The phenomenon of widespread stigmatization of victims of deadly, or previously incurable, diseases in African traditional societies would appear to pragmatically contradict the humanistic values of communalism associated with those societies. However, the implied contradiction of the phenomenon, which borders on irrationality and injustice, seems amenable to a rational explanation when one considers the thick ontological underpinnings of African traditional communalism along with their epistemic significance. The justification of the proffered explanation, the paper avers, is made clearer when it is taken as a paradigm of Jurgen Habermas’ theory of (communicative) rationality and action. Against this background, the paper argues that such global social problemsas terrorism and internet scams may well be justifiable if Habermas’ strategic and contextual models of rationality and action are communicatively valid.

The act of discrimination against the female sex is an undeniable phenomenon in virtually all human societies, though the severity varies from one society to another. It is against this backdrop that this paper is aimed at exposing the inadequate nature of the primogeniture rule of inheritance towards the female, as practised by the Esan people. The paper tests the validity of the logic on which the disinheritance of females rests, and discovers that it is invalid as it violates such moral principles as the categorical imperative and utilitarianism, among others. It therefore advocates for possessive right for females for the sake of justice and equity.

The article aims to delve into the ethical dimension of Ubuntu philosophy, which is an African philosophy that reverberates in other cultures and in various forms, thus exemplifying its universality and universalizability. In this dimension, it tries to re-examine the notion of ethics in relation to morals/morality, including “is” and “ought”, with reference to the human person. Moreover, Ubuntu philosophy is articulated and communicated in the maxim that is an essential component inthe lived experiences of the Bantu-speaking African community: “A person is a person through other persons.” With this, the article integrates some related European and Asian philosophies, considering the fact that Ubuntu philosophy endures as it is tenaciously upheld and edified alongside its implications.

Based on the fact that military establishments have historically played a major role in the transformation of societies, this paper argues that the Nigerian Armed Forces need to be credible and modernized in order to be able to fulfil their constitutional responsibilities. They can do this by providing the necessary support, in terms of professional expertise and administrative efficiency, for the successful implementation of Nigeria’s Vision 2020 and its strategic Seven-Point Agenda. By supporting the democratic institutions in the successful implementation of Vision 2020, the armed forces would have quickened the transformation of Nigeria intoan industrialized democratic nation that could compete favourably with its counterparts in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The paper challenges the dominant view of the individual’s place in an African (Esan) structure of Being or culture as one cast in the midst, and subject to the operations of (spiritual) forces, which are independently real and existent and can make or mar the individual’s existence based on the kind of relationship he/she establishes with them. The individual is expected to have reverence and awe for these forces; hence he/she is consistently striving to fit into the established structure of Being for his/her own good. The paper asserts that this is not a fair situation because it is the individual who conceptualizes and constructs such an idea of Being to account for his/her perplexing, multifaceted experiences and his/her ontological wonder; the individual is the fundament of Being; he/sheilluminates Being. Thus, though the structure of Being in which the Esan finds himself/herself playing important roles in his/her life and in the society, he/she must not always strive to fit into it, particularly when it outlasts its suitability for answering fundamental and baffling questions that keep confronting the individual in his/her existence. Since Being keeps unfolding and our knowledge of the Being-process is never complete, the individual must therefore consistently revisit, re-conceptualize and improve on the prevalent conception or structure of Being in order to account for current experiences that confront him/her.

The article is a bold extraction of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) value of traditional African education, attempting to capture the essence of what education made a young person be when he/she qualified for marriage. At the marriage stage an adult was given the green light to become the head of a family and manager of a home, and permitted make all the decisions touching on the family and, at the same time, take care of the community and country at large. In that situation, Prof. F.X. Gichuru has identified the qualifications as five pillars, viz. self-discipline, self-drive, integrity, harmony and patriotism, qualities that have been eroded in Kenya today by modernization and westernization, rendering the people generally irresponsible and non-accountable. The author proposes the five pillars as a solution to this problem, thereby creating a new accountable and responsible people, a new nation and a new leadership quality, targeting the young as the people to culturally transform in the space of twenty years. The African Cultural Regeneration Institute the author founded, now accredited by UNESCO to advise on ICH in Africa, has been proposed as the institution to champion this transformation of the national ethos of Kenya, starting with an initial action of two years. The success of the model will serve other countries of Africa and, indeed, the global community, in showing how ICH can be used to solve the challenges of modern society.

