Conflicts within the tsetse fly belt revealed a strong correlation between the dynamics of bovine trypanosomosis and the insurgency involving farmers and herders in Nigeria and parts of West Africa. This study examined the history, causes and influence of farmers-herdsmen conflicts on banditry, terrorism and food security as it relates to the epidemiology of African animal trypanosomosis (AAT). A combination of literature database searches, semi-structured questionnaires, and mathematical modeling was employed. The study found that transhumance contributes significantly to conflicts between (...) farmers and herdsmen. An average of 6.46 persons per attack were reported between 2005 and 2021. Only 8.4 $$\%$$ (95 $$\%$$ CI: 5.0 $$-$$ 12.9) of farmers and 18.2 $$\%$$ (95 $$\%$$ CI: 12.4 $$-$$ 25.4) of herdsmen have engaged in conflict resolution efforts. The study shows that both conflict and the spread of trypanosomosis can be effectively controlled when $$R_0 < 1$$, ensuring that the sub-population remains in the basin of attraction of the trypanosomosis-conflict-free equilibrium ( $$T_{0c}$$ ). The partial derivative of the basic reproduction number, $$R_0$$, with respect to improved conflict resolution, suggests that halting transhumance can prevent a portion of the cattle recruitment rate ( $$\Lambda_c$$ ) from becoming infected with AAT. Climate change exacerbates these issues, leading to settlement and resettlement strategies within the fly belt regions. The model indicates that the basic reproduction number can only be reduced to less than one ( $$R_0 < 1$$ ) to become globally asymptotically stable if there is effective conflict resolution involving both farmers and herders. The study advocates for the establishment of ranching in tsetse-free zones with adequate social amenities, improved marketing strategies for animals and animal products led by government agencies through public-private partnerships, the banning of open grazing, and strict enforcement of policies against violators. (shrink)

"A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue." "Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals (...) to flourish, and those that threaten them." "Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him." "As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature." "Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In Nigeria, as in other developing countries, access to training in research ethics is limited, due to weak social, economic, and health infrastructure. The project described in this article was designed to develop the capacity of academic staff of the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Nigeria to conduct ethically acceptable research involving human participants.

Isaiah Berlin is heralded as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and this editied work by a group of distinguished scholars is an examination of an Humean liberal intellectual. Isaiah Berlin's legacy still excites intense scholarly debate.

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others. "Some [essays], like Joseph Brodsky's tribute, are touchingly personal. Others, like G. A. Cohen's 'Isaiah's Marx, and Mine,' mingle personal reminiscences with a more theoretical look at Berlin's ideas. . . . The volume is a fitting tribute to a thinker famed for his erudition, eclecticism, and (...) clarity of style."--Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor "One of the many merits of this rich and rewarding collection is the sense-very imperfectly conveyed here-it transmits of the tone of Berlin's writings and conversation, of the multiplicity of his interests and the variety of his achievements. . . . The essays testify to the character of Berlin's mind as a luminous prism, in which the cultural traditions of Russia, England and Judaism are marvelously refracted."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement "[T]he collection testifies to the learning and profundity of Berlin's thought and, by way both of reminiscence and influence, to the charm and gaity of its expression."--Anthony Quinton, The Times of London. (shrink)

The central theses of Oduwole are: first, that Olodumare cannot be exonerated from the philosophical problem of evil for He possesses similar attributes to the theistic God in Judeo-Christian tradition; and second, that the Yoruba hold a strong dialectical principle of Ire and Ibi in their daily world encounters. This paper challenges these positions as inaccurate representations of the Yoruba African understanding of the nature of evil. It exposes the conceptual errors that fraught Oduwole’s paper and provides further rigorous analytical (...) expositions of the nature of evil in Yoruba-African philosophical thought. (shrink)

Liberty is an expanded edition of Isaiah Berlin's classic of liberalism, Four Essays on Liberty. Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has incorporated a fifth essay, as Berlin wished, and added further pieces on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are available together for the first time. He also describes the gestation of the book and throws further biographical light on Berlin's preoccupation with liberty in appendices drawn from his unpublished writings.

