South African Journal of Philosophy = Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Wysbegeerte - latest Issue

The concept of “harm” is ubiquitous in moral theorising, and yet remains poorly defined. Bradley suggests that the counterfactual comparative account of harm is the most plausible account currently available, but also argues that it is fatally flawed, since it falters on the omission and pre-emption problems. Hanna attempts to defend the counterfactual comparative account of harm against both problems. In this paper, I argue that Hanna’s defence fails. I also show how his defence highlights the fact that both the omission and the pre-emption problems have the same root cause – the inability of the counterfactual comparative account of harm to allow for our implicit considerations regarding well-being when assessing harm. While its purported neutrality with regard to substantive theories of well-being is one of the reasons that this account is considered to be the most plausible on offer, I will argue that this neutrality is illusory.

This paper aims to indicate the sense in which Menkiti’s normative conception of personhood can be considered as gendered, ableist and anti-queer. I argue that Menkiti’s given account of personhood marginalises at least one of the categories of gender, people with disabilities and queer people. Therefore, I conclude that it should be rejected as a plausible theory of personhood insofar as it can be argued that inclusive theories of personhood are preferable, namely theories of persons that consider gender, people with disabilities, and queer people.

An important branch of neo-republicanism holds that freedom as non-domination is the supreme ideal that should be pursued in a polity. In this paper I set out to better specify what neo-republicanism has to say about education. I propose a series of reforms that ought to track the common avowable interests of children, focusing on two important dimensions: i) establishing a proper institutional framework through which children can effectively influence decisions that will in turn affect them; and ii) how the civic education curricula should be modified so that the institutional framework will be upheld by virtuous future citizens. I then turn to showing how we can employ the neo-republican framework in order to criticise certain lacunae of educational systems and to improve upon these in a manner that would be in line with the desideratum of freedom as non-domination. The particular example that I focus on is that of Romania, a country whose educational legislation contains some minimal stipulations regarding civic education and pupils’ involvement in the decision-making process. Nonetheless, such stipulations either do not go far enough or are indeterminate, which might make them susceptible to implementation in a way that would be detrimental to the pupils’ common avowable interests.

One can view the recent science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian as a three-part dialogue concerning the existential relationship between humanity, technology, and the science employed to create said technologies. Pitched into the deep of space, each film’s protagonist must seek to find technological answers to save their own existence. Each film’s exploration of these themes essentially questions the importance of technology as a product of scientific-calculative thinking and the validity of this thinking as the primary mode of understanding the world. In this article, I explore the existential dialogue crafted between these films through Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Through Benjamin, we will see how the medium of film is completely dependent upon technology to present its art and how this transforms the stories it tells, while also transforming the audience and the audience’s reality. Consequently, understanding the popular reception of these films becomes just as important as the films themselves for our present study. Through Heidegger, we will see how technology provides a space where we can find a truth about ourselves and our reality. However, modern technology’s increasing scientific complexity, created by scientists who in turn employ modern technology to further science, also conceals just as much as it reveals. These films provide us with an opportunity to explore a truth about our dependence upon technology even though, as technologically dependent works of art, they may also conceal how dependent upon science we have become when constructing our reality.

In a paper on a “contextual South African philosophy curriculum”, M. John Lamola makes some sweeping comments about South African philosophers during the apartheid era and insinuates parallels with those today who ask questions about what a decolonised curriculum is. His arguments here are unclear, are based on false and insufficiently nuanced claims, and are pregnant with innuendo. In my response I demonstrate this.

Many defenders of contemporary virtue ethics contend that it directly competes with modern ethical theories such as consequentialism and deontology. One of the most common responses is that contemporary virtue ethics does not compare well because its proponents fail to provide guidance to an agent who is deliberating about what she should do. There are at least four different types of action-guiding objections to an ethical theory. They are based on moral dilemmas, indeterminacy, knowledge, and reasonable judgment. I will show how three current versions of virtue ethics are subject to at least one of those objections.

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected.

Take open-future Humeanism to comprise the following four tenets: (T1) that truth supervenes on a mosaic of local particular matters of fact; (T2) that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences; (T3) that there is a dynamic present moment; and (T4) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain truth values only when their referents are actualised. Prima facie this is a deeply problematic metaphysic for the Humean, since given that the widely accepted Humean conception takes all truths (inclusive of nomological truths) to supervene on an omnitemporal mosaic of local particular matters of fact, if there are no future facts, then the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor justify many everyday inductive inferences. However, I argue that this eternalist metaphysic is in tension with at least one of Hume’s central metaphysical claims concerning causation, e.g. that causal regularities may cease to hold at any time. In this paper I propose and defend one possible open-future Humean metaphysic which admits of “true-to- Hume” causal and nomological facts. Furthermore, although I am happy to concede that induction is problematic for the open-future Humean, I demonstrate that it poses no greater threat to the open-future conception than it does to the popular Lewisian conception of natural law.

As Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens, “play” has not only been part of all human societies throughout history, it has also contributed to the development of numerous cultural, social and political activities, including structured games and sports, certain judicial and legal activities, war, and numerous forms of art. Despite its importance, “play”, with its various manifestations, is often relegated to being a children’s activity or an occasion of pure waste, and is a surprisingly marginalised topic in academic scholarship. In part to remedy this deficit, my aim in this article is to create a novel philosophical conception of “play” by adapting selected concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as from the theories of Brian Sutton-Smith and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The concept of “play” that I propose is not only a useful heuristic for mapping various forms of “play”, it also highlights the creative and transformative potential that is inherent to “play” phenomena.

Dladla, Thabang. 2017. Archie Mafeje and the question of African philosophy: A liberatory discourse. South African Journal of Philosophy 36 (3) (2017): 350–361 (DOI: 10.1080/02580136.2017.1301161)

The SAJP editor regrets the implication in footnote 3 on page 351 of the above article that a title such as “Africa in Philosophy, Philosophy in Africa” presumptively denies the existence of African philosophy and the humanity of Africans. Such intentions cannot justly be imputed to the conveners of the seminar series so titled, Prof. Lungisile Ntsebeza and Dr George Hull.