Babalola Balogun

Several treatises have been written on the foundations of African moral systems. A significant number of them favours the claim that these systems are founded on religion, with the latter providing a justification for the former. Others have taken a contrary position, denying the supposed necessary causal connection between religion and African moral systems. This paper neither seeks to support nor rebut any of the foundations proposed, but rather to argue for the thesis that from whichever perspective it is viewed - religious, humanistic or rationalist - the Yoruba moral system has strictly consequentialist foundations, and is hence subsumable under the general consequentialist ethical programme. However, the paper notes that Yoruba consequentialism diverges significantly from its western counterpart on the claim that “the end justifies the means”; for whereas this is true of western consequentialism, according to Yoruba consequentialism no evil, however well-intended, can bring about a good end. The Yoruba oral tradition, and particularly the Yoruba language as currently spoken and written among the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, supplies tools of analysis, while ethical consequentialism provides the theoretical framework.

Some foundations have been provided for the social validity of human rights in Western philosophical literature. Some African scholars have also sought to ground the notion of human rights within the traditional African cultural beliefs and practices. There is, however, a dearth in literature on the Yoruba notion of human rights. Perhaps this may be due to scholars’ attitude that any talk about human rights is incompatible with the communalistic social structure of the Yoruba. The present paper challenges this prevalent attitude by providing some philosophical foundations for human rights within the limits permitted by the Yoruba world-view. The paper attempts a theoretical reconciliation between the Yoruba claim to communitarianism and the possibility of human rights. The paper concludes that, in spite of the seemingly antinomic relation they bear to each other, the idea of human rights is neither practically meaningless/unintelligible in a communitarian society, nor is it conceptually incompatible with the communitarian ideology. Keywords: Philosophical foundations, Human, Rights, Communitarianism, Yoruba

The problem of the nature of mind has lingered for a long time. Generated by the question of whether the mind is an independently existing entity or merely an aspect of bodily events and processes, the problem of the nature of mind has divided Western philosophers into two opposing camps, namely dualism and physicalism. Contemporary discourse of the nature of minds, within the Western philosophical tradition, continues to privilege physicalism over dualism, because it avoids the theoretical impasse engendered by the dualist inability to account for how two radically different entities manage to interact with each other. Although physicalism avoids the dualist pitfalls, it, however, encounters the problem of plausibly accounting for the possibility of conscious experience without commitment to the dualist ontology of a realm different from the body. In this article, we provide an African (Yoruba) perspective to the question of the nature of mind as an alternative to the Western perspective represented by dualist and physicalist theories. We develop a variant of dualism called “contextual dualism,” which accepts the dualist basic tenet of the duality of body and mind but diverges from it by permitting that some physical organs of the body also function in the capacity of the mind. Using ethnological analysis and the Yoruba linguistic hermeneutics as theoretical frameworks, the paper argues that the difference between when a physical organ functions as body and when it functions as mind is revealed in Yoruba language through their contexts of use. The paper concludes that contextual dualism drives a reconciliatory wedge between mainstream dualism and physicalism.

Christopher Peacocke’s Interlocking Account offers an example of the identity-based strategy for resolving the conceptual problem of other minds. According to the Identity Model, the sameness of meaning of a mental concept across inter-subjective domains is guaranteed by the sameness of the mental states to which the concept refers. Hence, for example, the meaning of the concept “pain” is fixed by the sameness of the sensation of pain to which the concept refers across inter-subjective fields. As an instance of this model, the Interlocking Account draws its most fundamental strength from the claim that human beings are similar in so far as they are carriers of conscious mental states, and that similar mental concepts have similar mental contents across individuals. The implication of this is that when similar mental concepts are used to describe contents of experience by different persons, the meanings of the concepts used are fixed by the similarity of the contents of experience to which the concepts refer. This paper argues that this identity-based strategy fails for three main reasons: the identity relation it purports to establish between one’s own case and those of others is difficult to achieve; “the sense in which the relation of one's mind and those of others exhibits that identity is not clear;” and it is an argument by analogy in disguise.

An instance of the use of a version of the analytic method known as the “ordinary-language approach” in African philosophy is characterised by a systematic examination (for the purpose of clarity) of philosophically significant concepts in an African language as used in ordinary discourse contexts among a local linguistic community. Central to this approach is the idea that the meaning of concepts depends on the ways ordinary people use them, and that this may form the basis of a philosophy. This article examines Barry Hallen and Olubi Sodipo’s critical engagements with the epistemological concepts of ìmọ (knowledge) and ìgbàgbọ (belief) as an instance of this analytic methodological orientation in African philosophy. The article finds the resultant analysis of these Yoruba concepts theoretically faulty because it defeats both the rational structure of complex concept formation in Yoruba language and the logical presupposition embedded in every language. The article concludes that in order to correct this, African philosophy needs to evolve its own unique method of analysis, or otherwise reject altogether the analytic method and erect in its place its own peculiar method suitable for what it does, and consistent with the general nature of philosophy.

Analysis has always been a core part of humanistic studies. In the domain of philosophical research, where it has assumed a larger-than-life status in the analytic tradition, analysis is a methodological device for conceptual clarification, the unpacking of loaded terms and expressions, and the achievement of overall understanding in every sphere of philosophical discourse. Scholars have expressed doubt about whether reductive analysis is an attractive methodological framework for African philosophy. In a recent article, Balogun raises the need for African philosophy to evolve its own unique method of analysis with the aim of decolonising analysis in the context of African philosophical investigations. This article advances this need by proposing a genre of philosophical analysis called “ethnolysis”. Coined from two words, “ethnography” and “analysis”, ethnolysis is a kind of analysis rooted in the search for ethnographical materials as a means of opening up an array of insights into the proper meaning of African concepts, terms, or expressions. The article defends “ethnolysis” in the light of the inappropriateness of mainstream analysis in producing an understanding of some philosophically interesting African concepts, terms and expression which are not completely amenable to the reductive analysis or fragmentation of the kind central to the analytic approach in African philosophy.

Robert Bellah’s article “Community Properly Understood…” is critical of the conventional conception of community as a product of consensus established by shared values and goals among people of common social reality. The need for such a critical approach is arguably encouraged by the rather imprecise deployment of the notion of community in the vast communitarian literature, a deployment which truly raises issues of concern over what the term ‘community’ really means. Bellah’s article is one of the numerous responses to this quest. This paper challenges Bellah’s view on community and offers some arguments to demonstrate why his conception of community may not be adequate. While the uniqueness of his argument is not in doubt, the paper argues that Bellah commits a straw man fallacy by conflating a normative question, “what ought we to do to achieve a working and progressive community?” with the descriptive question, “what is community?” The paper argues that an adequate conception of community must be such that its conception is acceptable to both the liberals and the communitarians. To achieve this, the paper introduces the notion of shared spaces to the conceptualization of the concept of community, and thereby arrives at the definition of community in terms with which both sides of the debate can relate. The paper concludes that with an appropriate concept of community, it would be obvious, contrary to the popular opinion, that liberals and communitarians are both committed to the survival of the community, and that they only differ in their respective approaches to achieving this common goal.