The purpose of this study was to investigate factors contributing to college students’ attitudes towards plagiarism. This study tested a hypothesized model that students’ self-esteem, usage of eBooks, working hours, and understanding of plagiarism policy predicted their subjective norm to plagiarize, which in turn, ultimately predicted their positive and negative attitudes towards plagiarism. The study also examined if students’ demographic characteristics influenced their attitude towards plagiarism. Data collected in an online survey from 90 college students were analyzed using path analysis (...) in AMOS. Results suggested that students who do not understand university plagiarism policy and use eBooks are more likely to plagiarize. The path model achieved the best fit when the paths from eBook usage and understanding of plagiarism policy were indirectly specified to PAP through SNP. The current study contributes to the body of knowledge on the factors that affect students’ attitudes towards plagiarism. This study's findings would enable faculty, policymakers, and college administrators to understand the factors that affect students’ attitude towards plagiarism and formulate and implement appropriate strategies to deter students from plagiarizing. (shrink)

Research on sexual violence is fraught with ethical and methodological challenges due to its sensitive nature. This paper describes the ethical and methodological challenges encountered in planning and conducting two exploratory studies on sexual violence that included in-depth interviews of eight female adolescent rape survivors in Ibadan and four married women in Lagos Nigeria who were raped, forced to perform sexual acts and sexually deprived. The first challenge encountered was an Institutional Review Board (IRB) requirement to obtain parental permission from (...) adolescents, when such a requirement may place the adolescent at risk if a parent was a perpetrator of sexual violence. Using arguments emphasizing the Council for International Organization for Medical Sciences guidelines helped convince the IRB to provide a waiver of parental consent. Second, the privacy required to conduct in-depth interviews for rape survivors was difficult to achieve because five of the rape survivors were apprentices who work in public settings which are typically used to conduct business in the informal sector. To overcome this challenge, interviews were conducted in safe locations, investigator's offices and homes of survivors. The culture of silence associated with sexual violence posed a challenge because it encourages perpetration of violence with impunity causing rape survivors to suffer in silence. None of the affected adolescents had sought judicial redress for rape despite availability of stringent punishment for this behaviour. Referral information was provided on where survivors could seek care. Interviews with the women could not be recorded on audio-tapes because of concerns that their partners might identify their voices from the tapes and punish them for this. Although research on sexual violence poses ethical and methodological challenges, it is not only desirable but also feasible to conduct such research in ways that ensure safety of participants. (shrink)

It is nearly two decades now since the publication of Godfrey Tangwa's article, ‘Bioethics: African Perspective’, without a critical review. His article is important because sequel to its publication in Bioethics, the idea of ‘African bioethics’ started gaining some attention in the international bioethics literature. This paper breaks this relative silence by critically examining Tangwa's claim on the existence of African bioethics. Employing conceptual and critical methods, this paper argues that Tangwa's account of African bioethics has some conceptual, methodic and (...) substantive difficulties, which altogether do not justify the idea of African bioethics, at least for now. Contra Tangwa, this article establishes that while African bioethics remains a future possibility, it is more cogent that current efforts in the name of ‘African bioethics’ be primarily re-intensified towards ‘Healthcare ethics in Africa’. (shrink)

The absence of a national soilclassification system for Nigeria hinderssuccessful agrotechnology transfer inparticular, and agricultural development ingeneral. A discussion of the role of indigenousknowledge in agricultural development showsthat indigenous knowledge of the soil can beintegrated with modern soil science to developa soil classification system for the country.Much as local knowledge is invaluable foradvancing scientific knowledge and vice versa,caution is given against overestimating therole of indigenous knowledge in developmentalactivities. It is important to encourage theproper integration of all knowledge systems increating new (...) paradigms for sustainabledevelopment in Nigeria. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the hermeneutic in the ongoing discourse on methodology in African philosophy. The diverse understanding of hermeneutics is not only limited to Western philosophy; in the few decades of its history in African philosophy, hermeneutics has also assumed different meanings. This paper discusses not only the historical evolution and development of hermeneutists in the West, but also the African hermeneutists: Tsenay Serequeberhan, Okonda Okolo, Sophie Oluwole, Raphael Madu, and Bruce Janz. Through a comparative (...) critical inquisition on the strengths and the problems involved in the conceptions of hermeneutics by these African philosophers, this paper argues that basic to hermeneutics is dialogue and its proclivity towards intercultural understanding. Keywords : Hermeneutics, African philosophy, intercultural understanding, Oral tradition. (shrink)

