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The ones who dictate and act for their own survival regardless of the existence of otherness soon realize, often too late, that there cannot be such a survival. To realize this is simply to understand the nature of the dialogue. The principle is at work in all felds and at all levels. The issue at stake is thus to fnd ways of relating to nature and fellow humans that both acknowledge and allow the complementary and reciprocal character of such a relationship – a sort of equilibrium made of diffe…Read more
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7The Interpreting Mind and Meaning-Formation: A Relational Critique of Lyotard and RicœurIn Sanjit Chakraborty (ed.), Human Minds and Cultures, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 159-173. 2024.Jean-François Lyotard in Discourse, Figure interprets the phenomenon of meaning-formation from the Lacanian standpoint of the unconscious, desire, and jouissance. There is, however, always the danger that the order of discourse be replaced by the order of jouissance, for such an order of interpretation comprehends meaning-formation as a discrete entity, that is, in non-relational terms. Similarly, in The Conflict of Interpretations, Paul Ricœur’s descriptive hermeneutics of negotiation falls sho…Read more
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15Community, Selfhood, and Dia-Formation: What It Means to Be CivilisedCulture and Dialogue 11 (2): 169-172. 2023.
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21Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism (edited book)Lexington Books. 2009.Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers including Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. The book offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world
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19How the Poem ThinksJanus Head 20 (1): 5-16. 2022.Ever since Plato's condemnation of the poets who did not deserve a place in his ideal city poetry has, in areas of the Western world, drawn suspicion as for its ability to convey the "truth." Philosophy, then, was thought to be a better candidate assuming that the truth in question could only be "discursive" as opposed to "poetic." In the West, the tension between poetry and philosophy reached a quasi-chiasmatic peak with modernism, a period during which the poem asserted in the most radical way…Read more
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2Noetic Validity in Aesthetic InterpretationQuest - an African Journal of Philosophy 17 (1-2): 91-106. 2003.Can an explanatory theory of the subject be an appropriate means to understand what it is to live a moment of meaningful form in art - what I shall call ‘the figural experience’? Is not such a theory, in spite of its critical and relativist impulse inexorably inclined to impose a set of pre-conditions that are incompatible with the nature of the experience itself? And vice versa what is the relevance of any "phenomenologism" when it comes to understanding the subjective formation of knowledge? …Read more
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7The Touch of MeaningJanus Head 15 (2): 157-166. 2016.The academic world, at least in the West, has traditionally always been suspicious when it comes to introducing in its quest for knowledge notions of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics” – in other words what is generally associated with sensory-experience. In the human sciences and the artistic fields the practice of research has always privileged “textual reason” over “sensory texture,” the textual over the textural. Only in the recent past have so-called postmodern theories of all kinds …Read more
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37The Self-Overcoming of (Western) Postmodern AestheticsEspes 9 (1): 16-25. 2020.This essay explores the nihilistic nature of the idea of postmodern aesthetics in the Western world by highlighting its historical and cultural specificity in contrast with non-Western postmodernities, in particular in East Asia, and this in spite of their formal similarities. We then have to question the nature, possibility and implication of Western postmodern aesthetics overcoming itself within the context of globalisation.
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13Editorial: Of the Philosophies of Africa – Theory and PracticeCulture and Dialogue 8 (1): 1-4. 2020.The overall concern of this issue is not really to question whether there is such a thing as “African philosophy.” Any question concerning “African philosophy,” i.e. a specifically pan-African discipline with its own methods and forms, is partly different from that of “African thought” in general, for the latter includes not only processes of consciousness that reflect on the natural and human fields, but also practices whose very nature is to create or express specific cultural textures. The ch…Read more
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16Dialogue, Culture and GlobalisationCulture and Dialogue 6 (2): 119-125. 2018.Globalisation has pervaded all aspects of our lives in many parts of the world. The phenomenon is obviously not only economic and technological; globalisation has affected human and cultural relationships, identity formations, and our ability and willingness to be attentive to our fellow human beings and the places of our worlds. Globalisation has generated particular forms of cultural practices and the ways we perceive and interpret them. But beyond the simple realisation of such mutations, the…Read more
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30Resistance of the Sensible World an Introduction to Merleau-PontyJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50 (3): 279-282. 2018.Volume 50, Issue 3, July 2019, Page 279-282.