Concept tag
#personhood
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Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics degree never mentioned. The Nguni saying behind ubuntu is usually translated as "a person is a person through other persons". John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) put the idea in the form: I…
Started by Emeka Nwosu4 replies144 views -
A person through other persons: what ubuntu actually asks of us
Ubuntu is printed on mugs and quoted in constitutional judgments; underneath the slogan is a demanding claim about what a person is, and African philosophers disagree sharply about how far to take it.
Started by Thandeka Mokoena0 replies102 views -
A person through other persons: is ubuntu an ethics of care?
Ubuntu and care ethics both put relationships at the centre of morality. Working with both in human-rights law has convinced me they are allies, not twins.
Started by Thandeka Mokoena0 replies54 views -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
I teach classical Chinese at a senior high school in Taipei. My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies158 views -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies143 views -
Thirty-four years as a GP: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I was a GP in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes with grief and sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies211 views -
‘Does life have meaning?’ is a recent European question most traditions would not ask
When my students in Accra first meet existentialism, a few of them find it thrilling and most find it puzzling. "Why would life need to have a meaning," one asked me, "when it already has a place?" That is my thesis, put…
Started by Kwame Asante6 replies238 views -
“You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
I'm a retired teacher reading the Analects slowly with a commentary, and I keep meeting a claim in the secondary literature that I can't quite find in the text. The claim, associated with Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont and their "role ethics",…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies200 views -
Soul as the form of a living body: does Aristotle help me teach the Igbo idea of chi, or get in the way?
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu. Every year we read Aristotle's De Anima, where the soul is defined as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially has life. The soul is not a ghost inside the body; it…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies190 views -
‘Benevolence’ is a better translation of ren than its critics allow
I've been reading the Analects with D. C. Lau's translation, which uses "benevolence" throughout. I keep reading on this site, and in introductions, that this is a false friend: that ren names a condition of full humanity, not a disposition to kindness.…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies175 views