Personhood is an extensively discussed theme in contemporary African philosophy, which has taken metaphysical, epistemological and normative dimensions. In Western philosophical traditions, discourse on personhood is transmuting to debates on transhumanism. Missing in the African philosophical literature is consideration of transhumanism and an explication of the relationship between personhood and transhumanism. In this article, I critically examine the relationship between personhood and transhumanism in an African context. Drawing on Barry Hallen’s African metaphysical account of personhood and Thaddeus Metz’s Afro-communal normative (...) conception of personhood, I argue that while some transhumanist elements are embedded in African normative and ontological conceptions of personhood, some others are not. In the final analysis, I defend an Afrofuturistic account of personhood that is compatible with some censored essentials of transhumanism in African thoughts. Keywords : Personhood, Transhumanism, Barry Hallen, Thaddeus Metz, Africa, Yoruba. (shrink)

"Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century", Historical Inevitability", "Two Concepts of Liberty", "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life". These four essays deal with the various aspects of individual liberty, including the distinction between positive and negative liberty and the necessity of rejecting determinism if we wish to keep hold of the notions of human responsibility and freedom.

This paper argues that there is a general absence of democratic theory in African political scholarship in terms of providing the underlying principles, meaning, canons and criteria of democracy in African culture. The paper exposes the conceptual errors implicit in the conflation of democracy as a concept and as practiced in different political systems. Consequently, it contends that an eclectic appraisal of our indigenous democratic values and practices as well as democratic ideas from other cultural traditions can provide a resonant (...) African theory of democracy. The paperconcludes that eclecticism is consociational in principle, and can help solve many of the contemporary socio-political problems besetting current democratic experiences in Africa. (shrink)

This lecture insisted upon negative liberty as the political complement to the human capacity for free choice, and made matching metaphysical claims: the nature of being, and especially the conflicts amongst values, were inconsistent with totalitarian claims. Berlin, arguing along this line, provided an account of the perversion of positive liberty into a warrant for such claims, discussed nationalism, and emphasized the value‐pluralism, now linked so frequently with his name.

The question of racial identity in the process and outcome of aesthetic surgery is gaining increasing attention in bioethical discourse. This paper attempts an ethical examination of the racial identity issues involved in aesthetic surgery. Dominant moral values in Western culture are explored in the evaluation of aesthetic surgery. The paper argues that African values are yet to receive the universal attention they arguably deserve especially in the rethinking of values underlying aesthetic surgery as racial transformation. Through a consideration of (...) some moral-aesthetic values in the Yorùbá-African culture, this paper further re-evaluates the ethics of aesthetic surgery. The paper contends against the propagation of aesthetic surgery as a new form of bolstering racial divides and identity in the evolving cosmopolitan age. The position defended in the paper is that some values from Yorùbá-African culture are useful in the consideration of the ethics of aesthetic surgery and more importantly, in avoiding the racial identity bias embedded in aesthetic surgery. The paper concludes that if due consideration is perhaps given to some African moral-aesthetic values in the global aesthetic surgery industry, some of the evolving moral and racial complexities would be better mediated. (shrink)

In this biographical essay, I survey the life and time of Sophie Abosede Olayemi Oluwole as a student, scholar and researcher in African philosophy. I show how she emerged as one of the first women to obtain a PhD and subsequently attained the rank of professor of African philosophy in Africa. I show that it was J.B. Danquah who first introduced her to African philosophy which was later to become the main focus of her research. I argue that in the (...) course of a research inAfrican philosophy spanning almost four decades, Oluwole gave the most incisive philosophical interpretation of the Yoruba Ifa Corpus which climaxed in her comparison of Greek Socrates and Yoruba Ò ̣rúnmìlà. Employing the method of conversational thinking, I will discuss Oluwole’s works in African philosophy and conclude by contending that due to her work on Ifa corpus, Oluwole can be credited with the discovery of what is now known and studied as ancient Yorubaphilosophy. (shrink)

The African Predicament The African predicament is a concept that explains the aggregate of plights that threaten the African people. It is also an account that combines methods from various disciplines since the robustness of the theme is not limited to the field of philosophy alone but serves as a problem for consideration in the … Continue reading African Predicament →.

