The motivation for this study originated from a review of literature which led the current researcher to the realisation that not much critical study has been performed on the theology and practice of Bible inspiration and its authority in Christ Apostolic Church. This article set out to identify the tenet of faith of the church on inspiration and authority of the Scriptures, locate this tenet in the context of Evangelical theology and compare the initial understanding of the concept of Bible (...) inspiration in CAC with the way it is perceived by the church members today. Primary sources of data for the work comprised the Bible, editions of CAC constitution and structured interviews. Secondary sources of data comprised Bible commentaries, books, journal articles and the Internet. Data collected were analysed using Conservative Evangelical theological framework. The study discovered that CAC held to word-for-word inerrancy of the Scriptures, even of its vernacular translations, and its binding authority on Christians in all areas of their lives. The study revealed that the belief of CAC on Bible inspiration and its authority located CAC at the centre of Evangelical theology which researchers have identified as inerrancy. Finally, the study discovered that the initial position of CAC on the inspiration and authority of the Bible remained the same as held by contemporary members of the church. The work provides theological relevance for the study of one of the doctrines of Pentecostalism in Nigeria. (shrink)

Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works roots the danger of undermining propaganda in an ideology based account of politics, treating individuals’ beliefs and social belief systems as the primary target and mechanism of undermining propaganda. In this paper I suggest a theoretical alternative to the role ideology plays in Stanley’s theory and theories like it, which I call practice first. A practice first account instead treats public behavior as the primary target of propaganda, and analyzes undermining propaganda as altering the incentive (...) structure that sets the terms for public behavior. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

Shareholder activism has been largely neglected in the few available studies on corporate governance in sub Saharan Africa. Following the recent challenges posed by the Cadbury Nigeria Plc, this paper examines shareholder activism in an evolving corporate governance institutional context and identifies strategic opportunities associated with shareholders’ empowerment through changes in code of corporate governance and recent developments in information and communications technologies in Nigeria; especially in relation to corporate social responsibility in Nigeria. It is expected that the paper would (...) contribute to the scarce literature on corporate governance and accountability in Africa. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

Why hasn't Africa been able to respond to the challenges of modernity and globalization?

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

This work attempts to address some basic feasibility concerns in the global taxation policy proposal. In recent years, moral-political philosophizing has extensively advan-ced the idea of transnational justice through volumes of scholarly literature. In moving the discussions beyond an ideational level and projecting it onto a practical realm, mo-ral-political thinkers have proposed a global taxation policy, the proceeds of the imple-mentation of which are meant to cater for the global poor. This proposal is morally laudable, given that it would substantially (...) benefit the global needy. Nonetheless, the proposal raises some basic feasibility concerns, such as the moral and legal justifiability of the proposal; the nature of the object to be globally taxed and how it is to be globally taxed; the nature of the globalist institution to implement the proposal; the legitimacy challenge of the globalist institution, and the challenge of practical implementation of the proposal by the institution. If the proposal is to succeed, the critical issues ought to be constructively addressed. Given that institutionalism necessarily emerges in the fea-sibility concerns, an institutionalist approach is advanced in this work to constructively address them. (shrink)

This paper examines two claims about the ontology of globalisation. First, it interrogates the claim that the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation is underpinned by the theoretical construct of economic and information-epistemic determinism, which has been developmentally significant in the North. The paper contends that this claim is likely to propagate some values that ought not to undergird the end-state vision of the prospective global village if the PGV is to be essentially conjunctive rather than essentially disjunctive. Second, the paper contends (...) that if a cohesive and egalitarian PGV is truly the end-point of the philosophy of globalisation, then the African socio-cultural values of a relational understanding of the self and universal brotherhood ought to be globally recognised and emphasised by the North as fundamental to the realisation of the vision of the PGV. The paper seeks to illustrate that if properly applied to the globalising process, these cultural values are ontologically conjunctive in the sense that they have the potential to promote the building of a cohesive and egalitarian global village, since they tend to encourage acceptance and co-operation among the different peoples of the world. Keywords Africa, culture, determinism, globalisation, philosophy. (shrink)

What purpose does civility actually serve? In an age of increasing political polarization, Amy Olberding's recently published The Wrong of Rudeness defends politeness, with some unexpected help from ancient Chinese thought. This defense sits in tension with a broader social conversation that focuses on the interaction of civility with oppressive social structures.Through a critical engagement with Olberding's book, I argue here that taking oppression seriously requires us to reclaim and repurpose civility. This means that we must attend to the social-structural (...) function of what we often split into "civility, manners, and etiquette." Olberding wisely suggests that we follow Confucius' lead in replacing this list... (shrink)

Contemporary political philosophy often operates on a ‘two-tiered’ theoretical treatment of global politics, on which domestic political systems and the principles governing their internal...

