This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It (...) is shown that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St’át’imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257–303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages. (shrink)

Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson analyzed a large‐scale web‐scraping corpus (the Google 1T dataset) and reported that word length is independently predicted from average information content (surprisal) calculated by a 2‐ to 4‐gram model (hereafter, longer‐span surprisal) across 11 Indo‐European languages, namely, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish. However, a recent article by Meylan and Griffiths suggested the importance of preprocessing for studies with large‐scale corpora and reanalyzed the same databases. After their preprocessing, the (...) results in Piantadosi et al. were not replicated in Czech, Romanian, and Swedish. Additionally, a German‐specific study by Koplenig, Kupietz, and Wolfer showed that the strict analysis did not replicate the result in Piantadosi et al. for that language with the preprocessing suggested by Meylan and Griffiths in a large‐scale but less noisy database. These three studies provide evidence from 11 Indo‐European languages and one Afro‐Asiatic language, Hebrew, as relevant in this debate. However, we do not have evidence from other linguistic groups. This study provides evidence about Japanese based on a strict preprocessing of Google's web‐scraping database. The results show that Japanese word length can be predicted independently by 2‐ to 4‐gram surprisal. (shrink)

Studies of non-standard, project-based forms of work prevalent in the creative industries have typically theorized the relational dynamics of work as a competitive process of social capital accumulation involving an individualistic, self-enterprising, zero-sum, and winner-takes-all struggle for favourable social network-positioning. Problematizing this prevailing conceptualization, our empirical case study draws on fifty in-depth interviews and two focus groups with creative workers in Ghana to show how relations of mutual aid, including elaborate efforts to live harmoniously with others, are intricately intertwined (...) with economic practices of getting by and getting ahead. Our analysis abductively mobilizes insights from Afro-communitarian ethics to theorize the mutual aid we observed as a complex socio-economic practice of relational resource redistribution contingent on degrees of social proximity. In applying “a theory from the South” to foreground the role of moral obligations, social harmony, and hands-on practices of mutual aid in non-standard forms of work, we contribute a “decolonial critique” of relationality of relevance to scholars of creative work and business ethicists. (shrink)

The Afro-Latin dance known as ‘salsa’ is a fusion of multiple dances from West Africa, Muslim Spain, enslaved communities in the Caribbean, and the United States. In part due to its global origins, salsa was pivotal in the development of the Figuration philosophy of dance, and for ‘dancing with,’ the theoretical method for social justice derived therefrom. In the present article, I apply the completed theory Figuration exclusively to salsa for the first time, after situating the latter in the (...) dance studies literature. My first section explores Juliet McMains’ recent history, Spinning Mambo into Salsa, with an emphasis on the dynamics of class, race and sex therein. My second section explores a resonant Afro-Latin dance history, Marta E. Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, where she deploys salsa’s sister-dance (tango) as a ‘counter-choreography’ to the choreography of postmodern neocolonialism. And my third section applies Figuration’s four central aspects of dance (or ‘Moves’) to salsa qua member of its ‘societal’ family of dance. In conclusion, through partnering with salsa, Figuration emerges as a member of its own ‘discursive’ family of dance, while salsa emerges as a gestural discourse capable of helping reconstruct a more socially-just world from the postmodern ruins of today. (shrink)

In this paper, we take our cue from Kevin Schilbrack’s admonishment that the philosophy of religion needs to take religious practices seriously as an object of investigation. We do so by offering Afro-Brazilian traditions as an example of the methodological poverty of current philosophical engagement with religions that are not text-based, belief-focused, and institutionalized. Anthropologists have studied these primarily orally transmitted traditions for nearly a century. Still, they involve practices, such as offering and sacrifice as well as spirit possession (...) and mediumship, that have yet to receive attention from philosophers. We argue that this is not an accident: philosophers have had a highly restricted diet of examples, have not looked at ethnography as source material, and thus still need to put together a methodology to tackle such practices. After elucidating Schilbrack’s suggestions to adopt an embodiment paradigm and apply conceptual metaphor theory and the extended mind thesis to consider religious practices as thoughtful, we offer criticism of the specifics of his threefold solution. First, it assumes language is linear; second, it takes a problematic view of the body; and third, it abides by a misleading view of the “levels” of cognition. We conclude that the philosophy of religion should adopt enactivism to understand religious practices as cognitive enterprises. (shrink)