This paper seeks to advance the horizon of Kwasi Wiredu’s philosophical defense of the compatibility of cultural universals and particulars. Wiredu reflects on language, biological identity, inter/intra cultural communication, as well as epistemic and moral fundamentals as cultural universals. In pursuing further Wiredu’s thesis on cultural universals, the present paper critically examines some of the inconsistencies implicit in Wiredu’s position. As a consequence, the paper extends the frontiers of the realm of universals by establishing the plausibility of causality as another (...) instance of a conceptual universal, transcending all cultural particularities. (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: between the Platonic (...) belief in absolute Truth and the lure of authoritarianism between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century fascism between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt a critical assessment of Hallen’s case for reconsidering consensual democracy in Africa and argue that it is unconvincing. In furthering the discourse, I argue against a case for consensual democracy by exposing some other salient problematic aspects of Wiredu’s model of consensual governance. Contra Wiredu and Hallen on non-party consensual governance, I make a case for enriching majoritarian democracy through a fusion of some moral-ontological aspects of indigenous political practices for good governance. This eclectic model, (...) I argue, is more appropriate for post-colonial African polity and should rather be taken more seriously in the ongoing conversations on how best to organise the African polis. (shrink)

This paper undertakes a philosophical investigation of the implications of the traditional Yoruba understanding of education for the contemporary African quest for development. The paper argues that the Yoruba conception of education is marked bythe underlying philosophical principles of functionalism, moralism and progressivism. These principles, the paper contends, are of great relevance to the quest of contemporary African societies for education that will serve as a catalyst for development.

This chapter investigates the problem of knowledge production on economic poverty in Africa as, largely, an instance of epistemic injustice. It applies Karl Popper’s critical rationalism to the issue of knowledge production on poverty. Methodologies of researches on poverty in Africa subtly promotes intended epistemic injustices against the subjects as the poor are underrepresented in knowledge about them; the experiences of the poor are often ignored, and their epistemic capacity for unearthing the push and pull factors of poverty are greeted (...) with much inferiority, skepticism and contempt. In severing the intersection between researching and reporting poverty in Africa and epistemic injustice, this chapter argues that Popper’s critical rationalism is philosophically indispensable. Popper’s scientific and political thoughts are potent theoretical interventions in addressing the epistemic, methodological, social, moral and political problems of poverty in Africa. The elements of scientific method inquiry, rationality, piecemeal social engineering, liberalism and intellectual openness explicit in Popper’s philosophy are explored, applied and found relevant to promoting poverty research ideals and policy development in Africa and beyond. The chapter concludes on the importance of Popper’s works, which span beyond his time and space, to knowledge about Africa. (shrink)

The question of what constitutes personhood is controversial in Western bioethical literature especially in relation to its implications for healthcare. Godfrey Tangwa explores the traditional African perspective of a person and maintains that it is different totally from the Western perception as there is no dichotomy between a person and a human being in the African context. He defends a conception of personhood as a moral agent rather than a moral patient, which the Western view focuses on. The basic justification (...) he offers in support of his position is the eco-biocommunitarian worldview. This paper seeks to respond to Tangwa by arguing that his positions on person are not only metaphysically superfluous; they are also ethically incoherent. This paper argues that Tangwa’s theses on “the traditional African perception of a person” are inaccurate representations and misapprehension of the common notion of personhood in sub-Saharan Africa. In reconstructing an African concept of personhood, this paper explores its plausible implications for global clinical bioethics relevance. (shrink)

