Empirical philosophies of mind

Three anthropological contributions within the debates on rationality and modes of thought are considered here: Horton's ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’, Gellner's Legitimation of Belief and Needham's Belief, Language and Experience. It is argued that within these texts, seemingly diverse and even opposed in theoretical position though they are, certain anthropological imperatives are common. Various philosophical views are invoked in these works in order to grapple with recurrent problems of social anthropology, a discipline conceived as the ‘empirical philosophy of mind’ and expressing itself as an essentially epistemological discourse. These attempts are unsuccessful but the reasons for their lack of success can be traced to certain constraints within the anthropological problematic itself.     

In search of an anatomy of African administrators

By way of welcoming one of the first—and still too few—accounts by African administrators of what it was like to have served under two masters, one British and one African, the article first reviews the chronology of the literature on and by Africa's administrators. Starting from a survey of the history of the British Colonial Administrative Service and some of the recent memoirs of its members, a milestone in the literature is signalled by the shift in emphasis of public service commissions of enquiry away from primary concern with salaries and conditions of service to concerns with the positive Africanization of the civil services. The gradual responsibility of Africans themselves for such reports is then noted, often culminating in a recommendation for the establishment of an Institute of Public Administration. While the quantity and quality of insiders' literature by Africa's civil servants still falls short of that which has characterized the writing by Indian members of the former Indian Civil Service, the position has improved since the publication of the proceedings of the Inter-African Public Administration seminars and by the noticeably less constrained comments by the bureaucracy during a period of military rule. The article concludes with a look at the Ife University project and calls for an extension of such primary research into African administration while the first, and historically unique, generation of African bureaucrats are still alive to record their memories and interpret their significance against subsequent analysis.     

Habermas,market‐friendly human rights,and the revisibility of economic globalization

This article examines the impacts, on citizenship rights, democratic practice and public policy, of the constitution‐like regimes for the protection of investor rights embedded within contemporary international investment treaties. It argues that a central objective of these investment treaties is to remove specific governmental functions from the stock of policy instruments available to national governments and to democratic polities. Drawing upon Habermas' discourse‐theoretic approach to law and democracy, the article argues that national states have the room to deviate, if not withdraw from the current configuration of economic rights advanced and enforced through international investment treaties. A robust proceduralist approach to rights and democracy would subject these agreements to critical democratic practice and open space to revise and roll back some of the rules and institutions associated with economic globalization.     

European elites and the narrative of the Greek crisis: A discursive institutionalist analysis

This article examines elite European discourses during the Greek financial crisis from its pre-history in September 2008 up to the arrival of the SYRIZA government in January 2015. The article employs the conceptual literature on Discursive Institutionalism (DI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI). Having coded 1,153 unique quotes drawn from a dataset of 15,354 news wires from Reuters, the authors argue that the communicative discourse of 63 senior European (and IMF) officials on the Greek crisis during that period demonstrates significant volatility. Four distinct narrative frames are identified: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’ and ‘reluctant redemption’, punctuated by three discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, which reflect the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis. The article's contribution is twofold: empirically, it is the first to provide a systematic analysis of the protagonists’ communication of the Greek crisis; and theoretically, it combines DI and HI in an effort to conceptualise an important part of our understanding of ‘bail-out politics’ throughout the Eurozone crisis.     

Criticism of multiparty democracy: Parallels between Wamba‐dia‐Wamba and Arendt

Abstract

The IMF, World Bank, and former colonial powers have put pressure on African countries to adopt multiparty democracy. Because of this pressure, many formerly one‐party states as well as some military dictatorships have embraced Western and Parliamentarian democratic forms. But does this mean that democracy has succeeded in Africa? Ernest Wamba‐dia‐Wamba of the University of Dar‐es‐Saalam and CODESRIA argues that embracing Western paradigms in an unthinking fashion will not bring real democracy, i.e. people's liberation. He advances criticisms of party politics and statism, and suggests that African palaver and people's movements are a surer site of political action. In his criticisms of representative government he parallels the thoughts and criticism of Hannah Arendt. Arendt advocated a council system that shares many of the attributes of African palaver communities. By consulting the criticisms of Arendt and Wamba‐dia‐Wamba, we can see that an easy optimism about the multiparty system is unfounded.     