This paper examines the shortcomings and possibilities of the social contract approach in relation to the Kenyan post 2007 elections political crisis. The authorapplies philosophical analysis to a practical situation, using Kenya as a case study in the context of the challenges of post-colonial nation-building. The author reflects on the “Afro-libertarian” politico-economic framework, in which communitarian and communal traditions with egoistic and profit-making individualist libertarian market rationality are tangled in a fragile, patrimonial state, with strong sub-national loyalties preventing the (...) building of a united nation and a strong state.The thesis of the paper is that if sustainable peace, social reconstruction and national unity are to be achieved, there is need to have an adequate understanding of the moral dimensions of the concept of “social justice”. The focus has to be on the building of an impartial state, with a clear national agenda and strong ethnically and politically neutral institutions and processes. (shrink)

Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europechallenges a view of Nordic societies as homogenously white, and as human rights champions that are so progressive that even the concept of race is deemed irrelevant to their societies. The book places African Diasporas, race and legacies of imperialism squarely in a Nordic context. How has a nation as peripheral as Iceland been shaped by an identity of being white? How do Black Norwegians challenge racially conscribed views of Norwegian nationhood? What (...) does the history of jazz in Denmark say about the relation between its national identity and race? What is it like to be a mixed-race black Swedish woman? How have African Diasporans in Finland navigated issues of race and belonging? And what does the widespread denial of everyday racism in Nordic societies mean to Afro-Nordics? This text is a must read for anyone interested in issues of race in the Nordic region and Europe writ large. As Paul Gilroy writes in his foreword, it is a book that "should be studied with care and profit inside the Nordic countries and also outside them by the broader international readership that has been established around the study of racism and 'critical race theory'.". (shrink)

Like all typologies, the following study is a generalisation of forces inherent in the making of a situation — here the treatment of multilingualism by the colonial and post-colonial powers and their African successors, and the explanation given for the dichotomy. Whilst the expression ‘Afro-Saxons’ was used by Ali Mazrui of the followers of the Westminster pattern, the term is here employed in a wider sense to cover the colonial nations of Teutonic/Germanic descent — whereas the term ‘Afro-Romans’ (...) has been coined to counter-balance the Afro-Saxons, as the heirs to the Roman Empire, i.e. the Romance-speaking peoples on African soil. (shrink)

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Abdias Nascimento, and Lélia Gonzalez are presented in this essay as Afro-Brazilian existentialist thinkers, whose global significance lies in their outlining philosophical interpretations of Brazil that center racial relations in the formation of the nation. By combining accounts of the lives and intellectual contributions of these thinkers, one can understand the core of each of their projects, whether in philosophical literature, sociological study of ethnic-racial relations, or philosophical anthropology. Part of a line of thought in (...) which the terms “black” and “existence” are put together, Jesus, Nascimento, and Gonzalez exemplarily proposed practices of decolonial knowledge production based on the notion that it is possible with the struggle for freedom and justice to reverse power structures that hierarchize human beings. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to articulate a specific desideratum for any theory of Latinidad, namely, that there is no adequate conception of Latinx without an attendant conception of Afro-Latinx. In order to be reflective of those whom it purports to describe in the U.S. and elsewhere in the hemisphere, the term Latinx must be plastic enough to encompass the many internal differences, and even antagonisms, between its different constituent parts. Within it, we argue here in particular, it (...) must include its Afro-descended history, which includes not just African-descended people but also a denial of the influences of African-descended culture writ large. Our central claim here, then, is that a certain African-descendedness is constitutive of Latinidad in multiple registers, including history, cultural practices, and social identificatory processes despite Latinidad’s pernicious exclusionary history. (shrink)

The study is a response to the call for papers on African issues and it focuses on the theme of blood. The chapter seeks to answer the following questions: Why is blood, the sanctity of life, associated with defilement? How can the good and purity of life which blood symbolizes come out of impurities? How is the practice of blood manipulation represented in biblical texts? How can bodily refuse in this case blood be conceived as a symbol of purity, power (...) and danger? How do readers of biblical texts understand the textual representations and interpretations of blood? Does each mode of blood manipulation rituals function as communicative symbols? Our response to these questions is threefold. First, we consider the sanctity of blood in relation to its purity and power. This is followed by an examination of danger beliefs associated with blood and lastly by an analysis of the sacred/taboo or purity/danger dichotomy within the context of the Old Testament and the New Testament as well as of the Shona Afro-Christians. (shrink)

Abstract:This article asks readers to consider expanding on ideas of Afro-Dominicanidad, and hegemonic narratives of blackness and anti-blackness. The goal is two-fold: first, to consider how ultra-nationalist movements in the Dominican Republic render dark-skinned Dominicans untenable to the viability of the Dominican nation-state and second: to identify how emic discourses of Afro-descent expand the epistemic grounds in the on-going fight against ultra-nationalism in the Dominican Republic.

