Journal of World Philosophies

Symposium: How Would Feminist Concerns Fare in the Debate between Confucian Role Ethics and Virtue Ethics?

Ann Pang-White, Stephen Angle, Sarah Mattice, Lili Zhang — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How would feminist concerns fare in the debate between Confucian role ethics and virtue ethics? Ann Pang-White sketches the contours of a non-dichotomous, role-based virtue ethics that is illuminated by a Confucian feminist account as one possible answer to this query. By reimagining the virtues of chastity and filiality that are indispensable to Confucian contexts, Pang-White seeks to develop a reading that can be useful in defending feminist values and replacing outdated understandings of gender roles in societies informed by Confucian thought today. In continuing the conversation with her, Stephen Angle asks whether a modernized, relational, role-based virtue ethics can really suffice to respond to feminist concerns. Sarah Mattice proposes that Pang-White center intersectional perspectives on feminism for the latter’s project, while Lily Zhang invites her to analyze how certain ethical conflicts that arise within the framework of Confucian ethics between roles and virtues can be resolved from Pang-White’s perspective. Pang-White’s reply to the panel reiterates different aspects of her relational role-based virtue ethical reading of Confucian feminism to argue that a better appreciation of the situatedness and imperfections of morality is needed to understand the imperfections that come in with it.

A Lifetime of Difference

Nesta Devine — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this memoir I track the people, events and influences which have had a bearing on my ability to work alongside Māori and Pacific students and academics. From a childhood in rural Aotearoa New Zealand, through sporadic and prolonged university studies, to teaching in Schools of Education at the University of Waikato and Auckland University of Technology, I have always been fascinated by the possibilities of thinking differently. This underpins my experience in supervising and supporting Māori and Pasifika academics, at the post graduate level and as early career researchers.

Philosophical Practice and the Matter of Everyday Life

Melissa Anne-Marie Curley — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In her first book, Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought, Leah Kalmanson draws on a wide range of Asian ritual and philosophical repertoires in making a case for the role of practical exercises of self-cultivation in the work of existential inquiry. This review considers some of the ways in which Kalmanson’s selection of sources is consonant with the intervention she seeks to make, and suggests some possible avenues for beginning to think in a similarly expansive way with and about western traditions.

A Poesis of Black Leipsis, Or A Theory of Blackalyspe

Anwar Uhuru — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kameron Carter’s reading of Black life as matter, as the imaginary, and as an innovation of possibilities enmeshes Black theology, Black womanist/feminist thought, Black Diaspora and Black American Studies, Philosophy, and Queer of Color Critique to reveal how the project of the western world erases Black physical and intellectual legacy. A project that is anti-black, anti-other, anti-difference that erases the legacy of the physical and intellectual aspects of Black contributions to the western world. His book is an invitation to think through what Black ontology would look like outside of white western constructions of religion and social scripts. Carter’s radical shift from being beyond the long durée of enslavement, colonization, segregation, and its afterlives scripts an (anti)blackening because of the western project of erasure works to undo such a project. The book is working against the social ontology of being a fragmented object that is plasticized, fetishized, and dissolved into a state of non-being. It is a project that disrupts and decolonizes previously constructed (anti)blackening architecture by creating a blueprint that asks for Black matter as an incomplete project because it must include imagination and innovation.

Enrique Dussel (1934-2023)

Nelson Maldonado-Torres — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Enrique Dussel was by any meaningful measure a giant representative of Latin American and world philosophy. This personal reflection sheds light on his intellectual trajectory and his contributions to liberation philosophy, world philosophy, South-South and South-North dialogues, and the decolonial turn.