Tosi and Warmke discuss cases where the speaker intends for the audience to take their expressions as evidence of good moral character. However, another possibility exists that similarly exploits the social communicative architecture. A contribution to public moral discourse may also attempt to strut by demonstrating evidence of bad moral character, by purposely failing to meet the evaluative standards of its audience—or, paradigmatically for my purposes, a particular section of its actual or notional audience. I call this kind of communication (...) vice signaling. On their face, virtue signaling and vice signaling may seem to be opposites, since the labels imply that they are signaling opposite things. But certain cases of vice signaling are in fact also cases of virtue signaling. These are the cases where someone flaunts the standards of an out-group in order to demonstrate solidarity, seriousness, or some other virtue to their in-group. In this paper I attempt to describe these cases and point out the moral risks and opportunities they present. (shrink)

In a forthright and uncompromising manner, Olúfémi Táíwò explores Africa’s hostility toward modernity and how that hostility has impeded economic development and social and political transformation. What has to change for Africa to be able to respond to the challenges of modernity and globalization? Táíwò insists that Africa can renew itself only by fully engaging with democracy and capitalism and by mining its untapped intellectual resources. While many may not agree with Táíwò’s positions, they will be unable to ignore what (...) he says. This is a bold exhortation for Africa to come into the 21st century. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ifá Defined Ifá Divination The Process of Divination.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Central Questions of Political Philosophy Making Sense of Human Nature Why One‐Party Rule? Why Socialism? Conclusion.

In this paper, I examine the generally accepted idea that law has definite limits to what it can be used to achieve. Toward this end, I discuss the limits of law as suggested by the Truth Commissions and the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), and summarize the divergences between law and the TRC. I suggest reasons why law may not serve or may underserve the purpose of healing and reconciliation in our time and conclude that the TRC is at best (...) a reminder to us of the limits of law as a principle of social ordering. (shrink)

Adeshina Afolayan, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, and Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba have edited a stellar collection of essays in Pathways to Alternative Epistemologies in Afr.

What would happen if, instead of taking an instrumentalist view of the ideas of modern African political thinkers, we consider those ideas as indeed they are, attempts by them to proffer answers to the central questions of political philosophy as those are apprehended in the African context? If we did, we would end upwith a robust, sophisticated discourse properly denominated ‘Modern African Political Philosophy’ in which we recognize, possibly celebrate and, ultimately, assess the quality of answers that African thinkers have (...) provided. The importance of recognizing a body of work under this genre cannot be overemphasized given the many debates, controversies, misrepresentations abroad in accounts of the relationship between Africa and modernity. It is almost as if there is only one way that African thinkers have related to modernity: in antagonism. I argue that one can give an account in political philosophy that shows that the received wisdom is profoundly mistaken. To do so requires that we rethink political philosophy in the modern African context. (shrink)

In recent years, the judicial systems of African countries have been increasingly ineffective, as demonstrated in cases as varied as the genocide in Rwanda and the land seizures in Zimbabwe. It is not only in cases involving individual rights and the state that the legal system is barely existent. The situation is just as bad, if not worse, in the administration of criminal justice. Whether it is the police, the prisons, or the courts, under both military and democratic governments, we (...) are confronted with evidence of the impotence of the judiciary. This article examines the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of government in Nigeria. It also makes recommendations to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of African judiciaries in checking executive power. (shrink)