The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim (...) Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America. (shrink)

This article draws our attention to the centrality of the normative idea of personhood in elucidating a robust Afro-communitarianism. To do so, it visits the debate between the so-called moderate and radical communitarians to argue that the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual is not an implausible position. It argues that this assertion, given a nuanced moral interpretation, can offer a promising African perspective on how to secure a life of dignity withoutnecessarily appealing to rights but (...) to the normative idea of personhood. It submits that the idea of personhood entails a morality of duties that prioritizes the well-being of all. It is this prioritization of the well-being of all as the proper moral-political goal of Afro-communitarianism that moral-theoretically captures the essence of the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze a seven-page speech delivered by Sukarno, first president of Indonesia, at the opening of the First Asia-Africa Conference where he advocated Afro-Asian unity/ solidarity as the panacea for colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Our aim, by focusing on a single text, is to demonstrate the role of an intensive analysis of ‘outstanding’ singular texts within the broad field of discourse analysis. The analysis is rooted within a positive discourse analysis (PDA) framework, with special focus on (...) lexical choices and variation, modality, intertextuality/interdiscursivity, metaphorical representations, ideological use of pronouns, indexical meaning, and strategies of argumentation. Through these rhetorical techniques, we illustrate how an independence leader constructs an emancipatory discourse aimed at reconciling the ideas and beliefs of the leaders of two continents that have a common history of colonialism. The study sheds light on the role of key speeches and political leaders in promoting an emancipatory discourse, and exemplifies how (presidential) rhetoric can be construed as offering a message of hope, strength, and inspiration while playing the role of a unifier, thereby highlighting the major underlying assumption of PDA: a commitment to a discourse of social change. (shrink)

Critical study of Pramāṇaratna of Raghunātha Bhaṭṭācārya, 16th century, treatise on the epistemology of the Mimamsa school in Hindu philosophy; based on the manuscript preserved in the Manuscript Library of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta.

A close relationship between masculinity, alcoholism, widowhood and gendered poverty is evident in contemporary African society. Alcohol consumption among young men begins at an increasingly early age due to availability of low-priced alcohol presented in different varieties. Young, beautiful and sexy girls are used to advertise alcohol. Many young men are addicted to alcohol and totally unable to be free from alcohol addiction. This sad state coupled with the impact of globalisation on the economies of many African countries has left (...) many men jobless. Consequently, many households are headed by women in a patriarchal context where men are supposed to be the heads of the family. Through an Afro-feminisation of Mother Earth lens, this article re-read Proverbs 31 in dialogue with Acts 9:36–43, to show the role of women in the socio-economic sustainability of the family, society and in enhancing gender equity.Contribution: This article re-read Proverbs 31 in dialogue with Acts 9:36–41 as resources for enhancing gender equity. An Afro-feminisation of Mother Earth for sustainable development was presented in ways that open up possibilities for the life of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1:28 to flourish. (shrink)

Late antique Alexandria is much better known than the early Islamic city. To be fully appreciated, the transition must be contextualized against the full range of Afro-Eurasiatic commercial and intellectual life. The Alexandrian schools ‘harmonized’ Hippocrates and Galen, Plato and Aristotle. They also catalyzed Christian theology especially during the controversies before and after the Council of Chalcedon (451) that tore the Church apart and set the stage for the emergence of Islam. Alexandrian cultural dissemination down to the seventh century (...) is here studied especially through evidence for the city’s libraries and book trade, together with the impact of its educational curriculum from Iran to Canterbury. After the Arab conquest, Alexandria turned into a frontier city and lost its economic and political role. But it became a city of the mind whose conceptual legacy fertilized not only Greek scholarship at Constantinople, but also Arabic science and philosophy thanks to the eighth- to ninth-century Baghdadi translation movement. Alexandria emanated occult energies too, thanks to the Pharos as variously misunderstood by Arabic writers, or the relics of its Christian saints, not least the Evangelist Mark, surreptitiously translated to Venice in 828-29. Study of the astral sciences too - astronomy but also astrology - was fertilized from Alexandria, as far afield as India and perhaps China as well as Syria, Baghdad and Constantinople. Egypt’s revival by the Fatimids, who founded Cairo in 961, had little impact on Alexandria until about the end of the eleventh century when, for a time, the city attracted Sunni scholars from as far away as Spain or Iran, while commerce benefited from the rise of the Italian merchant republics and the beginning of the Crusades. While the early caliphate had united a vast zone from Afghanistan to the Atlantic, the eleventh century saw a reemergence of late antique distinctions between the Iranian plateau, Syro-Mesopotamia, and the two Mediterranean basins. Alexandria was one of the points where these worlds intersected, though sub-Saharan Africa, to which it formally belonged, remained largely beyond its horizon until the twentieth century. (shrink)

This study interrogates the conventional understanding of and practice within mediated climate change communication as a forum where transformative ideas on sustainability practices are shape...

