Malesela John Lamola

Inspired by Louis Althusser’s polemic that Marxism is a science and not a philosophy, we enquire about the nature of this ‘scientificity’ of Marxism. The result is a clarification that Marxism is a social theory within the discourse of hermeneutics. Drawing on William Dilthey’s categorisation of human science as Geisteswissenschaft, which essentially is an interpretive science when differentiated from Naturwissenschaft, we point out that Marxism should be understood and used as a socio-hermeneutic theory. We highlight that at the pinnacle of his intellectual development that resulted in Das Kapital, Marx produced a scientific principle for interpreting historical social formations and the human condition, particularly during the capitalist epoch. The description of the scientific character of this hermeneutic principle, set against what Althusser attempted, and motivated by the quest for a contemporaneous application of Marxist theory, is the mission of our paper. It is a contribution to the Philosophy of Social Science

Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanism, as well as its dystopian possibilities. As a contribution to obviating the latter, an Africanist civilizational humanism proclaimed by Pixley ka Isaka Seme is proffered as a plausible alternative paradigm for humanity’s technological advancement. Seme, a pan-Africanist thinker of the early twentieth century, proclaimed humanistic-spirituality as the indispensable gift African Civilisation-in-its-renaissance is yet to offer global humanity. His postulation is being provided as a contribution to the archive on cross-cultural ethics of artificial intelligence.

Given the affective psychological and cognitive dynamics prevalent during human–robot-interlocution, the vulnerability to cultural-political influences of the design aesthetics of a social humanoid robot has far-reaching ramifications. Building upon this hypothesis, I explicate the relationship between the structures of the constitution social ontology and computational semiotics, and ventures a theoretical framework which I proposes as a thesis that impels a moral responsibility on engineers of social humanoids. In distilling this thesis, the implications of the intersection between the socio-aesthetics of racialised and genderised humanoids and the phenomenology of human–robot-interaction are illuminated by the figuration of the experience of a typical black rural African woman as the user, that is, an interlocutor with an industry-standard socially-situated humanlike robot. The representation of the gravity of the psycho-existential and socio-political ramifications of such woman’s life with humanoids is abstracted and posited as grounds that illustrate the imperative for roboticists to take socio-ethical considerations seriously in their designs of humanoids.

The very claim of the historical instance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is increasingly being subjected to critical interrogation from a variety of cultural and ideological perspectives. From an Afrocentric theory of history, this questioning of the ontology of the 4IR is sharpened by Africa’s experience of the claimed progressive mutation of global industrial progress from the “first” to this “fourth” revolution. Africa experienced the first industrial revolution as a European revolution in the exploitation of her natural and human resources, as well as the despoliation of her cultural-epistemic sovereignty. The challenge to fully engage in the theorisation of this 4IR, given the overwhelming and inexorable effects of its digital technologies on the personhood, sociality and geopolitical state of Africa has exposed the critical need for a set of rigorous Africanist analytical tools and epistemological approaches capable of guiding Africa’s appropriation of this techno-social revolution. This essay introduces the collection of research papers that have been selected for their endeavour to meet this challenge. It is highlighted that all of them move from a unique approach that asserts that technological progress is historical-cultural and socially embedded. Some of them address the question of the historico-ontological status of the 4IR innovatively with original African methodological tools, while others demonstrate how an African epistemology can be applied to issues such a digital virtual communities and robotics. This contribution to the bourgeoning field of African Philosophy of Technology is admired as work in progress.

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian analysis of colonization and its consequences is specifically isolated as one such impotent tool of critical analysis. As an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, Mbembe launches into a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language, as exhibited in On the Postcolony. This article challenges the efficacy of this post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as the proposed way out of his perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial self-imagination. In particular, his dismissal of Marxian theory is turned...

This essay highlights the root causes of the pervasive discomfort with Africanness common among a significant portion of the South African population. It claimsthat this collective national psyche manifests as a dysfunctional self-identity, and is therefore akin to a psychosocial malaise we propose to name “the LimpopoRiver Fever”. The root cause of this pathological psycho-political culture, we venture to demonstrate, is the historical process of a systematic self-orientationaway from Africa, perceived as “Africa north of the Limpopo River”. This psychosis as presently manifesting as what is distinctly an Afrophobia, and notmere xenophobia, I argue, has principally been nurtured since the 1950s by the ascendency of an anti-Africanist ideology within the national liberation movement, the African National Congress, which has subsequently been the governing party since the defeat of the apartheid regime in 1994. It is concluded that even historic efforts at redirecting the South African body-politic toward a pan-African consciousness which evolved around Thabo Mbeki during his presidency could not achieve the aspired re-Africanisation of South African society.

The very claim of the historical instance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is increasingly being subjected to critical interrogation from a variety of cultural and ideological perspectives. From an Afrocentric theory of history, this questioning of the ontology of the 4IR is sharpened by Africa’s experience of the claimed progressive mutation of global industrial progress from the “first” to this “fourth” revolution. Africa experienced the first industrial revolution as a European revolution in the exploitation of her natural and human resources, as well as the despoliation of her cultural-epistemic sovereignty. The challenge to fully engage in the theorisation of this 4IR, given the overwhelming and inexorable effects of its digital technologies on the personhood, sociality and geopolitical state of Africa has exposed the critical need for a set of rigorous Africanist analytical tools and epistemological approaches capable of guiding Africa’s appropriation of this techno-social revolution. This essay introduces the collection of research papers that have been selected for their endeavour to meet this challenge. It is highlighted that all of them move from a unique approach that asserts that technological progress is historical-cultural and socially embedded. Some of them address the question of the historico-ontological status of the 4IR innovatively with original African methodological tools, while others demonstrate how an African epistemology can be applied to issues such a digital virtual communities and robotics. This contribution to the bourgeoning field of African Philosophy of Technology is admired as work in progress.

As the prevailing marker of the development of human productive forces, and as utilised as a historical paradigm for the justification of artificial intelligence technologies as the necessary and eventual feature of human life, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by cultural assumptions and intellectual presuppositions that are informed by the presently hegemonic Western intellectual heritage. The problem identified and elucidated in this chapter is that the epistemic status of this socio-industrial development is set asymmetrically against Africa. Africa does not produce but mainly consume and use these technologies that are designed and manufactured in alien cultural settings. I go further and highlight that this problem does not only have cultural and geo-political implications but also have fundamental existential ramifications, as the dynamics of human-technology interaction as unveiled by the post-phenomenological method indicate that technology does frame human self-knowledge and modes of sociality. Casting this as both an epistemological and socio-ontological crisis, this chapter declares that this status quo, the skewed appropriation of AI technologies by Africa, and the effects thereof constitute a status quaestionis, an imperative for critical systematic exploration.

This essay is a proposition of a philosophy of liberation that is rooted in Africa’s existential realities. It contends that when philosophical practice in Africa becomes authentically contextual, it will discover that the most critical challenge of postcolonial African life is an imperative for an authentic African identity. In demonstrating this fact, Sartre’s existentialist phenomenological account of selfhood as rooted in radical freedom within a social consciousness that is alert to a Marxian view of the human subject in history, as well as his praxis of anti-colonial activism for the African cause, are posited as a theoretical framework that simultaneously delineates and guides the discharge of this imperative. The radical nature of the proposed intervention emerging out of this appropriation leads us to a key proposition of an Africanist paradigm, which is a qualitative emphasis on a philosophical praxis, a project, that is deliberately for the cause of Africa’s freedom, as opposed to merely being in Africa.