendo o Papiro de Ahmes, o mais importante deles. Mostramos exemplos (...) da forma hierática de representar frações e recorremos ao Mito Hórus, deus kemético para mostrar que frações estavam relacionadas ao cotidiano da civilização egípcia antiga. (shrink)

Neste artigo indicaremos que a proposição fundamental dos cursos de Geografia física de Kant é: o homem é habitante da Terra. Para validar essa tese, alinharemos a metodologia utilizada por Kant nos cursos de Antropologia e de Geografia física, a fim de evidenciar as convergências e divergências desses cursos. Além disso, também compararemos a metodologia empregada por Kant na História natural e na Geografia física, porque a distinção entre essas ciências nos permitirá ratificar a tese aqui defendida e delimitar os (...) critérios de validade da proposição acima indicada. Em Physische Geographie, Kant diferencia as proposições dessas disciplinas da seguinte maneira: as proposições geográficas se referem aos homens como habitantes da Terra, mas os investiga sem nenhuma perspectiva histórica, ou seja, os investiga no tempo presente. Ao contrário disso, as proposições naturalistas investigam os seres humanos em uma linha temporal sucessiva, a fim de demonstrar o que natureza fez deles. Dito isso, o problema central da história natural é demonstrar que os diferentes povos possuem uma origem comum e o problema central da geografia física é demonstrar de que maneira o habitat influencia no processo civilizador, moralizador, político e religioso dos diferentes povos. (shrink)