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) had a powerful influence on the development of American pragmatism in the twentieth century. He also had a strong impact on the social sciences. This classic book represents Mead's philosophy of experience, so central to his outlook. The present as unique experience is the focus of this deep analysis of the basic structure of temporality and consciousness. Mead emphasizes the novel character of both the present and the past. Though science is predicated on the assumption (...) that the present is predictable based on a thorough knowledge of the past, the experience of the present, says Mead, is an utterly unique moment comparable to no other, and when it is past the novel character of that unique experience is irrevocable. The emergence of novelty within the perceived rational order of reality is the crux of the problem that Mead explores. The present, in his words, is "the emergent event . . . something which is more than the processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed." The present as "the seat of reality" heavily conditions our retrospective view of the past as much as it helps to shape the future. The novelty of every present experience causes us to reconstruct our preceding experiences to make sense of the past, which is naturally assumed to be the main cause of what we presently experience. Our perspective on reality is thus relative to the conditioning of each new event and it changes continuously as the effects of the present shift our view of the past and future. This emphasis on the integrative, holistic nature of reality, in which everything past, present, and future is a condition of everything else, makes Mead's philosophy highly relevant to today's scientific picture of a quantum universe, where chance and probability play a role in the emergence of reality. Also of great interest is the way in which he extends his basic analysis of temporal-spatial reality to the emergence of mind and consciousness as a natural development of the evolutionary process. This stimulating and provocative work attests to John Dewey's praise of Mead as "the most original mind in philosophy in America" of his generation. (shrink)

In the influential 1995 article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Bruce Link and Jo Phelan described social and political factors as “fundamental causes” of death and disease. Whitney Pirtle has recently declared racial capitalism another such fundamental cause. Using the case of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she has argued that racial capitalism's role in that situation meets each of the criteria Link and Phelan's article outlines: racial capitalism influenced multiple disease outcomes, affected disease outcomes through multiple (...) risk factors, involved access to flexible resources that can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease, and was reproduced over time through the continual replacement of intervening mechanisms. We argue for Pirtle's conclusion using the extensive literature on racial capitalism and case studies concerning housing in the United States and Brazil and what Naomi Klein has termed “corona capitalism” in India. If races correspond to hierarchies of material security, as suggested by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, then these hierarchies and their causal effects are fundamental determinants of public health. (shrink)

The thesis of this study is that there is a plausible, adequate and coherent theory of law which lies embedded in the corpus of Marxist writings. This latent theory of law is a variant of natural law theory, called in the thesis, 'Legal Naturalism'. Marxist legal theory is formally similar to other theories within the natural law tradition. It differs from other theories because it posits a different locus for law from those affirmed by these other theories. Natural law, for (...) Marxism, refers to the "natural law of the mode of production". Legal naturalism is the view that the basic law of a given epoch or social formation is that law which is an essential aspect of the mode of production. Like other natural law theories, legal naturalism asserts that the positive law of any particular society is reflective of deeper structures. ;The legal naturalist interpretation of Marxism differs from existing interpretations in denying that the deeper structures which positive law reflects is solely, or even significantly, economic. They are legal, but naturally legal. Natural law provides a touchstone with which to identify, differentiate, explain and evaluate positive law. The implications of the distinction between natural law and positive law for the evolution and future of law examined and defended. (shrink)

Legal Naturalism advances a clear and convincing case that Marx's theory of law is a form of natural law jurisprudence.

This article brings to light some of the characteristics of the pervasive parental overpermissiveness and hyper-protectionism that unfortunately have made their way into our culture. With the aid of philosophers of education, such as Locke, Rousseau, and Dewey, I expose the corrosive effects that parental overindulgence has on the potential happiness of those in their charge, as well as on those who share their social space. As these philosophers warned long ago, by overindulging their desires, parents either overextend their children’s (...) expectations well beyond the reality of their capabilities or they squash their initiative by usurping their independence. In either case, parents cripple their children’s autonomy and thereby detract from the real work needed to develop habits and dispositions necessary to plan and carry out achievable accomplishments that are integral for sustained and enduring happiness. Put more simply, overindulgence, to the extent this impedes the development of requisite skills for achieving happiness and developing a sense of social responsibility, becomes a disguised form of child abuse. (shrink)

touch 27 Thirrdly, the straining of the eye 28 The occasions which suggest distance have in their own nature no relation to it 29 A difficult case proposed by Dr. Barrow as repugnant to all the known theories 30 This case contradicts a ...

