Husein Inusah

The research of Benjamin Libet and Daniel Wegner are groundbreaking works in neuropsychology that make arguments against human freedom. However, Libet’s and Wegner’s arguments are marred with some philosophical inconsistencies including; misconceptions, logical errors, and causal fallacies which seems to emanate from the problem of subjecting the concept of free will to an empirical enquiry only. In this essay, it is argued that empirical enquiry alone limits the study of the role of consciousness and its involvement in decision-making. It is suggested that scientific assessment alone may not be exhaustive in the evaluation of the idea of free will considering the role of consciousness and the absence of causal evidence between the interactions of the mind and the brain.

To liberate African philosophy from the remnants of the colonial style of thought, Kwesi Wiredu promotes the idea of the conceptual decolonization of African philosophy. He argues that, to accomplish this project, African philosophers must theorize in African vernaculars. This article attempts to show that the project of the conceptual decolonization of African philosophy by recourse to theorizing in African vernaculars is challenging. It examines a particular strategy that Wiredu deploys in “Conceptual Decolonization as an Imperative in Contemporary African Philosophy,” in which he hopes to demonstrate that the Akan conception of mind is superior to the Cartesian conception of mind. It demonstrates that Wiredu’s attempt to show the superiority of the Akan conception of mind is unsuccessful and that his project of conceptual decolonization fails. Nevertheless, it concludes that Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization project still shows promise even in light of our criticisms.

Some notable scholars argue that traditional African worldview is a backward-looking belief system that proves to be irreconcilable with mainstream science. The contention is such that unlike the principles of mainstream science which demystifies our understanding of the universe through the search for discoverable laws of nature, traditional African worldview rather mystifies the nature of our universe by rendering explanations based on metaphysical belief systems. Using the method of concept analysis, we argue, however, that the salient advances in mainstream science provide a sufficient ground to challenge what we consider to be a mischaracterization of African worldview. We do so by showing that the sound interpretations of salient developments in mainstream science demonstrate appreciable compatibility with the African worldview. Therefore, because there is no contradiction but diversity emanating from cultural differences, the claim of backwardness relative to African worldview is without merit.

In recent years, the struggle to decolonize knowledge in academia has largely focused on addressing cognitive concerns such as curricular development matters (materials to be taught) and pedagogical strategies (how it is taught) to transform education in Africa. Hardly does the issue of non-cognitive concerns such as the right attitude required to guide the development of this reformed curricular and pedagogical strategies get explored. Indeed, what is lacking in our struggle to decolonise the curricular and pedagogical strategies is an interdisciplinary perspective because the extant approaches rely largely on curriculum theories and practices that leave the role of allied disciplines such as social epistemology (specifically virtue epistemology), educational psychology and paremiology that deal largely with non-cognitive concerns utterly unexplored. However, it is widely argued that curriculum and pedagogy (material to be taught and students’ processing of the material) is insufficient to make any meaningful impact on educating the mind without the help of allied disciplines that will teach the right attitude. This chapter, therefore, underscores the importance of the study of non-cognitive factors in the curriculum development and transformation effort by connecting it with the resources in virtue epistemology, educational psychology and paremiology to emphasize the teaching of epistemic virtues in Akan proverbs to provide a comprehensive approach to the concerns of decolonising knowledge in Africa.

I argue in this paper that infinitism is the best answer to the dialectical regress challenge. Infinitism, as a theory of rational dialectics, has not received enough attention from scholars because major proponents of the theory have focused mainly on using infinitism to answer an epistemic regress problem. Rather than construing infinitism as an answer to the epistemic regress question, I take the theory to be addressing a dialectical regress challenge and subsequently pitch it against its dialectical rivals. It emerges that dialectical infinitism addresses the regress challenge far better than its competitors if it is couched as a social contextualist thesis.

Contractual moralists, such as Bowie and Donaldson, have argued that contractual agreement explains why corporations have a moral obligation towards the society in which they operate. They argue that a corporation’s moral obligation emerges from a hypothetical social contract that establishes its legitimacy to operate in society. Their assumption appears to indicate a logically necessary relationship between a corporation’s moral obligation and contractual agreement that establishes the corporation. We argue that there is no such relationship: a corporation’s moral obligation does not necessarily emerge from a social contract. We suggest that instead of assuming that a corporation’s moral obligation emerges from a social contract, it should be said that a corporation’s moral obligation is sustained by a social contract. This helps answer the question of why corporations have a moral obligation towards the society where they operate in a better light.

It is generally believed that pure versions of infinitism face two problems, namely: 1) they are unable to distinguish between potential and actual series of justified reasons because they are defined strictly in terms of relations between beliefs in the series so that every succeeding belief is justified by the belief before it and so on ad infinitum and, 2) they are unable to mark the difference between a set of justified reasons that are connected to truth and one that is not because they are defined strictly in terms of a relation between beliefs in the series of reasons. However, Aikin argues that impure infinitism could surmount these problems without undermining the infinite regress condition because impure infinitism can solve the Modus Ponens Reductio, MPR, argument that threatens pure versions of infinitism. I argue that Aikin does not succeed because his impure infinitism faces some fatal consequences and any attempt to salvage it will undermine the infinite regress of justification.

It is undeniable that people have beliefs about what actions are morally right. These beliefs play an important role in guiding moral action. Is it possible however to justify beliefs about what actions are morally right? How can beliefs of this sort be justified? Sinnott-Armstrong has advanced an epistemic regress argument against the justification of moral beliefs with the consequence that moral beliefs cannot be justified. This essay addresses the issue of the justification of moral beliefs to answer the question about how moral beliefs can be justified in response to Sinnott-Armstrong’s epistemic regress argument. It argues for the plausibility of Rawls’ reflective equilibrium as an adequate method of justification of moral beliefs. Three problems arise in the attempt to show that reflective equilibrium can adequately respond to Sinnott-Armstrong’s regress argument. These are vicious circularity, arbitrariness and epistemic moral disagreement. It is shown in this essay that these problems can be satisfactorily dealt with.

A corporation’s moral obligation is said to be sustained by two viewpoints: the narrow and broad views. The narrow view restrains a corporation’s moral obligation to the corporation’s owners and shareholders while the broad view, which is often deployed to support Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, extends the corporation’s moral obligation towards others beyond the confines of the corporation walls to include all stakeholders, and the environment in which the corporation operates and so on. We argue from an ethical perspective that this dichotomy is a facade. We conclude that the broad view is indeed a narrow view in disguise.

Our main focus in this paper is to try to show Rorty’s point of departure from mainstream pragmatist treatment of epistemology. In his pragmatic approach to epistemology, Rorty urges that a good pragmatist should abandon epistemology as a foundational and rational discipline and instead opt for conversation, the view that knowledge is an expression of judgment of a historically conditioned social group. According to Rorty, the view that we should disentangle ourselves from rigid canons of epistemology is the quest of classical pragmatism traceable to the writings of William James and John Dewey. On this showing, Rorty argues that conversationalism is consistent with mainstream or original pragmatism. Contrary to Rorty’s claim we try to show, in the following pages, that his pragmatic approach to epistemology is a deviation from mainstream pragmatism. We establish that mainstream or classical pragmatists do not repudiate epistemology.