Transparency International has consistently maintained two prominent assertions: that corruption remains a global threat because no human society in the world has a clean record, and that Africa is the most corrupt region in the world. These assertions raise some fundamental philosophical concerns. The former assertion re-opens the need to ascertain whether corruption is an essence of humans, or an acquired disposition. Howsoever this is resolved forms the fulcrum of concerns on the second assertion. This paper engages these philosophical concerns. (...) The paper takes two paths to achieve this goal. The first draws from Aristotle’s essentialism and Thomas Hobbes’ accounts on human nature to engage the debate on the relationship between human nature and corruption. The second derives and discusses the plausibility and fundamental implications of the claim that Africa is the most corrupt region in the world. It was found that neither on the basis of Aristotle’s nor Thomas Hobbes’, nor even a possible African cosmology as discussed, can it be said that official corruption is essential to humans. The paper concludes that what is at issue concerning corruption as measured by Transparency International pertains to different African expectations of recompense in a protective communalism from which relatives in public offices must have drawn care, now termed “corruption” by Transparency International, which is not so regarded in the African social order. (shrink)

This paper challenges the viability of argument from supervenience in defense of a physicalist position on the place of qualia, the subjective properties of consciousness, in a physical or material world. Physicalism, being an ontological thesis that asserts that the only things that really exist are either physical entities or properties, affirms that every mental attribute must be a physical attribute. However, the existence of a quale as an attribute of a mental state falsifies this affirmation. The physicalist argues that (...) qualia supervene on the physical properties in the human body, and that any problem about qualia is, just like any other scientific problem, resolvable scientifically, either in principle or in practice. This paper argues that supervenience is merely a report of the nature of reality, and not a justificatory ontological affirmation that qualia supervene on physical properties. The paper begins with a short description of physicalism and an account of qualia as distinctive character of consciousness. It further articulates and examines the physicalists’ use of the argument from supervenience to establish that qualia supervene on the physical elements in the world. The concluding part shows the errors in the argument from supervenience, and its implication for the truth of physicalism. (shrink)