后形而上学与后现代主义

"现代性"以"元叙事"为其特征,后现代性是对元叙事的颠覆."客观化假定"和"决定论假定"是现代性的两个最基本的哲学原理,黑格尔哲学的叙事是现代性的典型叙事.尼采以一种既"野蛮"又"学术"的方式,通过对真理信念和禁欲理想的谱系考察,拨去了长久以来笼罩在现代思想上的神圣光圈.海德格尔通过对西方形而上学的内在摧毁,将尼采审美理想实现的契机成功地从神话学领域转移至哲学领域.这一切表明,尼采、海德格尔及其后继者力图建构的,是一种新形态的形而上学.由这种形而上学支撑的社会思潮,就叫作后现代主义.     

Nature,Dialectics and Emancipatory Politics

Ecofeminist theory and politics, which originally grew out of the radical feminist movement and peace and environmental movements of the early 1970s, is composed of many voices. Since the 1970s, ecofeminists have emerged in such places as India, with the work of Vandana Shiva, and Australia, with the work of Ariel Salleh, among others, expanding beyond their Western origins. Like feminists, ecofeminists do not claim a single theoretical position and practice. And like feminism, ecofeminism is constantly changing, motivated, in part, by the lively theoretical debates within it. The purpose of this interview is to introduce the reader to ecofeminist philosophy, to explore what ecofeminism is, what ecofeminists' central debates are about, where they are going, and what ecofeminism's possibilities are as a theoretical tool for understanding the underlying structures of social and ecological problems.

Barbara Holland‐Cunz has contributed to ecofeminist theory and politics since the 1970s. She has been an active member in the feminist movement, the anti‐militarist movement, and the anti‐nuclear movement in Germany since 1978. She holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Political Science from Frankfurt University, where she currently teaches in the Women's Studies center in the Social Sciences Department. Holland‐Cunz' research areas include political theory, philosophy of nature, feminist politics and utopias, and the history of ecofeminism. The courses she teaches include: feminist theory and epistemology, gender in political theory, political strategies and Utopian thought, and ecology and the philosophy of nature. Holland‐Cunz lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and is an Editor of CNS.     

The impact of Illicit Financial Flows on the South African political economy under Jacob Zuma, 2009–2018

South Africa has also fallen a victim of a greater major concern over the scale and negative impact of Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) on the country's governance and developmental agenda. However, there is an unjustified observation that as one of Africa's biggest economies, South Africa is not a victim of IFFs. This observation shows that scholars and academic practitioners have not yet uniformly come to a cul‐de‐sac on this subject, and as such, this confusion constitutes a huge dichotomy on the subject matter. Based on Afrocentricity as the alternative lens, this article argues that there are after effects of the practice of IFFs in South Africa and that IFFs need to be given a special attention in order to curb them from destabilising South Africa's economic and political stability. Although this article discusses IFFs in general and how they come about, the central focus of this article is to unpack the impacts of IFFs under the Zuma administration and provide possible solutions. Methodically, this article relied on the prevailing continental and South African discourse circulating and thematic content analysis on conversations.     

The situational public engagement model in a municipal watershed protection program: information seeking,information sharing,and the use of organizational and social media

In an extension of the situational theory of publics, we tested a situational engagement model to answer how situational factors affect public engagement via both communication behaviors and the use of social media and organizational media. As part of the evaluation of a collaborative stormwater outreach and education campaign, a campus‐wide survey, assisted by a large public university's public affairs office, was conducted to identify key predictors of public engagement in a watershed protection program. A path analysis for the proposed situation engagement model revealed that problem recognition was the key to predicting both information seeking and sharing. The path analysis also yielded a significant association between communication behaviors and public engagement, mediated by the use of organizational media in seeking information on the issue. Further, the analysis showed a significant direct effect of involvement on engagement. The current study provided a preliminary framework that explains individuals' environmental behaviors in today's participatory and user‐generating media environment. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Georgia Lottery: Assessing Its Administrative, Economic, and Political Effects

This article examines the Georgia lottery as a “policy laboratory” and its potential effect on state‐level policy diffusion. The authors summarize an extensive research project they directed that included a survey of every state that offers a lottery, a general population survey of Georgia citizen attitudes toward the lottery, and results from an economic model summarizing the economic effects of the lottery. The analysis reveals that the Georgia lottery has been a significant source of revenue for the state's budget and operates in an administratively cost‐effective manner. The analysis also confirms the conventional wisdom that lower‐income households spend a greater proportionate share of their income on the lottery and that African Americans are more frequent players than whites. Furthermore, the Georgia lottery enjoys broad public support, the key to which appears to be the earmarking of lottery funds to specific, new, popular education programs. However, the data reveal that those educational programs promulgated by the Georgia lottery benefit citizens from both high and low socioeconomic status. Finally, the article suggests that lottery‐generated funds may reach a plateau or peak during the first decade of implementation and that state policymakers should design lottery‐funded programs accordingly.     

