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433A Relational Theory of Mental Illness: Lacking Identity and SolidaritySynthesis Philosophica 71 (1): 65-81. 2021.In this article I aim to make progress towards the philosophical goal of ascertaining what, if anything, all mental illnesses have in common, attempting to unify a large sub-set of them that have a relational or interpersonal dimension. One major claim is that, if we want a promising theory of mental illness, we must go beyond the dominant western accounts of mental illness/health, which focus on traits intrinsic to a person such as pain/pleasure, lethargy/liveliness, fragmentation/integration, …Read more
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31Must Land Reform Benefit the Victims of Colonialism? (repr.)In Erasmus Masitera (ed.), Philosophical Approaches to Land Reform in Africa, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 145-160. 2020.Reprint of an article that first appeared in the journal Philosophia Africana (2020).
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881African Theories of Meaning in Life: A Critical AssessmentSouth African Journal of Philosophy 39 (2): 113-126. 2020.In this article, I expound and assess two theories of meaning in life informed by the indigenous sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. According to one principle, a life is more meaningful, the more it promotes community with other human persons. According to the other principle, a life is more meaningful, the more it promotes vitality in oneself and others. I argue that, at least upon some refinement, both of these African conceptions of meaning merit global consideration from philosophe…Read more
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113Conversations about the Meaning of LifeObsidian Worlds Publishing. 2021.Interviews with David Benatar and Thaddeus Metz about some core aspects of their views about meaning in life, including debate between them. Accessible to a generally educated audience. Edited by Mark Oppenheimer and Jason Werbeloff.
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429Ubuntu: The Good Life (rev. edn)In Filomena Maggino (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, 2nd edn, Springer. 2021.Moderately updated version of this encyclopaedia entry.
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12What Science Means for Postmodernist Epistemology and the Philosophy of Education (Repr.)In Michael A. Peters, Marek Tesar, Liz Jackson & Tina Besley (eds.), What Comes after Postmodernism in Educational Theory?, Routledge. pp. 1398-1399. 1920.Reprint of an article first appearing in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2018).
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39An African Theory of Good Leadership (Repr.)International Journal of Ethical Leadership 7 41-56. 2020.Shortened version of an article first appearing in the African Journal of Business Ethics (2018).
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23Ends and Means of Transitional Justice (Repr.)In Krushil Watene & Eric Palmer (eds.), Reconciliation, Transitional and Indigenous Justice, Routledge. pp. 27-36. 2020.Reprint of an article first appearing in the Journal of Global Ethics (2018).
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48人生は創造する価値がありますか?Gendai-Shiso 47 (14): 94-113. 2019.Translation of 'Are Lives Worth Creating?' into Japanese by Sho Yamaguchi. A critical discussion of Benatar's anti-natalism that originally appeared in Philosophical Papers (2011).
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224Virtue in African Ethics as Living HarmoniouslyIn Chenyang Li & Dascha Düring (eds.), The Virtue of Harmony, Oxford University Press. pp. 207-229. 2022.A large swathe of the indigenous African ethical tradition is frequently encapsulated in the maxim, “A person is a person through other persons.” This phrasing is an overly literal translation of some sayings that are prominent in the southern and central regions of Africa, but that resonate with most indigenous sub-Saharan cultures. This chapter articulates and motivates a philosophical interpretation of the maxim for an international readership interested in virtue. According to the initial fo…Read more
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448Must Land Reform Benefit the Victims of Colonialism?Philosophia Africana 19 (2): 122-137. 2020.Appealing to African values associated with ubuntu such as communion and reconciliation, elsewhere I have argued that they require compensating those who have been wronged in ways that are likely to improve their lives. In the context of land reform, I further contended that this principle probably entails not transferring unjustly acquired land en masse and immediately to dispossessed populations since doing so would foreseeably lead to such things as capital flight and food shortages, which wo…Read more
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35What Is the Essence of an Essence? Comparing Afro-Relational and Western-Individualist Ontologies (repr.)In Jonathan O. Chimakonam & Monique Whitaker (eds.), Contemporary Debates in African and Western Philosophy, . 2024.Reprint of an article that first appeared in Synthesis Philosophica (2018).
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17Economic Goods and Communitarian ValuesIn David Bilchitz & Raisa Cachalia (eds.), Transitional Justice, Distributive Justice, and Transformative Constitutionalism: Comparing Colombia and South Africa, Oxford University Press. pp. 76-85. 2023.In contributions elsewhere to this volume, we considered the histories of Colombia and South Africa and how some of the values indigenous to those locales might plausibly bear on transitional justice in them. We advanced broadly relational and constructive (non-retributive) approaches to the social conflicts that had taken place there, ones that make victim compensation central. In this chapter we consider how Metz’s ubuntu-based reconciliatory approach to reparations might be relevant to Colomb…Read more
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11The Role of Economic Goods in National Reconciliation: Evaluating South Africa and ColombiaIn David Bilchitz & Raisa Cachalia (eds.), Transitional Justice, Distributive Justice, and Transformative Constitutionalism: Comparing Colombia and South Africa, Oxford University Press. pp. 33-53. 2023.Scholars have compared the transitional justice processes of Colombia and South Africa in some respects, but there has yet to be a systematic moral-philosophical evaluation of them regarding how they have sought to allocate economic goods. Here I appraise the ways that South Africa and Colombia have responded to their respective historical conflicts in respect of the distribution of property and opportunities. I do so in the light of a conception of reconciliation informed by a relational ethic …Read more
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134Life, Meaning ofIn Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal, Routledge. 1996.A 4000 word critical overview of recent Anglo-American philosophical books devoted to life's meaning. Online only.