This paper focuses on the problem of conflicts that are sociopolitical in nature. It thus agrees that conflict is a product of human interaction, but its degeneration into violence is avoidable and consequently detestable. The repressive, depressive and destructive functions of socio-political conflict are seen as products of the tension that exists between personal values and social values among the different individuals and groups that make up the nation of Nigeria, especially in the veryattempt at defining national security, social peace and political stability. This contretemps undermines the success of democracy in Nigeria; it is more problematic when democracy as a form of government is discovered to harbour conflict in its very attempts at ensuring an enduring social order. The paper thus advocates for a fundamental socio-political reconstruction based on the cherished values of African traditional thought that promotes social cohesion, respect for the dignity of the human person, social justice and economic growth. The philosophical methods of analysis and conceptual clarification, in addition to empirical methods, are employed.

Self-discovery leads to the development of the ethics of self-mastery. Many ethical systems prescribe how the individual could attain self-mastery by means of critical self-examination or self-analysis. Once such critical self-examination or self-analysis is successfully carried out, the individual begins to use himself, his personal preferences, as the standard of what is right or wrong. This is the background to the Confucian, Kantian and Existentialist ethics of categorical imperatives. Even in religious ethical systems that attribute the source of the moral law to divine authority, the individual still has to take a leap of faith to discover God's purpose for his existence, which he then internalizes. In the final analysis, any ethics that truly works must issue forth from the self. Hence self-mastery is the absolutely fundamental premise upon which to erect a sound moral character.

I attempt to rebut the following standard objections against cultural relativism: 1. It is self-defeating for a cultural relativist to take the principle of tolerance as absolute; 2. There are universal moral rules, contrary to what cultural relativism claims; 3. If cultural relativism were true, Hitler’s genocidal actions would be right, social reformers would be wrong to go against their own culture, moral progress would be impossible, and an atrocious crime could be made moral by forming aculture which approves of it; 4. Cultural relativism is silent about how large a group must be in order to be a culture, and which culture we should follow when we belong to two cultures with conflicting moralities.

The well-known label of “theater of the absurd” is based on the Aristotelian logic of the nonincluded middle, the common interpretation being that of the chaotic and irrational character of the universe, human destiny, and language. However, we propose another view on the subject, relying on the discoveries of quantum physics, the main principles of transdisciplinarity, and the literary theory of the possible worlds. We applied these ideas to some of Eugene Ionesco’s fa-mousplays, concluding that absurd becomes an irrelevant notion if analyzed in this perspective.

In order to properly understand the period which begins at the end of the '60s last century, this must not be described anymore using the traditional categories of culture and politics. Facing events like those in May '68 in France, the Italian revolution in 1979, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the attack against the Twin Towers from New York in September 2001, we are all tempted to say “impossible, yet real”. These events had immense consequences upon the individual and collective life, provoking radical upturns of traditional values and of the way people relate to these values. Thus, a new form of historicity was born, having as characteristics the perception of some phenomena both as miracles and traumas, because they seem impossible to explain rationally. In this text both the axiological mutations that occurred in the history of the last decades and the meanings of these mutations are presented in a personal way.

Following the distinctions made by Susan Pearce between souvenir collections, fetishism collections and systematic collections, the present study will underline the idea that, for Walter Benjamin, collection was a way to reconnect with the past and to reconstruct an image of what was destroyed. Every object collected by Benjamin was for him a souvenir of the European cultural identity.

In order to redefine barbarism, a hermeneutical framework is needed. The contemporary socio-cultural context and the transformations that have occurred during the last decades represent the premises for a new barbarism. In redefining barbarism, its relationship with civilization and culture should be first considered. Cultural mutations, together with the historical and political phenomena involved in contemporary civilizations’ reorganization as set forth in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Samuel P. Huntington), offer the theoretical background for the discourse wherein barbarism could revive and take an appearance other than the common one. The necessity of reinterpreting barbarism is backed up by other variables such as its structural inconsistency and weakness, which most definitely diminish its impact on individuals. Following the 20th century philosophical tendency of harshly critical thinking, all these point to the current weak character of barbarism. Thus so-called “weak barbarism” is reinterpreted evolutionally for a better reception among contemporary cultural philosophy, axiological and ethical studies.

