Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

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Browsing Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies by Author "Laure, helen"

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    African Philosophy and the Challenge of Science and Technology,” in Handbook of African Philosophy eds.
    (ToyinFalola&AdeshinaAfolayan, Palgrave-Macmillan in press., 2017) Laure, helen
    Unregulated knowledge markets have yielded the tragedy of the global commons, trading in profitable, high-tech commodities—from genetically modified seeds to electronically transferred ‘bit’ coinage. These quick-fix responses to basic human needs exacerbate the very distributive injustices that ostensibly they were intended to correct. The challenge faced by contemporary African philosophers is to defeat the tyranny of foreign expertise which undermines our biosphere and therefore threatens human survival, as it commands the pursuit of science-for-profit in the twenty-first century. African professional intellectuals can meet this challenge as philosophers without borders, utilizing their competitive advantage in defying the disciplinary boundaries that retard researchers and developers in G8 countries in their effort to grapple with egregious human distress. African intellectuals in all fields working as philosophers without borders are well-positioned to infiltrate the global division of intellectual labour, while amplifying otherwise suppressed critical voices of indigenous authority and of Western-trained African specialists—whose testimonies are disregarded if they threaten a lucrative agenda. The world’s ‘remote’ regions afford the best location for recognizing the shortfalls of profit-driven initiatives in pursuit of post-2015 UN sustainable development goals. Working in the poorest economies, African professionals are the best suited to study and reflect upon local conditions, and from there to extrapolate internationally, speaking on behalf of populations throughout the Two Thirds World who have the most to gain by radical transformation of the global knowledge economy.
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    Philosophy of Science and Africa,” in Handbook of African Philosophy eds
    (ToyinFalola&AdeshinaAfolayan, Palgrave-Macmillan in press., 2017) Laure, helen
    Recent contributions to long standing debates in philosophy of science include (i) a revision of the central importance that community and anonymity play in progressive scientific enterprise; (ii) a renewed emphasis upon pluralism, inclusiveness and diversity both in models of explanatory adequacy and in methods of inquiry—within each research specialisation as much as across disciplinary divides; (iii) the value of criticizable corrigibility as a mark of scientific pedigree; (iv) a recognition of the indelible interdependence between generalizable, theoretical reasoning on the one hand, and localizable, practical problem-solving on the other; (v) a general abandonment of efforts to define and police any fixed demarcation between science and non-science; (vi) a celebration of wonder, together with a renunciation of exhaustive completeness as realizable goals in the explanation of nature; (vii) an appreciation of the interdependency between human flourishing and the welfare of all forms comprising the family of life. These current perspectives in the history and philosophy of science provide a basis for rethinking tacit assumptions about African intellectual heritages. They help to overcome the illusion that there exists an indomitable, diametric opposition between Africans’ allegedly regressive cultural attitudes and indigenous superstitions about nature versus the enabling paradigms that have nurtured scientific initiative exclusively within the cultural purviews of Eurasia and the Americas.
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    Talking Global Justice: The importance of critical social theory in the African business paradigm.” Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance, (eds.)
    (Switzerland: Springer, 2015) Laure, helen
    Cultural diversity is tacitly regarded nowadays as the bane of efforts to internationalise criminal law (Thomas Nagel 2005) or to globalize even the most rudimentary principles of corporate social responsibility [CSR]. In this essay it is proposed, to the contrary, that cultural diversity is best regarded as a vehicle for discovering fundamental convictions about the possibilities for a trans-national meaning of economic justice rather than the main obstacle to its realisation. Guidance is taken from principles of indigenous models of good governance and diplomacy that characterise contemporary West Africa’s rich cultural diversity and which alleviate the severe economic pressures of its many histories. The possibility of global economic justice requires a conceptual change: from defining global justice as a fixed system of uniform procedures and implacable rules applied impartially and universally, to regarding the very idea of justice as the outcome of moral contestation. Global economic justice as an ideal is treated here as a collective and necessarily incompletable work in progress, emerging by ongoing rigorous analytic confrontation internationally between divergent traditions and contrary value systems. Focus will be on correcting shortfalls in the assumptions sustaining the recent history of international human rights documents, and proposals offered in the discourse of transnational corporate social responsibility theorists. Since cultural diversity obtains within social hierarchies just as aggressively as it does across nations, testimonies are required early in the process of treating global justice as an ongoing deliberative project, so that judicial interpreters come to know something about underclass experience and conditions prevailing in the informal economic sector as it expands worldwide.
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    “Who is an African?” Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies
    (. London: Ayebia Clarke Publ, 2012) Laure, helen
    On some interpretations, contemporary African identity seems to have grown irretrievably international. Correlatively, it has become fashionable to claim that our social and political identities are something we choose to do, not something we have been given and so have no choice but to be. These two themes—internationalism and self-determining agency—recur in the works of leading African poets, playwrights, fictive narrators and literary critics who have chimed in with Diasporan intellectual and artistic voices advocating a view of African identity as an individualistic pursuit. This essay will examine critically two currently popular examples of the essentialist and structuralist genres of theorising about social and political identities. The two chosen models may be read as reinforcing the view of African identity as a transnational social construction. One of these models was authored by the social philosopher Axel Honneth whose psychoanalytic work is central to the foundation of current debates about the politics of recognition. The other model mentioned here comes from the influential political theorist Walker Connor known for his advocacy work on stable nation-building. Both models can be interpreted as reinforcing views of ‘African identity’ as a transnational social construction—moreover, as a construct that can be improved upon by individual Africans seeking to expand beyond their nations’ histories, or improved upon through social engineering schemes designed to enhance citizens’ identities with a unifying supra-nationality, and a group-transcendent vision and loyalty. Ama Ata Aidoo’s orientation sheds a sceptical light on both of them