Bruce Janz

African philosophy has used the concept of the future in a wide range of ways, but these ways have not been surveyed. This chapter does that by considering five broad types of questions. The first is to ask about what African philosophy has said about the future. This will take us into a discussion of African theories of time, as well as into thinking about the places where African philosophy has contributed something to the question of Africa’s future, particularly in early postindependence in various countries. The second question is about the concepts which necessitate some understanding of the future in African philosophy. These include divination, destiny, immortality, and the environment. The third question has to do with philosophy’s part in some proposals for Africa to move into the future. These include a brief look at Afropessimism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, African Renaissance, and Ubuntu, inasmuch as they assume or advocate for a future. The fourth question has to do with proposals that philosophers have made for African philosophy’s own future as a discipline and as an intellectual component to African life. And finally, the fifth question has to do with how we might think of futurity as an integral component of philosophy itself, as part of “becoming-African.” How might the doing of philosophy be seen as facing the future, and how would that change the way it is engaged?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature by Charlie HaileyBruce B. JanzThe Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Natureby charlie hailey Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021Charlie Hailey’s The Porch is a difficult book to review. This is not because I have to be measured in my praise—it is an excellent book, well written, with a mix of close observations and rigorous research. It is also not difficult to review because it is challenging to read—it is an absolute joy to read. Hailey is a writer with a sense of rhythm and scene; this work could easily be taught in a course on creative nonfiction as it has that sense of writing craft along with its phenomenological acuity.No, The Porch is difficult to review because I get the sense that Hailey is asking us to do something other than evaluate it for the adequacy of its arguments or the originality of its points, or even the beauty of its writing. He is asking us to enter a world with him, to see things we haven’t seen and see those we have seen in a new way. The chapters are titled “Porch,” “Tilt,” “Air,” “Screen,” “Blue,” and “Acclimate,” and these give an idea of the space he is opening up. It is a space somewhere between a material world and the sense we make of it. The author is entirely committed to both, but not fooled by the illusions or uplifting promises of either.The primary porch of the book is on his cabin on the Homosassa River in Florida. It is a porch that is under threat of rising waters due [End Page 142] to climate change and catastrophe due to hurricanes. It is a porch on an estuary fed by a spring, which means that the water quality and clarity varies greatly over the nine miles of the river’s flow. Animal life abounds. It is, in other words, a porch where one is not going to be easily lulled to sleep, at least if paying the slightest bit of attention.It is perhaps unavoidable that talking about this book means talking about the environment. Indeed, on a first reading, this reminded me more of nature writing than architecture writing. The book is, to be sure, a reflection on architecture at its best, which is to say, the lived aspect of built space, the almost imperceptible but nonetheless real ways in which the liminal space of the porch affords the experience of the membrane between nature and culture, the outside and the inside, the public and the private. But it is also nature writing, inasmuch as a common thread in nature writing is to place us in the middle of nature, as part of it. We are not the designers, nor are we the inhabitants; we are those in the milieu, the middle of cause and effect, actor and acted upon, subject and object. It is a rare book on architecture, even vernacular architecture, that achieves this. The tendency is to always look for the optimization of the built environment, the tweak that will succeed in drawing us out into our best selves or the cute or trendy new feature. That is not Hailey’s goal here.If the porch is one of the best places in the built environment to understand the milieu, it must present itself in those terms beyond the author’s own circumstance. Otherwise, this would just be a paeon to a much-loved place. But the book is full of examples of porches, both literary and real, not just as objects or as liminal spaces between nature and culture, but as sites that show us their inhabitants and guests in unguarded and exploratory moments. If the trope of human vs. nature in American letters is of the human coming to terms with his or her own individuality, striving to tame, dominate, or at least fit into nature, and the trope of human in the built environment often ends up as the externalization of our internal, as-yet unrealized natures, this porch does something entirely different. We neither have the self/other...

The article is combined of six chapters authored by these who voiced their experiences with social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemics in various contexts, but mostly centered on psychological, sociological, and ethical aspects. Authors, mostly psychologists and philosophers, were invited to describe their perspectives on the sense and practice of social distancing in times of pandemics. Their reflections seek to demonstrate various perspectives related to subjects’ novel self-experience, social situatedness, and their dealing with conventions and habits altered through the pandemics. As “the owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering”, there is no conclusion in this article. It rather encourages other authors to reflect on the nearly global, still lasting phenomenon.

Machines have always been a tool or technical instrument for human beings to facilitate and to accelerate processes through mechanical power. The same applies to robots nowadays – the next step in the evolution of machines. Over the course of the last few years, robot usage in society has expanded enormously, and they now carry out a remarkable number of tasks for us. It seems we are on the eve of a historic revolution that will change everything we know right now. But not only robots have an impact on our life. It is digitization in its entirety, including smart applications and games, that confronts us with new spaces. This special volume of Ethics in Progress tries to broaden our understanding of a philosophical field – robots and digitization – that is still in its infancy in terms of it research and literature.