According to the French philosopher Alain, art must regain its existence as a real and solid object to counteract deceitful imagination. In line with this view is Yves Michaud’s description of the “gaseous” state of contemporary art. Paradoxically, the wide circulation of many ‘artistic’ products, destined to be consumed and invoke emotions, does not indicate that we are in presence of an important affirmation of ethical and aesthetical values. As it were, the proliferation of aesthetic objects has destroyed the symbolic value of art. The Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia has underlined how the disappearance of the axiological dimension has led art towards imposture and under the yoke of imagination, which both assist the strategies of the demonic. At this point a question arises: is it possible to eradicate the power of the demonic and evil from our existential condition? According to Jung it’s impossible. In Castelli’s view, the union between art, evil and the demonic has characterized the artistic panorama of the sixteenth century. In the twentieth-century, we owe to Hermann Broch – who brought the raising power of kitsch under philosophical scrutiny − the idea of a complicity between degraded art and evil. Not all scholars agreed that Kitsch represented evil. Many philosophers argued that the growing popularity of Kitsch among the masses posed a problem concerning the demand for art. For this reason, philosophical speculation had better not take a Manichean attitude and reject Kitsch outright, on the contrary, Kitsch should be studied with the aim of transforming the “hunger for art”, of which it is a manifestation, into a desire for ethical and artistic values.

Public Art has represented a rising artistic genre for the last few decades. Art abandoned museums and galleries to conquer the public space, a fact which gave birth to passionate controversies that cannot be approached only in terms of paradigms of art history. Taking Richard Serra’s controversial sculpture, Tilted Arc, as an example, this article aims at tracing, by means of an interdisciplinary approach, the challenges that public art has been confronted with in the contemporary city.

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of Western (European) technical civilization on regional cultures in Nigeria, using Igboland in South-EasternNigeria as a test case. It begins with a discussion of some general features of Western technical civilization whose evolution has been profoundly influenced by technological advances in Europe and her cultural colonies in North America and elsewhere. Consequences of the contact between Western technical civilization and traditional Igbo culture are also examined. The paper concludes by discussing the challenging problem of Africa’s contribution to technical civilization.

Theoreticians of civilization have defined a series of anomalies of the European culture as cultural maladies. But this notion was used from author to author with very different meanings, being vaguely defined or used as a simple metaphor. In the ideological discourse of the Third Reich the references to the maladies of the European culture are frequently correlated to the references to the savior Reich. The present study suggests the concept of axiological malady in order to designate more precisely a series of unhealthy phenomenon of the European culture, for instance the puerilism.

The paper adopts philosophical research methodologies of conceptual clarification, critical analysis, and extensive argumentation. It attempts to jointly employ African metaphysical and epistemological grounds to address the problem of finding appropriate justification for reparations for Africa on the issue of past slavery and slave trade. The paper states that the crux of the problem is how to formulate a coherent theoretical framework, which provides a strong connection between the direct victims of slavery and slave trade and their descendants in Africa, on the basis of which the latter could justifiably claim for restitutive justice against the wrong done to the former. Western traditional accounts usually define reparations such that the concept only intelligibly applies to moral relations among contemporaries, not between the departed and the living. This reasoning, therefore, forecloses any moral relations between the departed and the living, making it morally unjustifiable for the latter to claim for restitutive justice on behalf of the former. However, this study re-thinks the concept of reparations, using two core areas of African philosophy. African metaphysics recognizes that an experiential being is ontologically connected to the other, that is, any other experiential being and spirits, inclusive of ancestors. This relationship also invariably closes the epistemological gap between the experiential and non-experiential worlds, making them a unity within African cosmology. Situated within the present study, the foregoing shows that the living could justifiably claim for restitutive justice on behalf of the departed, the direct victims of slavery and slave trade.

Ecological crisis is one of the major worries at 21st century. The ecological damages already caused are severe, and many species including human beings are facing serious challenge to survive. The cross-cultural worldviews could be a promising approach to solve this global problem. Every culture reflects some core values but we need to recognize and consider them. A comparison between cultures shed more lights since in this way we can learn and rectify our own values. The relation between self and nature is pre-historical, exists before the civilization begins. However, new knowledge and technology interrupted this relation throughout the history and as a result catastrophic events increased. This paper analyzes self-nature relation in the Western and Eastern cultural traditions. It argues that the common cultural value ‘identification’ can be demonstrated to build up a harmonious co-existence with nature.

A madhouse can be regarded as the realm where concepts do not have a constantly changing topos. This autarchic sanctuary has no “patients” and is a true malady of the soul. An “engaged” philosophy is one which deals with the selection of concept consumption. On behalf of the healthiness of the spirit, the authorial voices have engaged themselves in a therapeutic writing. ”The world” had to be cured, the maladies of the soul were a threat everywhere. The concepts, qua therapeutic agents have taken on this role. But if the malady itself would be constitutive of the spirit, a medicina mundi through which the creation of concepts is a Genesis, a permanent naming is offered as an alternative for the “healing” of the spirit. This is the thesis through which in Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit, the philosopher Constantin Noica chose to portray six maladies of which the soul would be “suffering” and which make the object of this paper.