By Alex Lenferna Concern for poverty in Africa is coming from the most unexpected places lately: the boardrooms of fossil fuels companies. Multimillionaire fossil fuel execs, like Exxon’s Rex Tillerson and Peabody’s Charles Meintjes, are painting themselves as Africa’s saviours, claiming that fossil fuels are the answer to Africa’s poverty and development problems. The often […]
philosophy
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Nietzsche, Heidegger and creativity
In the course of preparing for a doctoral seminar on Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, I was struck, once again, by the creative thinking on the part of these epoch-making figures, as well as its implications for creativity. Freud’s creativity is evident, to mention only one thing, in the fact that, as far […]
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Fanon and the question of ‘white theory’
It is undeniable that Frantz Fanon identifies European, or “white” culture as racist to the core. It is equally undeniable that he affirmed the likelihood of the discourses of knowledge emanating from this culture being equally racist. It stands to reason that a culture, which regards itself as being superior to all others, given its […]
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Why people are such inherently conflicted beings
While preparing for a seminar on the roots of contemporary theory among the ancient Greeks, the Hellenistic Romans and early Christian thinkers, I was struck by the way that the different, and divergent, strands of the cultural legacy of the West (as well as of other cultures globally which share some of these roots) explain […]
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What ‘wisdom’?
Can humanity today show itself capable of developing a way of life that may be called, against all odds, one marked by WISDOM? This seems highly unlikely, given the state of the world economy (which has a lot to do with short-sightedness and wastefulness), and more importantly, the planetary ecology. Fact is, humans have shown […]
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“Philosopher” Stephen Hawking pronounces philosophy dead
At the recent philosophy conference at UCT in Cape Town, philosopher Callum Scott, from UNISA, presented an intriguing paper – “The death of philosophy: A response to Stephen Hawking” – on the 2010 book by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam Books). In a nutshell, Scott offered a critique of Hawking […]
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Ubuntu, a cliché not a philosophy
Ubuntu, like many other words and concepts one comes across at a young age, has been a part of my reservoir of knowledge for so large a part of my life that it is impossible, save with the intervention of hypnotherapy, to pinpoint the first time I heard or understood it. One rarely came across […]