Faith-based Organisations have been at the forefront of a growing interest of the intersection between religion and development. Their value has been recognised as both pragmatic and, perhaps more contentiously, also 'spiritual' in nature because of advantages arising from faith itself. For many FBOs, religion is far more than an 'essential component of identity … it is a source of well-being'. In this manner, FBOs challenge the modernist assumptions of traditional development theory, which view the spiritual and physical domains as (...) separate. In fact, for some FBOs, 'spiritual faith provides the fuel for action'. This paper reports on an aspect of the empirical findings of a South African study and explores both the way in which Christian FBOs understand their Christian identity and the way in which they articulate this through their use of scripture as a motivating or an envisioning tool. (shrink)

One of the most pressing issues in the urban ghettos of the Cape Flats is that of gangsterism and the discourse of power and powerlessness that is its lifeblood. Media coverage over the past two years was littered with news on gangsterism as the City of Cape Town struggles to contain what some labelled a pandemic. It is a pandemic that is closely tied to a deprivation trap of poverty, marginalisation, isolation, unemployment and, ultimately, powerlessness. The latter concept of powerlessness (...) and its interplay with these factors constituted the main thrust of this article as it explores the concept of power as deeply relational with the economic, psycho-social and spiritual dimensions. It is proposed that Kingdom power challenges the status quo within such contexts and offers the church an alternative framework within which to engage prophetically. (shrink)

South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world and any discussion around poverty and the church's response cannot exclude this reality. This article attempts to analyse the response of wealthy, 'majority white' suburban congregations in the southern suburbs of Cape Town to issues of poverty and inequality. This is attempted through the lense of restorative justice, which is broadly explored and defined through a threefold perspective of reconciliation, reparations and restitution. The first part explores a description (...) of the basic features of poverty and inequality in South Africa today, followed by a discussion on restorative justice. This is followed by the case study, which gives the views of clergy and lay leaders with regard to their congregations' perspectives and responses to poverty and inequality within the context of restorative justice. Findings from the case study begin to plot a tentative 'way forward' as to how our reality can more constructively be engaged from the perspective of congregational involvement in reconstruction of our society. (shrink)

Jessica du Toit wonders if our relationship with our pets can be morally defended.

The findings of an empirical study entitled ‘Meeting the challenge of poverty and inequality in the Cape Metropole: Factors impacting the mobilisation of congregations in their response to poverty and injustice’ reaffirm that the majority of congregations are still largely operating within a ‘relief and welfare’ paradigm with regard to poverty. In attempting to analyse the hindrances to churches’ mobilisation in addressing poverty from a holistic perspective, it became clear that, while there were common challenges, several other intersectional issues also (...) play a role with regard to engagement. This article, therefore, analyses and discusses how these factors have an impact on the mobilisation of local congregations in their response to the twin challenge of poverty and inequality. (shrink)

This book offers a critical feminist perspective on the widely debated topic of transitional justice and forgiveness. Louise Du Toit examines the phenomenon of rape with a feminist philosophical discourse concerning women’s or ‘feminine’ subjectivity and selfhood. She demonstrates how the hierarchical dichotomy of male active versus female passive sexuality – which obscures the true nature of rape – is embedded in the dominant western symbolic frame. Through a Hegelian and phenomenological reading of first-person accounts by rape victims, she (...) excavates an understanding of rape that also starts to open up a way out of the denial and destruction of female sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

The Homo naledi discovery introduced questions that had not been previously posed regarding fossil finds. This is because, apart from their fascinating physiology, they seemingly deliberately disposed of their dead in a ritualised way. Although this theory may still be disproved in future, the present article provisionally accepts it. This evokes religious questions because it suggests the possibility of causal thinking, wilful and cooperative behaviour, and the possibility that this behaviour entails traces of proto-religious ideas. This poses the challenge to (...) develop a hominin hermeneutics that endeavours to reconstruct the possible motivation behind this action. The relatively larger brain with its enlarged Broca's area suggests the possibility of a sophisticated communication system and an enhanced way of dealing with emotion. We know that almost all life forms have some form of awareness and that more sophisticated degrees of consciousness may be present in the higher primates. Various 'clues' are investigated to try and understand the H. naledi phenomenon: lessons from chimpanzee studies, the implications of tool making for hominin development, the possibility of a proto-language and the role symbol formation may have played. The H. naledi case also indicates on a theological level that religion is natural. Some attention is given to this thesis. Biological and environmental factors come into play to illuminate biological factors like emotion and higher cognition without which religion would not be possible. Sophisticated cognition is coloured by affect and this makes some form of reflection on the fate of loved ones who have died a strong possibility. (shrink)