Godforsakenness

Tanzeen Rashed Doha — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir (migrants),
and Bangladeshi Deobandi Islamists, who re-enact the role of the ansar (helpers), as they explore godforsakenness
during two waves of migration in 2016 and 2017. Bringing together theological aphasia and references to
contemporary jihad, this ethnographic meditation calls into question the assumptive logics of secular historicism
and liberal humanitarianism as it confronts the deathworld of the War on Terror through Islam’s founding texts
and traditions. Drawing from Talal Asad’s reading of the secular as “conceptually prior to the political doctrine
of secularism” and a formation that contains “a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities,” it highlights and
unearths the secular core of liberal concepts of humanitarianism, historicity, spatiality, and geography, to specify
their uses within the discourse of the War on Terror. The ulama in the border region point to the secular and
identify it as a structuring coordinate within the discourse of liberal civil society. At the level of sensibility, the
interactions between the scholars and Islamists in the border region reveal a domain consisting of moods, anxieties,
and perceptive qualities that runs counter to the affective life immanent to secularity.

What Dwells There?

Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Museum visitors partake in the effect of what we can call the domestication of the view. They witness the constant changes in how objects are allowed to exist in a museological space. In this way, visitors are challenged to cultivate new sensibilities that simultaneously reveal and conceal things and their relationships. These meanings have been subject to political debates, controversies, disputes, and conflicts around property rights involving museum representatives and other actors. As a result, the domesticated things inside the museums threaten to displace themselves, moving towards the uncertainty of other shelters and other hands. Each time other flows and movements towards other ‘homes’ are asserted by different sort of groups and communities to reclaim or ‘bring home’ objects previously obtained through a mixture of pillaging, acquisitions, donations, and violent actions, distinct voices ask the same question: whose home? By exploring a case concerning the restitution of objects outside and inside museums, this article explores an alternative understanding of the notion of the house as a legitimate relationship between materiality and those worlds in which objects dwell. In the first sections, to explore the idea of heterotopy coined by Michel Foucault from an anthropological perspective, I return to some interpretations of notions such as ‘home’ and ‘house’ drawing on classical ethnographies. Secondly, I focus on what Ghassan Hage calls a ‘diasporic lenticularity’ to explore other “modes of existing” in multiple places and realities. Finally, I conclude by revolving distinct cases concerning museum practices and reallocation processes, transforming and (re)creating new spaces to locate and house unstable objects and presences.

Mabogo Percy More’s Concept of the Problem of the Oppressed-Oppressor and Intraracial Sexism

Sarah Setlaelo — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More has devoted more than four decades of his work to the problem
of “being-black-in-an-antiblack-world.” This article interrogates the extent to which More homogenizes the
contingencies of black2 existence and black embodiment, as I feel black existentialists do; or subsumes the
phenomenology of the lived experience of blackness under a “black universalist” account that does not give an
adequate account of the gendered embodied experiences with antiblack racism. By “contingency” I mean More’s
concept of the contingency of existence, where he claims that human existence is without necessity, nor is it justified;
and so people resort to attempting to justify their existence and to find meaning by trying to assume the status of
God or superiority in relation to others. More argues that contingency is the source of antiblack racism, as white
people attempt to justify their existence by dehumanizing black people. I claim that contingency does not only play
out in the interracial domain, but is also one of the sources of intraracial sexism within the black community.
My interrogation aims to extend the reach of More’s work by giving an existential-phenomenological account of
“being-black-and-female-in-an-antiblack-antifemale-world.” To this end, I focus on two contingencies—the
contingencies of biological sex and the contingency of physical strength—that More discusses in his sole article on
intraracial sexism, “Black Attitudes: A Call for Personhood” (1981). I argue that within the black intraracial
domain, these two contingencies are ascribed meaning that creates a binary, which elevates black men to superior
status, while reducing black women to the inferior.

Becoming a Knower Through Apory

Helen Ruth Verran, Hayashi Yasunori — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Located in a settler-Australian tertiary education institution we develop a worldly or mundane approach to working in and between institutions enacting two distinct world philosophies. We engage with the epistemics embedded and expressed in the functioning of modern institutions committed to a naturalistic scientific world. And albeit to a more limited extent we engage with epistemics embedded in and expressed by institutions framed and ordered by collectively enacting intentions of Eternal World-Making Beings of Yolngu Aboriginal Australian lands and peoples.