反本质主义语境下的后现代主义

实用主义对本质主义的批判,揭开了哲学上后现代性取代现代性的序幕.海德格尔既反对本质主义又反对实用主义.他关于实用主义与本质主义之间具有深层关联的观点,成为后现代哲学家激进批判现代性的理论起点.利奥塔通过对科学知识与叙事知识两个不同方面的拆解,成功点破了本质主义成为现代人生活的一种普遍模式的奥秘.福柯则揭示出,在现代性条件下,文本和权力关系怎样通过话语对社会和它的文化生产行使着一种有效的控制.德里达把文本看作是与外在权力无关的东西,既表明了他与福柯之间的重大分歧,也推进了海德格尔对本质主义的批判,同时还把哲学拓展到文学领域.本文试图在所有这些方面建立起联系,并且把追溯的源头引向古希腊哲学的理论特质.     

简论晚明“西洋哲学”之输入

《记法》专门探讨"记忆"问题,是一部介绍西洋"认识论"或"知识论"的专著。《童幼教育》是教育学及伦理学专著,属哲学之一支,既是介绍"西洋法学"、"西洋医学"入中国之最早文献之一,亦是引介"西洋神学"及"西洋大学"之最早文献之一,可说"太西总学之大略"已赖此书输入中国。《西学凡》介绍了哲学学科四年之课程(第一年逻辑学,第二年物理学,第三年形而上学,第四年数学与伦理学),已经把当时"西洋哲学"之全部内容包含完了。《灵言蠡勺》分四篇,一论灵魂之体,二论灵魂之能,三论灵魂之尊,四论灵魂所向美好之情,是晚明一部专门介绍西洋"灵魂"学说之哲学典籍。这些书在中国之刻印,正值"西洋近代哲学"之发源期,它们没有把"西洋近代哲学"介绍到中国来,但却把"西洋近代哲学"之前的"西洋哲学"介绍到中国来了。近代以前"西洋哲学"之完整框架,已经在弗.培根活动的那时节,出现在晚明中国学术界。     

“A Beckon to the Makings,Workings and Doings of Human Beings”: The Critical Pragmatism of John Forester

John Forester's important research project of developing a critical pragmatist approach to planning and policy analysis now spans two decades. Common themes that give direction and coherence to his project are, first, a new view of public planning as the restructuring of communication between stakeholders with divergent and conflicting interests and large inequalities in power and influence; second, a redefinition of the role of the planner away from a handmaiden of power to a hands‐on professional who fosters inclusive, participatory forms of collective action; and, finally, a deliberate concern with the micropolitics of planning that enables participants to broaden their full potential for democratic transformation within the context of strong, enduring inequalities in agenda‐setting and decision‐making power. This review traces the roots of Forester's project in pragmatist thought and in particular themes from Emersonian moral philosophy, adding a notion of “critical” to Forester's radical pluralist stance. Forester subscribes to John Dewey's argument for democracy, which inherently requires diversity to arrive at warranted truth. For Forester, the core task of a planner is to safeguard the participation of those normally excluded from decision making by institutionalized inequalities.     

Understanding the changing fortunes of metropolitan neighborhoods, 1980 to 1990

Abstract

This article develops a model that relates decadal changes in neighborhood poverty rates to metropolitan‐wide economic changes and the neighborhood's demographic profile, predetermined poverty rate, and locational characteristics. The model is estimated for the 1980–1990 period using metropolitan census tracts as proxies for neighborhoods. This national sample of tracts is stratified into predominantly white, African‐American, Hispanic, and mixed subsamples.

Results indicate that only a few variables consistently predict growth in neighborhood poverty: overall job availability; the age composition of neighborhood residents; the proportion of nonmarried households; and the neighborhood's 1979 poverty rate. Other variables have distinctly different coefficients depending on the racial‐ethnic subsample. These coefficients include segregation, welfare benefits, the location of manufacturing employment, and availability of automobiles. We conclude that studies that focus solely on African‐American poverty neighborhoods fail to recognize common patterns across all neighborhoods and to discern unique features of neighborhoods inhabited predominantly by non‐African Americans.     