South Africa remains a divided community on many levels: socially, racially and socioeconomically. This is no more evident than in the recent protests - most notably waged on university campuses and on the streets in the past year. This, the article argues, is closely related to the need to reclaim the notion of power by those who feel they remain relegated to the social and economic peripheries after over 20 years of democracy. While 'theology and development' praxis has been most (...) closely associated in a post-apartheid era with welfare and charity approaches or pragmatic interaction with state and civil society, what has not been sufficiently addressed is the notion of power which once dominated ecclesiastical discourses. This is the proverbial 'elephant in the room', which the article argues must once again be revisited and re-engaged - both within scholarly reflection and within church practice - in order to address these divides. (shrink)

Health policy is only one part of social policy. Although spending administered by the health sector constitutes a sizeable fraction of total state spending in most countries, other sectors such as education and transportation also represent major portions of national budgets. Additionally, though health is one important aspect of economic and social activity, people pursue many other goals in their social and economic lives. Similarly, direct benefits—those that are immediate results of health policy choices—are only a small portion of the (...) overall impact of health policy. This chapter considers what weight health policy should give to its “spill-over effects,” namely non-health and indirect benefits. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The technological virtual converges with our contemporary existence in a multitude of ways, which suggests a need to interrogate the question of the virtual existentially. Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenological account of embodiment is invaluable in this regard because the virtual is encountered from the basis of the facticity of the embodied individual – a facticity that is closely related to perception and motor intentionality. The current article argues that these characteristics of the body-subject should be taken into consideration in order (...) to develop a clearer description of the virtual. However, beyond an embodied account that relates to early technologies, Merleau-Ponty also presents through his concept of the flesh a novel avenue for the ontological investigation of the virtual. The flesh describes the intertwining of the body-subject and the world, which is suggestive of a new account of the individual’s sensibility in relation to the virtual. An original concept is suggested to describe the existential-ontological structure of the virtual: The embodied screen. The embodied screen as neologism presents an alternative conceptualisation of the coincidence of the body-subject (who understands the world spatially) with the virtual (as non-spatial). By tracing imaginative signification and embodied habitude in terms of the virtual, this article suggests certain existential implications of the virtual for contemporary being. (shrink)

The debate between instrumentalist and technological determinist positions on the nature of technology characterised the early history of the philosophy of technology. In recent years however technological determinism has ceased to be viewed as a credible philosophical position within the field. This paper uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to reconsider the technological determinist outlook in phenomenological terms as an experiential response to the encounter with the phenomenon of modern technology. Recasting the instrumentalist-determinist debate in a phenomenological manner enables one to reconcile the (...) apparent dualism of the instrumentalist and determinist positions through Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This ontology has recently been used to ground accounts of virtual embodiment. We argue that in addition to explaining away the classical form of technological determinism, it can also phenomenologically ground a novel understanding of technological determinism. Namely, a technological determinism of virtual embodiment. (shrink)

The technological virtual converges with our contemporary existence in a multitude of ways, which suggests a need to interrogate the question of the virtual existentially. Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenological account of embodiment is invaluable in this regard because the virtual is encountered from the basis of the facticity of the embodied individual – a facticity that is closely related to perception and motor intentionality. The current article argues that these characteristics of the body-subject should be taken into consideration in order to (...) develop a clearer description of the virtual. However, beyond an embodied account that relates to early technologies, Merleau-Ponty also presents through his concept of the flesh a novel avenue for the ontological investigation of the virtual. The flesh describes the intertwining of the body-subject and the world, which is suggestive of a new account of the individual’s sensibility in relation to the virtual. An original concept is suggested to describe the existential-ontological structure of the virtual: The embodied screen. The embodied screen as neologism presents an alternative conceptualisation of the coincidence of the body-subject (who understands the world spatially) with the virtual (as non-spatial). By tracing imaginative signification and embodied habitude in terms of the virtual, this article suggests certain existential implications of the virtual for contemporary being. (shrink)

