La pensée de Lévinas demande à être prise au sérieux, aventure philosophique où le verset ne vaut pas preuve, et qui a toujours gardé sa route comme un marin, son cap. Aujourd'hui que l'œuvre est close, il est clair que cette navigation n'allait vers aucun port mais que, par essence hauturière, elle cingla droit, là où les mers étaient vastes et les vents, forts. Là, une haute vague se leva : Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. Ce titre, où un (...) adverbe pointe démesurément au-delà du verbe, dresse le livre au-delà de son propre contexte. Mais il permet de rassembler toute l'œuvre dans le sillage de sa course, et donne une vue sur la philosophie du siècle, et celle qui nous fut transmise. Prendre cette pensée au sérieux, c'est d'abord faire le pari de la neutralité, ne pas y chercher une morale mais l'accompagner dans sa quête du sens éthique comme intelligibilité ultime de l'humain et possibilité de la compréhension de l'être. Adjectif substantivé (au neutre, das Ethische) avant que substantif (die Ethik), l'éthique se formule en se cristallisant autour de certains vocables (Je, Tu, Il, Es - sujet, autrui, Dieu, être) qu'elle compose, comme un poème ou, mieux, une partition. Accompagner cette pensée, c'est seulement dérouler l'intrigue que tissent - " Ensemble, mais pas encore " - ces mots obéissant à leur loi. C'est dire le sonnet ou interpréter la sonate. On suit alors le mouvement an-archique d'une pensée qui, au profond du sujet, discerne une brûlure, nécessaire pour qu'autrui ne soit pas loup pour un loup. Ce ravage, seule la grâce improbable d'un Dieu qui s'absente s'offre à le réparer, concédant ainsi à l'homme d'être. J. R. (shrink)

A sequel to Levinas' Totality and Infinity.

Wiredu’s call for democracy by consensus is illustrated by his description of traditional African consensual rationality. This description contains the attribution of immanence to African consensual rationality. This paper objects to this doctrine of immanence. More importantly, the doctrine of immanence has led to the attribution of pure rationality to traditional African consensual practices. With reference to Aristotle’s three components of persuasion, I object to deliberation as purely rational and impervious to extraneous factors. I further argue that it is because (...) deliberation is not always perfectly rational that the process of consensus can suffer three forms of social conformity: conformity to dominant players, to numerical opinion majority, and to group-centrism. These forms of conformity mean that a consensus task order could lead to decisions of more inclusive value, but not necessarily decisions of more epistemic value. The concept of agonistic inquiry is employed to tackle what I see as the dangers of conformity and complacency in the project of inclusivity, and this is to strike a crucial balance between too-consensual and purely adversarial forms of deliberation. (shrink)

According to Wiredu, the Akan profess secular esteem rather than religious worship to supra-natural beings, who they perceive in an empirical sense. He backs this up by re-reading what he sees as the Akan general ontology in a way that denies them of the concepts of the supernatural, the transcendental, the mental, the spiritual, and an ontologically distinct mind. At the end of denying the three criteria of worship as well as all of these other concepts which might otherwise be (...) available to the Akan, one might struggle to find any evidence that the Akan even had a religion. I dispute this secular reading, and I more generally demonstrate that the characterizations of the Akan attitude to divinity as non-worshipping, non-supernatural, non-transcendent, and non-spiritual, are either conceptually flawed, factually incorrect, or both. (shrink)

The ethics of conducting research in epidemic situations have yet to account fully for differences in the proportion and acuteness of epidemics, among other factors. While epidemics most often arise from infectious diseases, not all infectious diseases are of epidemic proportions, and not all epidemics occur acutely. These and other variations constrain the generalization of ethical decision-making and impose ethical demands on the individual researcher in a way not previously highlighted. This paper discusses a number of such constraints and impositions. (...) It applies the ethical principles enunciated by Emmanuel et al.1 to the controversial Pfizer study in Nigeria in order to highlight the particular ethical concerns of acute epidemic research, and suggest ways of meeting such challenges. The paper recommends that research during epidemics should be partly evaluated on its own merits in order to determine its ethical appropriateness to the specific situation. Snap decisions to conduct research during acute epidemics should be resisted. Community engagement, public notification and good information management are needed to promote the ethics of conducting research during acute epidemics. Individual consent is most at risk of being compromised, and every effort should be made to ensure that it is maintained and valid. Use of data safety management boards should be routine. Acute epidemics also present opportunities to enhance the social value of research and maximize its benefits to communities. Ethical research is possible in acute epidemics, if the potential challenges are thought of ahead of time and appropriate precautions taken. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 60, Issue 2, Page 304-319, June 2022.

