A response to Metz's reply on the end of ubuntu

Thaddeus Metz argues against our position that ubuntu has reached its end. He rejects our recommendation that ubuntu both as a way of life and as an ethical theory must be jettisoned as it is no longer applicable to modern conditions. He thinks that both our recommendations are wrong. Hence he seeks to show that ubuntu is defensible both as an ethical theory and as a way of life. Further, he thinks there is a role to be played by ubuntu in how life could be lived in modern day (South) Africa. He also seeks to offer a defence of the relevance of ubuntu theorists. For these reasons he couches his responding title with the phrase ‘Just the beginning of ubuntu [?…?]’. In this paper I continue the debate by seeking to show that Metz's response poses no threat to our original position. I then endeavour to show that my assessment of his position puts him in an unenviable position of defending the indefensible. I further suggest that Metz's current defence of ubuntu is not philosophical but dogmatic.     

The end of ubuntu or its beginning in Matolino-Kwindingwi-Metz debate: An exercise in conversational philosophy

Matolino and Kwindingwi in an essay “The end of ubuntu” published in this journal in 2013 argue that ubuntu has stalled both as a way of life and as an ethical theory which led them to draw the far-reaching conclusion that ubuntu has reached its end. In 2014 Metz published a rejoinder in this journal with the title “Just the beginning for ubuntu: reply to Matolino and Kwindingwi” in which he gestures that the justifications on which Matolino and Kwindingwi rested their conclusion were unfounded. Reacting to Metz in an essay published in this journal in 2015 with the title “A response to Metz’s reply on the end of ubuntu”, Matolino claims that Metz’s rejoinder poses no serious threat to their original position and insists that Metz’s counter-position is not only weak but grossly indefensible. In fact, he characterises Metz’s arguments as dogmatic rather than philosophical. In this paper, I wade into this encounter, which I now tag the “Matolino-Kwindingwi-Metz debate”, not for the sake of argument but to show the philosophical significance of the “Matolino-Kwindingwi conundrum”. That ubuntu has reached its end is not a mere declaration or position or conclusion, it is a problem, one whose significance would redefine not only the sphere of ubuntu philosophy but the historicity of African philosophy as a whole. I shall argue also that though the conundrum remains decisive, I agree with Metz that the arguments marshalled in its support are not decisive. Metz on the other hand may have offered systematisation of ubuntu but I agree with Matolino that his new system may not be as impregnable as he envisages. In showing the philosophical significance of the conundrum and in showing the weaknesses in the arguments of these actors, I shall argue not for the restoration but for the re-invention of ubuntu using the tool of conversational thinking.     

Reading with and without eye movements: reply to Just, Carpenter, and Woolley

Just, Carpenter, and Woolley propose that measures of single-word processing times, such as gaze durations during normal reading or durations of reader-controlled exposures, can be used both for developing theories of comprehension and for determining the course of new reading technologies. We argue that better understanding of comprehension processes does not necessarily follow from observed correlations between text variables and eye-fixation parameters. Further, recent rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) research suggests that eye fixation data obtained from studies of normal reading might have little practical value in optimizing the readability of RSVP displays and other means of text presentation.     

Moral education,ubuntu and ubuntu-inspired communities

While it is generally believed that moral education is important in the development of children, there is disagreement over a range of issues concerning the teaching of values and morals in schools. In the forefront of this debate are issues concerning whether morality or values and morals can be taught in schools, ought to be taught, and how they should be taught. In this paper I want to focus on the last of the issues within the background of ubuntu. My broad interest is to stimulate discussion regarding whether ubuntu, ubuntu-inspired communities, and some of its values can contribute to the issue of the teaching of values and morals. In the process of my engagement with moral education and ubuntu, I can be taken to be offering ubuntu and practices in ubuntu communities as an alternative way of teaching values and morals – values that are important for social and political citizenship.     

Ubuntu and the law in South Africa: Exploring and understanding the substantive content of ubuntu

Supposing some legal solutions lay in exploring and understanding the substantive content of ubuntu, what then? Is there no ground for suspecting that some legal scholars and courts, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand ubuntu? That the terrible, seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to ubuntu have been unskilled and unseemly methods of solving some legal problems? Certainly, some legal problems have not rendered themselves to proper solutions through such methods.     

Skepticism and elegance: problems for the abductivist reply to Cartesian skepticism

Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.     

Unanswerable questions for everyone: reply to Inan

Millianism is the familiar view that some expressions, such as proper names, contribute only their referent to the semantic content of sentences in which they occur. Inan (Philosophical Studies 2010) has recently argued that the Millian is committed to the following odd conclusion: There may be questions that he is able to grasp but that he cannot answer, either affirmatively, negatively, or with a simple ??I don??t know??. The Millian is indeed committed to this conclusion. But we intend to show that Inan??s argument generalizes, so that everyone who accepts certain largely uncontroversial principles is committed to the odd conclusion that there may be questions that are graspable but not answerable.     

Still the same dilemma for conceptual engineers: reply to Koch

Philosophical Studies - Steffen Koch (Koch 2020) raises several objections to my critique of conceptual engineering (Deutsch in ‘Speaker’s Reference, Stipulation, and a Dilemma for...     

Augmentation-reduction and pain: reply to petrie

The comments by Petrie (1978) on our earlier paper (Elton, et al., 1978) are discussed. Clarification of procedures demonstrates that Petrie's comments do not warrant any modification of our conclusion that the relationship between perceptual reactance and pain has not been clearly established.     

Accreditation: A reply to mathers

Accreditation in counselling is meant not for the benefit of the counsellor but for the protection of the public. It is concerned more with guaranteeing certain standards of ethics than with the acclamation of status. Whatever method is used, it must avoid the pitfalls of conservatism and academicism which in other professions have been jointly responsible for the attack on accreditation itself as a process. Those involved in counselling and psychotherapy should not wait passively until Parliament acts, but need to be critically involved in bringing into being a system of accreditation which is both flexible and creative.