When allocating scarce healthcare resources, the expected benefits of alternative allocations matter. But, there are different kinds of benefits. Some are direct benefits to the recipient of the resource such as the health improvements of receiving treatment. Others are indirect benefits to third parties such as the economic gains from having a healthier workforce. This article considers whether only the direct benefits of alternative healthcare resource allocations are relevant to allocation decisions, or whether indirect benefits are relevant too. First, we (...) distinguish different conceptions of direct and indirect benefits and argue that only a recipient conception could be morally relevant. We analyze four arguments for thinking that indirect benefits should not count and argue that none is successful in showing that the indirectness of a benefit is a good reason not to count it. We conclude that direct and indirect benefits should be evaluated in the same way. (shrink)

The virtual has become the latest rostrum for ideological heteronormativity; it increasingly plays host to an insidious rhetoric of unjustifiably fixed and oppositional gender binaries that exhort heterosexuality as a norm. Conservative political and religious groups, as well as consumerist advertising, utilise digital technology to reinforce cast-in-stone and adversarial social perspectives for manipulative and exploitative ends. Contrastingly, the virtual may be mobilised to support and facilitate queering in contemporary societies and may positively counter such fixed ideological heteronormative categories of social (...) life. Crucial in this transformative account of the virtual is the body, which is for Merleau-Ponty the horizon of engagement with the world as a condition for perception and performativity. Queer perspectives may, in turn, overcome the oversight of Merleau-Ponty (as critically suggested by Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young) regarding the specific gendered characteristics of the body itself, and allows for an expanded embodied and queer conceptualisation of the virtual. A transformative vision of the virtual entails therefore a rethinking of our understanding of digital technology through (a) the phenomenology of the body-subject and (b) queer theory. I argue that the idea of the body as entirely discursive or performative (per queer theory) needs to be adjusted by explicating the foundational ontological characteristics of the body-subject’s encounter of the virtual. (shrink)

Sara Kolmes has argued that the human ‘handlers’ of emotional support animals (ESAs) should have the sorts of body-like rights to those animals that people with prosthetics have to their prosthetics. In support of this conclusion, she argues that ESAs both function and feel like prosthetics, and that the disanalogies between ESAs and prosthetics are irrelevant to whether humans can have body-like rights to their ESAs. In response, we argue that Ms Kolmes has failed to show that ESAs are body-like (...) in the ways that paradigmatic prostheses are and that, even if they were, these similarities would be outweighed by a crucial dissimilarity that she underestimates. (shrink)

When I arrived in Paris in 1977 to study with the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, the first question he asked everyone in his seminar was: d'où parlez-vous? Where do you speak from?From where do you speak? Without a final or fixed reply, this fundamental question occupies a central place in Paul Ricoeur's expansive work. It is perhaps one of his more important commonplaces. D'où parlez-vous? The question is a reminder, a provocation to remember that speaking is located—it takes place in a (...) place, and helps to establish and transform that place—and that speaking also incurs responsibility for this power.In May 2018 the meeting of the Society for Ricoeur Studies took place for the first time on the African continent.... (shrink)