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20An African Theory of the Point of Higher Education: Communion as an Alternative to Autonomy, Truth, and Citizenship (repr.)In Amasa Ndofirepi & Ephraim Gwaravanda (eds.), African Higher Education in the 21st Century: Some Philosophical Dimensions, Sense Publishers. pp. 122-145. 2020.Reprint of a chapter that first appeared in Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University: Toward a Philosophy of Higher Education (Palgrave 2018).
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25MeaningIn Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 355-366. 2019.This chapter critically discusses philosophical literature bearing on the question of what the implications of atheism – roughly the nonexistence of God as conceived in the monotheist tradition – might be for whether and how our lives are meaningful, with a major focus on what has been published in English in the twenty‐first century. Its aim is to acquaint the reader with the major contemporary debates and to indicate some points where they call for contributions.
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24Replacing Development (repr.)In Benedict Okeja (ed.), African Philosophy and Global Justice, Routledge. pp. 109-135. 2019.Reprint of an article initially appearing in Philosophical Papers (2017).
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32The Meaning of Life (Annotated Bibliography)In Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2010.A lengthy annotated bibliography of some of the key literature on analytical philosophical approaches to life's meaning as of 2010.
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African Moral Theory and Public Governance: Nepotism, Preferential Hiring and Other Partiality (repr.)In Paul Omoyefa (ed.), Basic Applied Ethics, Vdm. 2010.Reprint of a chapter that initially appeared in _African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied Ethics_ (2009).
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381Africanising Institutional Culture: What Is Possible and PlausibleIn Pedro Tabensky & Sally Matthews (eds.), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions, University of Kwazulu-natal Press. pp. 242-272. 2015.Since the transition to a constitutional order, in what respects have cultures in higher education institutions in South Africa become Africanised, and, going forward, how should they be? In this chapter I provide an overview of the major different forms that Africanisation of institutional culture could take, and I then indicate the respects in which South African universities have or have not taken them on board over the past 20 years. In addition, I provide the first comprehensive critical di…Read more
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31African Values and Capital Punishment (repr.)In David R. Morrow (ed.), Moral Reasoning: A Text and Reader on Ethics and Contemporary Moral Issues, Oxford University Press. pp. 372-377. 2017.Reprint of a chapter first published in _African Philosophy and the Future of Africa_ (2011).
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21How to Ground Animal Rights on African Values: A Constructive Approach (repr.)In Jonathan O. Chimakonam (ed.), African Philosophy and Environmental Conservation, Routledge. pp. 30-41. 2017.Reprint of a 2017 article from the Journal of Animal Ethics.
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36African and East Asian Perspectives on AgeingIn Christopher Wareham (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Ethics of Ageing, Cambridge University Press. pp. 118-132. 2022.After expounding the conceptions of harmony that are central to Confucianism and the sub-Saharan ethic of ubuntu, I apply them to three major topics pertaining to age, namely, virtue, the value of life, and care. Roughly speaking, indigenous East Asian and African values of harmony both entail that only the elderly can be truly virtuous, that the elderly have a strong claim to life-saving resources, and that they are entitled to care from their children, views that I show are not characteristic …Read more
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449Neither Parochial nor Cosmopolitan: Cultural Instruction in the Light of an African Communal EthicEducation as Change 23 1-16. 2019.What should be the aim when teaching matters of culture to students in public high schools and universities, at least given an African context? One, parochial approach would focus exclusively on imparting local culture, leaving students unfamiliar with, or perhaps contemptuous of, other cultures around the world. A second, cosmopolitan approach would educate students about a wide variety of cultures in Africa and beyond it, leaving it up to them which interpretations, values, and aesthetics they…Read more
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791Popper’s Politics and Law in the Light of African ValuesJus Cogens 2 185-204. 2020.Karl Popper is famous for favoring an open society, one in which the individual is treated as an end in himself and social arrangements are subjected to critical evaluation, which he defends largely by appeal to a Kantian ethic of respecting the dignity of rational beings. In this essay, I consider for the first time what the implications of a characteristically African ethic, instead prescribing respect for our capacity to relate communally, are for how the state should operate in an open socie…Read more
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471Recent Work on the Meaning of 'Life’s Meaning': Should We Change the Philosophical Discourse?Human Affairs 29 (4): 404-414. 2019.In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of 'life’s meaning'. Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a noticeable trend among philosophers to try to change our un…Read more
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99The Meaning of Life (Textbook)In Duncan Pritchard (ed.), What is This Thing Called Philosophy?, Routledge. pp. 319-358. 2015.A three chapter part of a textbook for undergraduate philosophy majors.
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813Symposium: Are Certain Knowledge Frameworks More Congenial to the Aims of Cross-Cultural Philosophy?Journal of World Philosophies 2 (2): 99-107. 2017.In “Global Knowledge Frameworks and the Tasks of Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” Leigh Jenco searches for the conception of knowledge that best justifies the judgment that one can learn from non-local traditions of philosophy. Jenco considers four conceptions of knowledge, namely, in catchwords, the esoteric, Enlightenment, hermeneutic, and self- transformative conceptions of knowledge, and she defends the latter as more plausible than the former three. In this critical discussion of Jenco’s article…Read more
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645Relational Normative Economics: An African Approach to JusticeEthical Perspectives 27 (1): 35-68. 2020.Recent work by comparative philosophers, global ethicists, and cross-cultural value theorists indicates that, unlike most Western thinkers, those in many other parts of the globe, such as indigenous Africa, East Asia, and Latin America, tend to prize relationality. These relational values include enjoying a sense of togetherness, participating cooperatively, creating something new together, engaging in mutual aid, and being compassionate. Global economic practices and internationally influential…Read more
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The Meaning of Life |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
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