Preoccupation with multiparty aggregative democracy in Africa has produced superficial forms of political/electoral choice-making by subjects that deepen pre-existing ethnic and primordial cleavages. This is because the principles of the multiparty system presuppose that decision-making through voting should be the result of a mere aggregation of pre-existing, fixed preferences. To this kind of decision-making, I propose deliberative democracy as a supplementary approach. My reason is that deliberation, beyond mere voting, should be central to decisionmaking and that, for a decision to (...) be legitimate, it must be preceded by deliberation, not merely the aggregation of pre-existing fixed preferences. I agree with arguments that when adequate justifications are made for claims/demands/conclusions, deliberation has the potential to have a salutary effect on people’s opinions, transform/evolve preferences, better inform judgments/voting, lead to increasingly ‘common good’ decisions, have moral educative power, place more burden of account-giving on public officers, and furnish subjects/losers/outvoted with justifications for collectively binding decisions. I argue that a deliberative turn in politics in Africa will have a mitigating effect on tribal and money politics. (shrink)

Entend dégager l'enjeu philosophique de la pensée augustinienne du cogito, dans " La cité de Dieu " et dans " La Trinité ", en situant la réflexion du saint dans le champ de la philosophie antique, et en rapprochant sa perspective de celles de Descartes et de Husserl.

There have been two parallel views regarding the role of voting in deliberation. The first is that deliberation before the fabrication of balloting was completely devoid of voting. The second is that voting is, not just part of deliberation, but is standard to deliberation. I argue in this article that neither of these views is correct. Implicit voting has always existed across time and space but only as a last resort in the event of a failure of natural unanimity. What (...) is relatively modern is the establishment of what I call explicit voting, namely, balloting, outside deliberation and often without deliberation. I also distinguish between natural and artificial unanimities, and clarify that artificial unanimities are products of implicit voting. I demonstrate these clarifications with some examples of deliberation. I deploy these clarifications to rid a certain debate of confusion regarding the precise role of voting in consensual deliberation. (shrink)

BackgroundThe safety of sleeping pills has increased dramatically during the last 100 years, from barbiturates to bensodiazepines to modern day so-called Z-drugs.MethodsThe circumstances of prescribing sleeping pills in the early 20th century are illustrated by summarizing the main storyline of a novel by Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. This is followed by a thought experiment and a theoretical discussion.ResultsIn his 1937 novel Sömnlös (Swedish for sleepless) Vilhelm Moberg portrayed existential and relational distress in relation to insomnia. In a thought experiment, past (...) progresses in sleeping pills safety are projected into the future. Thereby, it is claimed that important issues in the area of philosophy of medicine come to the fore. This leads to a theoretical discussion about broader questions concerning the role of the physician, the goals of medicine (as described by Lennart Nordenfelt), the concept of pharmaceuticalisation (as described notably by sociologist of sleep Simon J. Williams and co-workers), and health enhancement (c.f. Carl Elliott and the alleged wish to be better than well).ConclusionInsomnia is a prism through which important philosophical and sociological questions related to the practice of medicine can be asked. (shrink)

The task of producing a comprehensive, single‐volume treatment of Buddhist philosophy presents certain editorial challenges, not the least of which is the problem of how to do justice to the sheer breadth and diversity of a tradition that spans some two and a half millennia. This introductory chapter of A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy sheds some light on the considerations that shaped the structure and content of the book.

A la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la philosophie, dans un débat autour de l'héritage de Kant, s'autodétermine comme système de la liberté, pour achever la révolution copernicienne, et accéder, dans le système du savoir, au concept, à la conscience de soi. La liberté s'affirme comme identité du penser et de l'être. Schelling est alors inspiré d'une part par Spinoza, et d'autre part par Kant et Fichte.

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has (...) two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. (shrink)