BackgroundThe practice of giving animal research subjects proper names is frowned on by the academic scientific community. While researchers provide a number of reasons for desisting from giving their animal subjects proper names, the most common are that naming leads to anthropomorphising which, in turn, leads to data and results that are unobjective and invalid; and while naming does not necessarily entail some mistake on the researcher’s part, some feature of the research enterprise renders the practice impossible or ill-advised.ObjectivesMy aim (...) is to assess whether the scientific community’s attitude towards naming animal research subjects is justified. That is, I wish to consider whether the practice of naming animal research subjects is good or bad for the purposes of scientific research.MethodAfter reviewing the extant literature, I constructed a list of the main arguments researchers provide for desisting from naming their animal research subjects. I then analysed these arguments, with a view to determining whether they in fact provide good reasons to avoid naming animal research subjects.ConclusionI argue that none of the aforementioned reasons usually provide good grounds for not naming animal research subjects. Moreover, there are usually powerful reasons in favour of researchers giving their research animals proper names. This is because the practice usually leads to greater empathy and so to improved animal well-being. This, in turn, leads to better animal science. Thus, the scientific community’s attitude towards naming animal research subjects is not justified. (shrink)

This article gives a general introduction to reasons why metaphysics might be considered a human constant. The basic metaphysical stance is rooted in human nature and human consciousness, being open to change and continually challenged. The biological rootedness of metaphysics relates to human consciousness, human dualisms, language (especially metaphor) and the fact that humans are self-transcending beings. It is suggested that the dualisms humans experience and express are not foreign to nature and part of the knowledge process. It is argued (...) that metaphysical concepts such as unity, holism and relatedness are still necessary for human self-understanding and understanding of reality. The focus on the exclusivity of the human mind (Kant) contributed to the objectification and eventual manipulation of nature in science and technology and culminated in modernism. The existentialist and nihilistic responses that followed were inevitable. The tacit role of metaphysics in physics is indicated with reference to concepts such as nothingness and the quest for unity. Humans are destined to update their metaphysics in an ever-changing world. (shrink)

Recent developments within literary theory challenge the theological assumption that specific words can act as ‘transcendental signifiers’, claiming supra‐linguistic origin and divine authority. Within the postmodern theology of Mark Taylor this challenge is taken up in such a way as to obliterate the idea of divine revelation within language. However, this article contends that this position, which claims to be absolutely ‘post‐revelational’ results in self‐contradictory statements, hidden and unacknowledged forms of foundationalism, and a disregard for the radically other and different. (...) Karl Barth also addresses the problem of the radical relativity of words, but without denying the influence of divine revelation within language. Taking the nature of the ‘true Word’ as being radically Christological, Barth claims the miraculous nature of transcendence‐within‐language. However, this divine presence within the Word of God remains hidden, and thus does not inaugurate a violent miracle, whereby human language in all its relativity would be trivialized. Instead of claiming to have abolished transcendent foundations in the light of the challenge of relativism, as Taylor does, this article claims that Barth openly advocates a non‐violent, subtle form of transcendent foundationalism for theology, and thus maintains both the relativity of language and divine revelation as the ‘Word of God’. (shrink)

A fundamental valuation of present day technology requires an investigation of its supporting metaphysics. Although technology ostensibly is the exact opposite of any kind of metaphysics, its metaphysical foundations, which co-determine its influence on values and worldview formation, can be indicated. Western technology is reconsidered from the perspective of Heidegger's critique on technology. Technology need not determine values in a deterministic way. We are challenged as created co-creators to give a human face to technology. Africa can be considered relatively free (...) of the influence of high technology. The way technology is imbedded in African metaphysics, myth and worldview is investigated from the perspectives of life force and ubuntu. Although the African example may be foreign to Westerners, it proves that it is possible to live in a technological world without losing the values indispensable to humanity. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(2) 2003: 173–183. (shrink)

The main claim in this article is that the traditionally Western and currently dominant understandings of the figures of “Nature” and “Animal” underlie and structure different forms of oppression and should be critically confronted. The racial-sexual subjugation of the colonized African draws symbolically on the older Western symbolic subjugations of Animal and Woman. In the Great Chain of Being of Western metaphysics it is Woman’s sexual body that links humans to the domain of the animal, and Man’s intellect that distinguishes (...) and separates humans from that same domain. Situated in the border between human and Animal, Woman merges with the chaos and fleshiness of Animal and Nature. With the emergence of race as a category of classification and colonial justification, the African is placed at the furthest remove from Western Man, the epitome of reasonable humanity. African Woman, in particular, is seen as the Animal Other. The colonial-“civilizing” project thus institutes a certain flight from Nat... (shrink)