The basic concern of the paper is to state what the practice of African Philosophy is and should be in view of the contemporary dismal situation of postcolonial Africa. The attempt is to articulate a conception of African philosophy as a critical un-packing of the ideas and conceptions that legitimated European expansion and to this day–having been internalized by the Westernized African elite–sanction Western hegemony. And so, along with the critique of Eurocentrism the paper explores what it means to “return to the source” and to reclaim our “generic human identity.” The aim, in all of this, is to articulate a conception of African philosophy as a critical and combative hermeneutics of the contemporary African situation.

The essay focuses on the concept of mimesis Theodor W. Adorno developed in his Aesthetic Theory. After outlining key motifs of Adorno’s critical theory so as to provide the overall intellectual context, it explains why for Adorno mimesis enacts an ethical relation to the (non-identical) other. Mimesis for Adorno, the paper suggests, counters the violence that reason inflicts on the objects of its cognition by reconstituting the latter in terms of reason’s concepts. The essay discusses mimesis also in relation to other aesthetic concepts that dialectically interanimate in Adorno’s explication. It ends with very provisional thoughts on the possibilities, or lack thereof, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory offers for the aesthetic practices of historically marginalized constituencies.

This reflection on the phenomenological analysis of empathy according to Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein suggests a basic structure for getting to know and retain other consciousness within a single unitary sphere of consciousness. Empathy provides the access to an other that does not absorb the other’s stream of consciousness. Rather, empathy is the possibility for the intersubjective intention of a shared world of space and time. Unless the I inculcates other consciousness within itself, the I cannot recognize itself as one among others.

Indian philosophy of Yoni-Linga may be examined as a parallel to the Chinese philosophy of “Yin-Yang.” This essay will compare the similarities and distinctions between the two kinds of dichotomies through a theoretical formulation: certain conceptual, analytical and cross-cultural perspectives. The study will be focused on semiologieal, aesthetical, ontological and theological comparisons between these two of the most famous pairs of conceptual antonyms which have been developed by later Sino-Hindu philosophies and theologies as human worldviews widened and deepened with Eastern civilization.

This essay analyzes the representations of time and memory in Holocaust literature through a comparative study of Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s three stories “A Scrap of Time,” “A Second Scrap of Time,” and “Traces.” Although both the writers make use of time and memory to represent the Holocaust, their ways of representation vary significantly. Memory and time are used in Delbo to show the timelessness in complex layers of memory and to recreate a reality through inventive narrative style. Whereas, in Fink, they are used to delineate the scraps of time in the ruins of memory and to create a tragic domestic reality through conventional narrativity. Moreover, this essay cautions against the danger of misrepresentation of memory as “amnesia,” often represented in the canonical postmodernist views of memory.

The paper reconstructs Hegel’s repudiation of any kind of transcendent metaphysics. Hegel argues that transcendent metaphysics is dialectically incoherent because it mistakes its own reflection for an absolute independent of reflection. Hence, it is subject to a reification of philosophical thought. This entails that the relation between logic and philosophy of nature in Hegel must not be interpreted as any kind of emanation. Otherwise, Hegel would himself be subject to his effective critique of transcendent metaphysics.