Deleuze and the liberal tradition: normativity,freedom and judgement

This paper is a critical review article of Paul Patton's book, Deleuze and the Political , and analyzes the relationship between Deleuze and the 'liberal' tradition of political philosophy. It focuses on three concepts drawn from the liberal tradition - normativity, freedom and judgment - and in each case shows how these concepts are capable of being transformed in light of Deleuze's philosophy. For Deleuze, a truly 'normative' principle must be a principle of creation as well as critique: it must not only provide norms for condemning abuses of power, but also a means for transforming norms that have themselves become abuses of power. From a Deleuzian perspective, the normative is thus seen as the condition for the production of the new. The liberal notion of 'negative freedom' in turn finds itself transformed into the stronger notion of 'critical freedom' (Tully), which entails the freedom to critique and create, to transform (and not merely pursue) one's own interest and desires. This entails, finally, an exercise of a kind of judgement outside pre-existing rules or norms that would be truly creative of the new (e.g. the production of new rights). A concluding section of the concept of the 'social imaginary’ shows how Deleuze's work might contribute to a transformation and rejuvenation of the liberal tradition itself.     

Constructing a decolonized world city for consumption: discourses on Hong Kong Disneyland and their implications

The paper argues that, under the globalized economy, state power is far from diminishing. I study how the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government officials in 1999 developed “competition-development” discourse and “disappearing-world-city” discourse to persuade the public to approve the unequal and non-transparent Hong Kong–Disney deal for setting up the Hong Kong Disneyland (HKDL). I also examine how newspaper reports have circulated and have reinforced these two pairs of political discourses in wider popular discourse. I further reveal, in the post-colonial context of HongKong, how the HKDL project functions to accomplish decolonization tasks and to reshape Hong Kong as a consumption-based tourist spot instead of a citizen-based participatory community.     

Comment on Kerry D. Vandell's “FHA restructuring proposals: Alternatives and implications”

Abstract

New Orleans, a highly segregated city with low homeownership, experienced a tremendous number of housing foreclosures between 1985 and 1990. This study highlights the process and impact of foreclosure in the urban housing market, which contributes to an understanding of their impact on the spatial structure of the city. Two aspects of foreclosure are examined: the differential impacts of foreclosure on low‐income and African‐American householders and changes in socioeconomic conditions (neighborhood change and the spatial structure of the city) resulting from foreclosure.

Conventional wisdom holds that urban neighborhood transformation is driven largely by white flight. The data presented in this article suggest a counterhypoth‐esis. Middle‐income professional whites employed in businesses impacted by recession who had recently bought housing with high loan‐to‐value ratios were forced to sell or have their houses foreclosed upon. The depressed market, in turn, made such housing affordable to middle‐class blacks interested in homeownership. Thus, black economic opportunity, rather than white flight, dramatically transformed the racial composition of many New Orleans East neighborhoods.     

An Afrocentric exploration of Jacob Zuma's anti Apartheid stance: The question of Israeli–Palestinian struggle

In this article, the author utilizes interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis to analyse the state of South Africa–Israel relations under the Zuma‐led African National Congress (ANC). The author ground roots this article on Afrocentricity as the alternative theoretical framework to identify the position of the ANC in relation to the unfolding events in Israel and broadly analyse this position in order to make sense of it. This is done within the context of the Zuma‐led ANC in order to tease out major contradictions, which characterizes the administration of Zuma's stance on attested Apartheid Israel. The central question engaged with in this article is to determine whether political and ideological counterstatements to those the ANC communicated, by some of the opposition political parties such as African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), had any major implications on South Africa's foreign policy on the Apartheid Israel. In this article, the author argues extensively that Zuma's foreign policy on Israel can best be understood when located into his entire term as president of South Africa and the NASREC resolution of 2017.     

Pretty faces,marginal races: Predicting election outcomes using trait assessments of British parliamentary candidates

The conventional wisdom on Western European politics leads us to believe that all the “action” lies with parties, because the unified parliamentary delegations in Western Europe draw voters' attention to parties' policies and images. Though British elections take place under a single member district plurality system, British parties, like their continental counterparts, are highly centralised and feature disciplined parliamentary delegations. Despite the strong ties between British candidates and their parties, we demonstrate that perceptions of candidates' personal attributes can be used to predict general election outcomes. Using a computer-based survey where subjects are asked to evaluate real British candidates using only rapidly determined first impressions of facial images, we successfully predict outcomes from the 2010 general election. Moreover, we find that perceptions of candidates' relative attractiveness are particularly useful for predicting outcomes in marginal constituencies.