Aminah Hasan-Birdwell

The following paper brings together the history of the Atlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century and Hugo Grotius’s treatment of slavery, war, and trade in the De iure belli ac pacis. In this paper I focus on the practices of slave raids during the trade in the 1630s through the 1640s in Central and West Africa. The practice of slave raids was often described and categorized by both Africans and Europeans as war or acts of war. I argue that given Grotius’s depictions of a solemn war, it is difficult to legally distinguish an intent to enslave in a raid from an act of war against an enemy nation.

Hannah Arendt is more readily known for her political thought and social commentary on the twentieth century than for her reading of the history of philosophy. This chapter argues that Arendt’s reading reflects a distinctive methodology for the history of philosophy when compared to other prominent twentieth-century historians of philosophy and science. Specifically, the analysis focuses on Arendt’s reading of the meditative tradition in the history of philosophy. In her later work of the 1970s, Arendt highlights the transformations and the abandonment of key ideas in the meditative tradition, particularly in its medieval and modern formulations. Arendt finds that the meaning of the activity of “thinking” in the meditative tradition was lost or distorted in post-Greek philosophical traditions. According to Arendt, the ancient form of meditation expressed the activity of thinking insofar as it was invested in the aporetic model employed by Socrates. Arendt’s unique insight for the history of philosophy is her argument that this loss of the activity of thinking was inextricably linked to the political and moral crisis of her time—totalitarianism. The chapter concludes by drawing out the pedagogical implications of Arendt’s reading of the history of philosophy for undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy.

This article considers Ottobah Cugoano’s philosophical response to the moral and legal contradictions of the practice of human trafficking in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787). It analyses Cugoano’s critique of the origins of slavery in general and the practices of ancient slavery, from which seventeenth-century proslavery advocates drew political, theological, and moral justifications of the African slave trade. According to Cugoano’s analysis, there is a necessary moral dependency of the laws of civilization (positive law) on natural law. This distinction has significant philosophical and ethical ramifications that extend beyond the debate over abolition in Cugoano’s time, specifically ramifications for conceptions of slavery in the early modern tradition of natural law theory.

This paper attends to Emmanuel Levinas’s criticism of the univocity doctrine as it pertains to Baruch Spinoza and in view of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation. The analysis will have a narrow focus on univocity because it will exclusively treat the univocity of cause in Spinoza and its ethical and political implications. Narrowing the approach will illustrate the importance of the doctrine in Levinas’s minor engagements with the modern philosopher and its convergence with Deleuze’s project in Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: namely, the univocal relation between Substance and the modes. Although both Levinas and Deleuze will converge on basic observations about the univocity of cause, they will depart at significant moments on the implications of the doctrine itself. The analysis will acknowledge Deleuze’s reflections on the Ethics, but it will focus on Levinas’s critique and indictment of Spinoza’s thought—that it eliminates singularity and that it is in itself a justification of perpetual war.