Free space in the academy

“Academic freedom” does not mean the same thing to everyone. There are, to be sure, a few who argue against it. Sandra Korn, in the Harvard Crimson last year, argued that we should abandon academic freedom in favor of academic justice. She argues that we have reached a consensus on issues such as racism, classism and sexism, and so to promote racist or classist or sexist views under the guise of “academic freedom” is to ignore a higher standard and more importantly to ignore the fact that academic freedom is always couched in political realities, and is never the dispassionate exercise of reason and the pursuit of knowledge. It always serves an agenda, and so if that is the case, it should serve the agenda of justice, particularly justice for disadvantaged and marginalized people. Her online article, when I last looked, had almost 1300 comments, and had inspired commentary from a number of other publications. You can imagine the range of these comments and reactions: everything from “this is long overdue” to the newest favorite insult circulating the internet, “she’s just another Social Justice Warrior (SJW).

Dialogue And Listening

When we think about dialogue, we often implicitly assume that we are thinking about speaking. We are faced, though, with the breakdown of the ‘rules’ of dialogue, resulting in a situation that has more in common with war than with a marketplace of ideas. I raise the question of the other side of dialogue, listening, as having an active role in constructing the ecosystem of thought in which dialogue can happen. Listening is difficult to compel, hard to measure, and easy to mischaracterize, but it nevertheless is crucial in establishing the conditions for productive intellectual exchange

Reason And Rationality In Eze’S On Reason

The title of Emmanuel Eze’s fmal, posthumously published book uses the words “reason” and “rationality” in a maimer that might suggest they are interchangeable. I would like to suggest that we not Reat them as the same, but rather tease out a difference in emphasis and reference between the two. In African philosophy, the problem of reason is really two separate problems, the first of which I will call the “problem of reason” (that is, the question of whether there are diverse forms of reason or only one universal form) and the second the “problem of rationality” (that is, the question of whether everyone has the capacity to deploy reason past what mimicry or programming makes possible). Both of these problems are addressed by Eze’s schema for forms of reason. He identifies several forms, but focuses on “ordinary reason”, which allows all the other forms to operate. Ordinary reason also makes rationality possible, that is, the culturally specific yet emergent way of navigating forms of reason. Reason is necessarily diverse, because its multiple forms are deployed differently by different rationalities. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

The Edges Of (African) Philosophy

This chapter aims to reposition African philosophy as it exists in the minds of many in the West, from being something that has to be accommodated to being the living memory of philosophy itself. Philosophy instinctively explores its edges. No matter which philosophic tradition one inhabits, practitioners are usually taught that philosophy is about questions. Great questions, big questions, profound, perhaps perennial questions. And yet, the further these practitioners proceed into research, the less they behave as if their questions are actually the central focus of philosophy. Creating concepts means, in part, questioning people\u27s questions. They are, of course, far from some discussions of concepts which would regard them as mental representations and nothing else, or solely as abstract entities. This is not a version of concepts which assumes that they pick out features of the world. The intention is different. Being stupid is a rather specific state of affairs