This book analyzes the hermeneutics of place, raising questions about central issues such as textuality, dialogue, and play. It discusses the central figures in the development of hermeneutics and place, and surveys disciplines and areas in which a hermeneutic approach to place has been fruitful. It covers the range of philosophical hermeneutic theory, both within philosophy itself as well as from other disciplines. In doing so, the volume reflects the state of theorization on these issues, and also looks forward to the implications and opportunities that exist. Philosophical hermeneutics has fundamentally altered philosophy’s approach to place. Issues such as how we dwell in place, how place is imagined, created, preserved, and lost, and how philosophy itself exists in place have become central. While there is much research applying hermeneutics to place, there is little which both reflects on that heritage and critically analyzes a hermeneutic approach to place. This book fills that void by offering a sustained analysis of the central elements, major figures, and disciplinary applications of hermeneutics and place.

Boehme's concern was to outline a theory of knowledge that overcame the lifeless structure of traditional religion, and also made possible the real significance of individuals. He accomplished this by describing a dialectical system that began with a unique version of non-being, Ungrund, which was chaotic, and which was never negated throughout the entire dialectic. This system was one which provided a significant role for knowledge, in that the driving force of the dialectic was self-knowledge on the part of God. The words he uses for the emergence of the dialectic are knowledge words--Verstand , Vernunft , Weisheit , Erkenntniss, Wissenschaft. This self-knowledge is a free movement that happens through the infusion of one force in the chaos, which Boehme calls Lust, into all the other forces, Begierde. The forces of Begierde have their craving for manifestation satiated, while Lust has its desire for self-knowledge met. The cooperation between these two is the entire story of dialectical creation, which Boehme calls Weisheit. One can either recognize this dialectical creation in the search for knowledge , or one can conceive knowledge as apart from that grounding . The second of these is a legitimate form of knowledge, but it becomes illegitimate if it does not recognize its dependency on Verstand. God has Verstand, in that God has knowledge of the dialectic, but this knowledge is conceptual, but particularized. Humans both gain Verstand and assume it, in their knowledge of the world through signatures. The result of this structure of creative knowledge is that: God is related to creation directly, without resorting to pantheism; Evil, which is simply a competing "Weisheit" or manifestation can be conquered; There is a place for positively conceived, named individuals; and, a third option is created, between static ontotheology in which there is an unquestioned foundation that legitimates all else, and pure perspectivism, in which the divine is simply one story that could be drawn from the world around

Samantha Vice’s proposal on how to live in ‘this strange place’ of contemporary South Africa, includes an appeal to the concepts of shame and silence. In this paper, I use Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben to move the discussion of shame from a moral to an existential question. The issue is not about how one should feel, but about the kind of self that whiteness in South Africa makes possible today. Shame desubjectifies. Vice’s recommendation of silence is then taken as witnessing/listening, which I argue grounds the possibility of a recovery of the self

In this paper, I wish to consider Watsuji Tetsuro's (1889?1960) concept of climate (fudo), and consider whether it contributes anything to the relationship between climate change and ethics. I will argue that superficially it seems that fudo tells us little about the ethics of climate change, but if considered more carefully, and through the lens of thinkers such as Deleuze and Heidegger, there is ethical insight in Watsuji's approach. Watsuji's major work in ethics, Rinrigaku, provides concepts such as between-ness and trust that enable his philosophy of climate to move from a theory of national characters (as Fudo is often seen to be) to an approach to living well within one's milieu

specific cultural forms from the charge of ethnophilosophy. It is possible for philosophy to address the particulars of cultural experience without losing its »universal« character. The papers in this volume address three major themes in an effort to illustrate the encounter between philosophy and culture – the nature of persons, the nature of k nowledge, and the nature of change. The essays in the volume vary in their success at reaching the stated goal, inasmuch as some are more successful than others at integrating the particular (cultural) and the universal (philosophical). Overall, though, Karp and Masolo's work is an important and welcome addition to the ongoing task of think ing through the nature of African philosophy.

01 This essay had its genesis in a deliberate misreading of a conference call for papers. I had been working on what I called "place making imagination," when I was told about a conference asking for papers on "Imaging Place." Only two letters separated what I was doing from what was required – Imaging Place easily becomes "Imagining Place" and hypostatizes into "Place Making Imagination." Imagination produces images, I thought, and is comprised of them, and so the misreading is slight at best. I should be able to make things fit easily enough.

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.