Drawing from the varieties of capitalism theoretical framework, the study explores the home country influences of multinational corporations on their corporate social responsibility practices when they operate outside their national/regional institutional contexts. The study focusses on a particular CSR practice of seven MNCs from three varieties of capitalism – coordinated, mixed and liberal market economies – operating in the oil and gas sector of the Nigerian economy. The study concludes that the corporate codes of conduct of these MNCs operating in (...) Nigeria, to a large extent, reflect the characteristics of their home countries' model of capitalism, respectively, albeit with certain degree of modifications. The home countries' model of capitalism is also found to have implications for the degree of adaptability of these MNCs' CSR practices to the Nigerian institutional context – with the mixed market economy model of capitalism adapting more flexibly than the liberal and coordinated market economies, respectively. The findings of this study will contribute to the emerging literature on the institutional embeddedness of CSR practices in transnational social spaces, understanding of varieties of capitalism, and CSR in developing economies. (shrink)

Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo (1703–c. 1759 ce), philosopher and physician, was born at Axim, Ghana, and died at Fort Chama, Ghana. When he was four years old, the Dutch West Indies Company's preacher in Ghana sent him to Holland to be baptized and educated in the Bible for future service in Ghana. However, the Company headquarters, undesirous of any interference with its lucrative trade in slaves, turned little Amo over to the German Duke Anton Ulric‐Wolfenbuttel.

This African moral framework discusses distant poverty as human vulnerability. Contextually, if vulnerability means human frailty, relative to some opposing facts of life, and that poverty makes the human person frail, relative to some largely unrealized/unrealizable desirables without assistance, then distant poverty as human vulnerability invariably connects, significantly, with poor dependency: poor people are vulnerable as dependent on the assisting other. Some fundamental questions arise: 1) What is the ontology of distant poverty as human vulnerability? 2) In what ways does (...) the idea of poverty as human vulnerability essentially and morally connect with the idea of dependency? 3) Is the issue of addressing the problem of distant poverty as human vulnerability a question of perfect or imperfect moral duty or both? 4) In what ways do the perfect or imperfect moral duty connect to positive and negative moral duties? 5) What moral framework best accommodates, all things considered, moral duties? Considering these questions, this work advances that African ethics as character ethics, fundamentally serves as a better moral framework, compared to the Western ethics that has dominated the debates on addressing the questions for years. (shrink)

Three groups of claims frame this article. First, the Nigerian State is largely enmeshed in environmental deficit, given the substantial oil pollution in the Niger-delta area, the problem of erosion in the Southeast, the filthy status of the Southwest, and the incessantly worrying perturbation of the ecological stability in the Northern part of Nigeria. Second, the political leadership in Nigeria for years has not really given genuine policy priority to, and, on this model, developed a credible framework that the citizenry (...) could buy into to sustainably address the causes and the consequences of the environmental deficit. Third, given the foregoing, this work suggests a re-thinking/re-discussion of approach to the environmental deficit. Drawing on and integrating some relevant ideas, values, and virtues in African metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, the article develops a framework, prescribing how the democratic leadership and the citizenry ought to act in sustainably addressing the environmental deficit. Beyond the philosophic foundations, the framework is also teleologically political: it emphasizes that the moral legitimacy of democratic leadership in Nigeria partly derives from its commitment to the good of the built and the natural environment, and it also stresses that the citizenry could only be good moral agents, as eco-citizens, if they develop the virtues of environmental responsibility and responsiveness, by theoretically and practically supporting the good of the built and the natural environment. The research methods of critical analysis of empirical data and reflective argumentation are adopted to pursue the goals of the work. (shrink)

The present article highlights ethical challenges and practical solutions to the problems that arise when designing and conducting the fieldwork data collection with the members of violent youth gangs, prison inmates, and arrestees held in police cells in Nigeria. Issues related to the process of seeking approval and then implementing the research, gaining access, achieving informed consent, confidentiality, the use of interpreters, and remuneration are presented through case studies. The conclusion stresses the need for researchers to be well prepared and (...) sensitive to the research participants' community and cultural backgrounds while following ethical practices in multicultural contexts, especially in Africa and other developing nations. (shrink)