Tradition
African & Africana
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How would you tell a wise elder from a well-stocked memory? Odera Oruka’s problem, revisited
Odera Oruka went out to rural Kenya to talk with elders and recorded their answers to questions about God, justice, death and the good life. He drew a line between folk sages, who voice the received wisdom of their community well, and…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga3 replies -
Freire’s “banking” model, seen from inside a capoeira roda
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes "banking" education: the teacher deposits knowledge, the students receive, file and store it. Against it he sets problem-posing education, where teacher and students investigate together, and the teacher is also taught. In capoeira Angola…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Sartre’s “look” and Fanon on being fixed by another’s gaze
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes the moment of being caught looking through a keyhole: suddenly I am an object for someone else, and I feel shame. The look of the other gives me an outside I can't control. Fanon's Black…
Started by Claire Dubois2 replies -
Ubuntu and personhood: Menkiti’s communitarian view
I'm finally reading the African philosophy my physics course 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 Anyaoha4 replies -
The firing squad and my loan defaults: when does surviving need explaining?
In credit scoring we have a problem called reject inference. We only ever see repayment data for people we approved. The people we rejected never got a loan, so we never learn whether they would have repaid. If you're not careful, your…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
Last week my son sent me an article that said most of what any of us knows, we know only because somebody told us. I laughed, then I thought about it while I was splitting pods. I have grown cocoa for thirty…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Data is not knowledge: what Dretske’s account says about my credit-scoring models
At work we decide who gets a small loan from patterns in phone use: how regularly someone tops up airtime, how many contacts they call, how their balance moves through the month. Our marketing calls this "knowing the customer". I've been reading…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Capoeira is a game, a fight, a dance and a memory: which of Caillois’s boxes does it go in?
In capoeira Angola we don't say we fight. We say we play: jogar capoeira. Two people enter the roda, the circle of players and musicians, and the berimbau sets the pace. Somebody once told me Huizinga thought play was older than culture,…
Started by Jorge Bonfim5 replies -
The buyer at the gate offers more than the cooperative: does a promise bind when breaking it pays?
I sell my cocoa through a farmers' cooperative. At the start of the season every member promises to bring their beans to the cooperative, which in return gives us credit for fertiliser, a fair weight on the scale, and a share of…
Started by Akosua Mensah6 replies -
A company can be sued but cannot be tripped over. In what sense does it exist?
Last month I sat through four hearings in my family's case against a company. It had a registered office, a seal, a board, and a lawyer almost as tiresome as ours. What it did not have was a body. You cannot trip…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Wiredu’s consensus politics and the epistemology of disagreement: is agreement evidence?
Kwasi Wiredu argued that traditional Akan political decision-making aimed at consensus rather than majority rule. Councils of elders would talk, sometimes for a long time, until they reached a decision everyone could accept. He proposed that modern African states might learn from…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?
I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Keep the losing opinion on the page: what the Talmud could teach an online forum
The more time I spend in online philosophy forums, including this one, the more I think the rabbis solved some problems we keep failing at. Three practices I'd love to see here. Record the minority view. The Mishnah asks why it bothers…
Started by Eliana Halpern6 replies -
My model has ‘the average borrower’. Nobody is the average borrower. What am I talking about?
I build credit-scoring models for a mobile-money company in Nairobi. Every week I write sentences like "the average borrower in this segment repays within 23 days" or "the typical applicant has 2.4 active SIM cards". Everyone understands them. No borrower repays in…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga5 replies -
Orí and the Stoic cylinder: does a destiny you chose make you more free or less?
In Yoruba thought, before birth each person chooses an orí, literally a "head", meaning the inner self that carries one's destiny. One of the words for destiny, àkúnlẹ̀yàn, means something like "that which was chosen kneeling". You chose it, but you cannot…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
Why “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology
This term our prison reading class ran a short course on restorative justice. Part of it was writing a letter to the person you harmed. The letters were not meant to be sent unless the other person agreed, but the drafting was…
Started by Brian Otieno Ouma4 replies -
Correlation is not causation, I tell my team. But what exactly is the missing ingredient?
Our credit-scoring models find patterns: people who top up airtime at regular times repay loans more often. Everyone on my team can recite "correlation is not causation". Nobody can say what causation adds. It matters practically. If regular top-ups merely correlate with…
Started by Wanjiru Njenga4 replies -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s impossible-army test, applied to the stories that go viral
There is a passage in the Muqaddimah where Ibn Khaldun complains about earlier chroniclers. They recorded enormous army numbers because a source had recorded them, without asking whether such an army could be fed, watered, marched and supplied. His point is that…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
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 replies -
Four ventilators, seven patients: is triage consequentialism with a human face, or something else?
During the worst weeks of an outbreak, our hospital in Addis Ababa had four ventilators and, on one night, seven patients who needed them. We used a triage protocol: allocate to those most likely to survive with treatment, and, among similar cases,…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
Thirty-four years in a GP surgery: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
I managed a GP surgery in Leith for thirty-four years, and the question I heard most often across the desk in the last decade was some version of "she isn't the person she was". It was said by husbands, daughters, neighbours, sometimes…
Started by Alistair Gow5 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
What is a genuine consultation for? Consensus, shura and the contractualist test
Contractualism's core question, "could you justify this to everyone it affects?", is usually treated as a test you run in your head. I've been wondering what it looks like as a practice. Wiredu argued that traditional Akan politics was organised around consensus…
Started by Kwame Asante4 replies -
Genealogy and the genetic fallacy: can the history of a value ever count against it?
Every introductory logic course warns against the genetic fallacy: where a belief came from does not settle whether it is true. Your racist uncle may believe the earth is round, and it is. And yet a whole style of moral philosophy works…
Started by Johanna Reinhardt5 replies -
Anton Wilhelm Amo’s impassive mind: a better dualism than Descartes’s?
When the philosophy club I run at school reaches mind and body, I always start with Anton Wilhelm Amo, the philosopher born near Axim on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken to Germany as a child, educated at Halle and Wittenberg, and…
Started by Kwame Asante5 replies -
Was gender always the organising category? Oyěwùmí and the Yoruba argument
I keep returning to a book that divides everyone I discuss it with: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women (1997). Her claim is that in precolonial Yoruba society, the primary principle of social organisation was not gender but seniority, relative age. She…
Started by Titilayo Adeyemi6 replies -
‘The Fact of Blackness’ or ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’? What a translation choice did to Fanon
Rereading Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I noticed something I'd missed for years: the fifth chapter has two different titles in English. Fanon's French is ‘L'expérience vécue du Noir’. The 1967 translation called it ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The 2008 translation calls…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies