scholarly journals “Healing the World”: The Divine Role of Africa-Centered Metaphysics

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-101
Author(s):  
Augustine Maruva Tirivangana ◽  

This paper argues that Africa is the cradle of civilization. That civilization evolved out of an understanding of the cosmos as well as the valorization of the metaphysical author of cosmogony. The paper asserts that appreciation of metaphysics created a stable and balanced cosmos. Civilization then meant living in harmony with fellow mankind, with the environment and with the cosmos as a whole. The paper suggests this was based on a clear understanding of the interdependence between the departed as well as the organic relationship between man, animal and nature. Now there is a gap between civilization and technological advancement. The metaphysics of unhu/Ubuntu as enshrined in the living law of Ma’at sank under the weight of capitalism; that pursuit of profit regardless of any moral price. Universal politics is now dictated by the desires of a few who stop at nothing to create a world order where humanity is reduced to a commodity. Wars and more wars have become the order of the day, threatening the whole world with extinction. This paper traces how Africa in particular has lost its metaphysical locus as a result of several foreign –induced imperial interventions culminating in the present intellectual, moral and cultural cacophonies that tear Africans apart. The paper argues that Africa can restore its glory as the citadel of civilization by returning to the “the way”. It is hoped that the whole world would also take a leaf, as it has done before, from Africa’s return to “the way”. The paper contends that the metaphysics of unhu/Ubuntu has this divine role to heal the world of various types of sickness: social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, psychological and material.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 93-100
Author(s):  
Gisa Jähnichen

The Sri Lankan Ministry of National Coexistence, Dialogue, and Official Languages published the work “People of Sri Lanka” in 2017. In this comprehensive publication, 21 invited Sri Lankan scholars introduced 19 different people’s groups to public readers in English, mainly targeted at a growing number of foreign visitors in need of understanding the cultural diversity Sri Lanka has to offer. This paper will observe the presentation of these different groups of people, the role music and allied arts play in this context. Considering the non-scholarly design of the publication, a discussion of the role of music and allied arts has to be supplemented through additional analyses based on sources mentioned by the 21 participating scholars and their fragmented application of available knowledge. In result, this paper might help improve the way facts about groups of people, the way of grouping people, and the way of presenting these groupings are displayed to the world beyond South Asia. This fieldwork and literature guided investigation should also lead to suggestions for ethical principles in teaching and presenting of culturally different music practices within Sri Lanka, thus adding an example for other case studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Piotr Urbanowicz

Summary In this text, I argue that there are numerous affinities between 19th century messianism and testimonies of UFO sightings, both of which I regarded as forms of secular millennialism. The common denominator for the comparison was Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment of the world” in the wake of the Industrial Revolution which initiated the era of the dominance of rational thinking and technological progress. However, the period’s counterfactual narratives of enchantment did not repudiate technology as the source of all social and political evil—on the contrary, they variously redefined its function, imagining a possibility of a new world order. In this context, I analysed the social projects put forward by Polish Romantics in the first half of the 19th century, with emphasis on the role of technology as an agent of social change. Similarly, the imaginary technology described by UFO contactees often has a redemptive function and is supposed to bring solution to humanity’s most dangerous problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-20
Author(s):  
Adriana Hoffmann Fernandes ◽  
Helenice Mirabelli Cassino

This article combines thoughts about childhood, visual culture and education. It is known that we live among multiple images that shape the way we see our reality, and researchers in the visual culture field investigate how this role is played out in our culture. The goal is to make some applications those ideas, to think about the relationship between the images and education. This article tries to grasp what visual culture is and in what ways presumptions about childhood generate and are generated by this association. It also discusses the genesis of these presumptions and the images they generate through a philosophical approach, questioning the role of education in a culture tied to the media, and about how children, who are familiar with multiple screens, presage a new visual literacy. We see how images play a fundamental role in the way children give meaning to the world around them and to themselves, in the context of their local culture. Given this context, it is necessary to consider how visual culture is tied to the elementary school, and what challenges confront the generation of wider and more creative ways to approach visual framing in children’s education.


Author(s):  
Julia S. Kharitonova ◽  
◽  
Larisa V. Sannikova ◽  

Nowadays, the law is being transformed as a regulator of relations. The idea of strengthe-ning the regulatory role of technologies in the field of streamlining public relations is making much headway in the world. This trend is most pronounced in the area of regulation of private relations. The way of such access to the market as crowdfunding is becoming increasingly widespread. The issuing of the so-called secured tokens is becoming popular for both small businesses and private investors. The trust in new ways of attracting investments is condi-tioned by the applied technology - the use of blockchain as a decentralized transparent data-base management system. Under these conditions, there is such a phenomenon as the democ-ratization of property relations. Every individual receives unlimited opportunities to invest via technologies. Thus, legal scholars all over the world face the question about the role of the law and law in these relations? We believe that we are dealing with such a worldwide trend of regulating public relations as the socialization of the law. Specific examples of issuing tokens in Russia and abroad show the main global trends in the transformation of private law. The platformization of economics leads to the tokenization and democratization of property relations. In this aspect, the aim of lawyers should be to create a comfortable legal environment for the implementation of projects aimed at democratizing property relations in Russia. The socialization of private law is aimed at achieving social jus-tice and is manifested in the creation of mechanisms to protect the rights of the weak party and rules to protect private investors. Globalization requires the study of both Russian and foreign law. To confirm their hypothesis, the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the legislation of Russia, Europe and the United States to identify the norms allowing to see the process of socialization of law in the above field. The generalization of Russian and foreign experience showed that when searching for proper legal regulation, the states elect one of the policies. In some countries, direct regulation of ICOs and related emission relations are being created, in others, it is about the extension of the existing legislation to a new changing tokenization relationship. The European Union countries are seeking to develop common rules to create a regulatory environment to attract investors to the crypto industry and protect them. Asian countries are predominantly developing national legislation in isolation from one another, but most of them are following a unified course to encourage investment in crypto assets while introducing strict rules against fraud on financial markets. The emphasis on the protection of the rights of investors or shareholders, token holders by setting a framework, including private law mechanisms, can be called common to all approaches. This is the aim of private law on the way to social justice.


Author(s):  
V. Sheinis

The world order based on Yalta and Potsdam decisions as well as on two nuclear superpowers infighting has filed as a history. What is coming up to take its place? A correlation between power and law in international policy, national sovereignty and supranational institutions, territorial integrity of states and the right of nations to self-determination, bloc infighting atavisms, so called "double standard" and international interventions – these are critical debating points that the author develops his own approach to. The role of the U.S. in world policy, and the foreign policy choice of Russia are also examined.


Author(s):  
Andrew Inkpin

This chapter clarifies the sense of world disclosure implied by a phenomenological conception of language. It takes the two main lessons of Heidegger’s discussion of realism and idealism in Being and Time to be that traditional debates are based on mistaken ontological presuppositions, and that there is no gap between the way the world appears ‘for us’ and the way it is ‘in itself’. Applying the second lesson to language, it shows how the mediation and constitutive role of language can be understood as genuinely disclosing the world without introducing a potentially refractive or distortive loss of contact with referents. Applying the first lesson, it contrasts the phenomenological conception of language developed here with some familiar forms of realism and nonrealism, arguing that by rejecting an inside-outside opposition it moves beyond such conventional alternatives.


2020 ◽  
pp. 13-42
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha

This chapter assesses the key role of the non-combatant or follower ranks in the history of sub-imperial drives exerted across the land and sea frontiers of India. The reliance of the War Office upon combatant and non-combatant detachments from the Indian Army, used in combination with units of the British Army, left an imprint upon the first consolidated Indian Army Act of 1911. From 1914 the inter-regional contests of the Government of India for territory and influence, such as those running along the Arabian frontiers of the Ottoman empire, folded into global war. Nevertheless the despatch of an Indian Expeditionary Force to Europe in August 1914 disrupted raced imaginaries of the world order. The second less publicized exercise was the sending of Indian Labor Corps and of humble horse and mule drivers to France in 1917-18. The colour bar imposed by the Dominions on Indian settlers had begun to complicate the utilisation of Indian labor and Indian troops on behalf of empire. Over 1919-21, as global conflict segued back into imperial militarism, a strong critique emerged in India against the unilateral deployment of Indian troops and military labor, on fiscal grounds, in protest against their use to suppress political life in India and to condemn the international order which their use sustained.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Eric Smith

Abstract Paul had a clear understanding of how his calling and his work mapped onto geography. In contexts where he felt that others were encroaching on his territory, as in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Paul could be very angry and defensive. Likewise, when Paul was writing to people in territories that he did not consider part of his purview, such as in Romans, he was deferential and submissive. In all three cases—in Galatians and 2 Corinthians when Paul was being defensive about his territory, and in Romans when he was being deferential—Paul used a particular word, κλίµα, to designate geography—a word he never used in any other context. This article puts this observation in conversation with ancient mapping, which relied on “process descriptions” of space and place rather than “state descriptions.” That is, ancient cartography privileged the process of movement or travel, and in contrast to most modern mapping, ancient maps didn’t usually make use of any external system of reference. One particular map, the Peutinger Map, helps illustrate this phenomenon. Understanding how ancient maps organized space, we can begin to understand Paul’s notions of territory and the way they determined which places he felt compelled to visit. By knowing something about Paul’s maps and geographies, we can make sense of his language in Romans 15, where territory played a pivotal role in his self-understanding as an apostle and in his trajectory across the Roman world, “from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyricum,” but also onward to Spain and to the end of the world.


Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the scope of the work, situates it in the scholarly field, and defines terms repeatedly used throughout the book, such as bodily experience, difference, constructive theology, and body theology. The chapter notes that the important question regarding bodily experience is not whether but how it will be valued. All experience is essentially bodily experience, and theology as a critical inquiry into our being in the world needs to consider experience as a resource by attending to bodily experience and the way it situates us in the world. The chapter previews the book’s aim to provide a robust and complex notion of “body theology” and demonstrate what kinds of analyses this re-envisioned approach can do, and to offer an integrated view of the role of perception in bodily experience.


Author(s):  
Sergio Dellavalle

This chapter argues that Hegel can be regarded as the philosopher who was the first to pave the way to a new paradigm of order and, thus, also to a new idea of the relation between the state and international law. Hegel would not only conceive order as a ‘system’—which emerges clearly from the investigation of the deep connection between his interpretation of international law and relations and the broader context of his philosophy—but this ‘system’ would also be something new within the horizon of the patterns of social order. Indeed, two elements of a new paradigm are at least sketched in Hegel’s philosophy: the polyarchic setting of order, and its dialectic (or maybe even communicative) understanding.


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