Gail Presbey

To a world assaulted by private interests, this book argues that peace must be a public thing. Distinguished philosophers of peace have always worked publicly for public results. Opposing nuclear proliferation, organizing communities of the disinherited, challenging violence within status quo establishments, such are the legacies of truly engaged philosophers of peace. This volume remembers those legacies, reviews the promise of critical thinking for crises today, and expands the free range of thinking needed to create more mindful and peaceful relations. With essays by committed peace philosophers, this volume shows how public engagement has been a significant feature of peace philosophers such as Camus, Sartre, Dewey, and Dorothy Day. Today we also confront historical opportunities to transform practices for immigration, police interrogation, and mental health, as we seek to sustain democracies of increasing multicultural diversity. In such cases our authors consider points of view developed by renowned thinkers such as Weil, Mouffe, Conway, and Martín-Baró. This volume also presents critical analysis of concepts for thinking about violence, reconsiders Plato’s philosophy of justice, and examines the role of ethical theory for liberation struggles such as Occupy!

This paper will put forward to new audiences the core of Claude Sumner's thesis regarding philosophy in the "broad" and "narrow" senses, the former referring to wisdom and the sapiential tradition. It will look at Sumner's role in popularizing early Ethiopian texts in a project meant to debunk preconceptions that Africa has no written history of philosophy. Nevertheless Sumner does not limit himself to written texts in the Ethiopian tradition, but has branched out into collecting and analyzing the oral traditions as well. He has argued that the written texts of Zera Yacob are examples of "religious rationality" in some ways similar to Descartes' scientific rationality. He argues that proverbs possess "figurative logic," which while different than conceptual logic is still indeed logic. Both written and oral sources of Ethiopian philosophy stretch well beyond the last fifty years, Sumner asserts, and thus African philosophy becomes known as being older than Hountondji, Okolo and others have thought. The paper argues that Sumner's contributions to the growth of the field of African philosophy should not be overlooked.