In this paper, I advance Odera Oruka's insights on the ethics of consumerism in order to draw relevant implications of his thoughts on rethinking the problem of obesity. I argue that Oruka's ethics of consumerism and his right to human minimum theory entail some salient ideas that might serve as a better ethical model for reducing the global obesity prevalence. Though Oruka's African moral philosophy is yet to receive universal attention it arguably deserves, the interests of the international and ‘globesity’ (...) community would be better served learning from the contributions of an African moral theory to contemporary bioethical discourse on obesity. Oruka's moral thoughts are by constitution, a deontological and cosmopolitan call for reducing hunger in globalized world, while also indirectly, addressing obesity of the poor. I show the limitations of his ethics of consumerism, and the shortcomings of such ethics in the context of obesity of the poor. Consequently, I develop a neo-Orukan virtue based ethics that is worthy of attention in efforts towards addressing the obesity tide. No such perspective currently exists in the context of obesity; yet the exigent need for one is necessitated by the defects of the libertarian and harm principle approaches in Western bioethical discourse. (shrink)

Focusing on black communities in Africa, in this paper, I attempt an African bioethico-aesthetic deconstruction of the falsehood in colorist definitions of beauty purveyed by the migration of non-surgical cosmetics to Africa. I provide a novel ethical evaluation of the act of skin bleaching using principles of the African ethic of communion. I argue that skin bleaching is morally wrong to the extent that it promotes disharmonious relations and false identity in the beauty industry in Africa. Drawing on scientific studies (...) that link toxic ingredients in many skin-bleaching products to adverse health effects, I discuss the public health impact of bleaching cosmetics and other problems occasioned by their strategic expansion into African markets. I propose that there is an urgent need for a relational ethic of polycentric governance that would harmoniously regulate the production and distribution of cosmetic products across regions in order to avoid the exploitation of consumers in black African societies, while also protecting consumers’ right to make informed choices through education. (shrink)

This article proposes a unified theory of the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). The theory provides a framework for rationalizing the various and contradictory findings in past empirical research. The theory is based on the parallels between the business and CSR domains, and thus draws on models from economics.

About the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1668- 1774 and Johann Gottfried Herder, 1774-1803.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “For anyone wanting to understand the twists and turns of the history of ideas, this book will be indispensable.”―John Gray, New York Times Book Review The Sense of Reality was the last new collection of essays published by Isaiah Berlin in his lifetime. All informed by Berlin’s lifelong fascination with the history of ideas, these engaging studies range widely: the subjects explored include realism in history; judgment in politics; the history (...) of socialism; the nature and impact of Marxism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics; Russian notions of artistic commitment; and the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, taking its cue from the impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece. Now with a new foreword by Timothy Snyder and a new appendix comprising a previously unpublished essay on the great Russian critic Vissarion Belinksy and a previously uncollected lecture on utopianism, The Sense of Reality is a rich and illuminating collection from one of the most seductive writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx is considered the classic short account of the life and thought of the theorist of the socialist revolution. With a new Introduction by Alan Ryan that elucidates the enduring value of this work and its place in Marxist scholarship, this is a compelling history of ideas as well as a portrait of one of the twentieth century's most incendiary thinkers.

This short story, written when Berlin was twelve, is his first surviving essay. It reveals the disposition that found expression in his more mature work. Berlin contrasts the settled life of ‘a cosy little home’ with the crude consequentialism of Commissar Uritsky and its destructive effects. The story is a morality tale: Uritsky meets his just end.

The masterly essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, in which Sir Isaiah Berlin underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct, deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other nineteenth-century thinker. A brilliantly lucid work of synthesis and exposition, the book introduces Marx's ideas and sets them in their context, explains why they were revolutionary in political and intellectual terms, and paints a memorable portrait of (...) Marx's dramatic life and outsized personality. Berlin takes readers through Marx's years of adolescent rebellion and post-university communist agitation, the personal high point of the 1848 revolutions, and his later years of exile, political frustration, and intellectual effort. Critical yet sympathetic, Berlin's account illuminates a life without reproducing a legend. New features of this thoroughly revised edition include references for Berlin's quotations and allusions, Terrell Carver's assessment of the distinctiveness of Berlin's book, and a revised guide to further reading. (shrink)