The article focuses on Sino-African relations, with specific reference to South Africa. An outline is provided of recent developments as a roadmap for the unfolding of this relationship. The question of whether China’s African interest can be seen as tacit colonisation is discussed. Even if these fears are allayed, the question remains whether the Chinese presence on the continent will make a significant difference to African development. To answer this question, the focus shifts to economic models and the Chinese recipe (...) for economic progress. Confucianism was opposed during the cultural revolution of Mao Zedong, but it now forms the basis for Chinese foreign policy and internal affairs. This is briefly investigated. Some Confucian ideas are related to basic African concepts in an effort to find a common ground in Afro-Chinese relations. The impact of secular Confucianism on African spirituality is discussed. (shrink)

Since the end of the 19th century, Brazilian researchers have speculated about the phenomenon of ethnic coexistence they have witnessed in their country. How may the mixed culture that is its obvious result be explained? Should it be attributed to some sociocultural syncretism, to an interpenetration of civilizations or, quite simply, to a synthesis? Whatever the case, it is certain that cultural elements of very different origins became united in Brazil and that they have remained closely associated there in spite (...) of their disparity. The best example of this “cultural conglomerate,” if we may call it that, is without a doubt that of the Afro-Brazilian religious cults and, although numerous studies have already been devoted to them, they have a richness of content and meaning, plus a capacity for renewal, that is far from being exhaustively investigated. (shrink)

But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart and (...) encouragement to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography. · 1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.· 2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915. John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. (shrink)

This essay has two aims. The first is to show that the editors of Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings and some of the writers who contributed to it (especially Ismail Ezzedine, Anar Rzayev, Tawfick Zeyad, Abdel Aziz El-Ahwani, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Alex La Guma, Adonis, Salah Dehni, Luis Bernardo Honwana, Ghassan Kanafany, and Tozaburo Ono) attempted to reconceive of nationalism in a way that would make international solidarity constitutive of the new national projects. It is argued that this is quite different from (...) thinking of the contributors to Lotus as abandoning nationalism in favor of a supranationalist project. The second aim is to show that at least some of the contributors to Lotus thought of themselves as being the vanguard of modernity, and not as the creators of “alternative modernities”. This essay shows that some of the aforementioned contributors to Lotus implicitly drew on standpoint epistemology in order to argue that, due to their struggles against colonialism, racial discrimination, etc., they had a privileged epistemic vantage point from which to criticize modernity in its European form for not being modern enough. (shrink)

31 October 2017 marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Reformation in Germany, West Europe. One of the most important legacies of the Reformation is the teaching concerning God’s gracious salvation, received and appropriated only through faith in Christ Jesus our Saviour. The current article seeks to focus on reflection on gratitude as a Christian lifestyle in response to God’s redemption. The article reflects on gratitude as recognition account, highlighting the importance of gratitude as a Christian virtue, as (...) a socioreligious phenomenon, and its importance in human happiness and well-being. This, as it shaped the life of Christians, is found especially in the African continent, in whose traditional life, gratitude was ubiquitous, known and practised even before conversion to the Protestant religion. The article also briefly highlights the fact that a relaxed attitude regarding the teaching on gratitude could result in Sunday or nominal Christianity and the demise of prophetic Christianity. Some concluding thoughts regarding gratitude are shared. (shrink)

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will insist that ‘jesterism’ as ‘prophetic (...) animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation. (shrink)

In the region of Asia Minor and above all in Smyrna up to the third and fourth centuries the tension between Jews and Christians is palpable. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp and in the Martyrdom of Pionius, it is clear that the social ascendency of Judaism in Smyrna was exploited on various occasions until it became a co-protagonist in the persecution against the Christians. Despite the gradual separation and differentiation between Jews and Christians, both the New Testament and subsequent Christian (...) literature in Smyrna report that no self-understanding of Christianity in relation to its deepest roots escaped its necessary confrontation with Judaism. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Resumo O Reinado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (também conhecido como Congado), manifestação católica, típica dos negros, festa popular e importante no Estado de Minas Gerais funda-se em uma narrativa mítica em torno da Santa de mesmo nome e constitui o imaginário de seus devotos. Compreender como esta religiosidade mítica foi constituída no Brasil é o objetivo desse artigo. Os dados são partes integrantes de tese de doutoramento que adotou a teoria da complexidade (...) (Morin), a psicologia profunda (Jung, Campbell, Bachelard), a antropologia do imaginário (Durand) e a antropologia da festa (Duvignaud) com seus principais expoentes em diálogo com outros autores, como referenciais teóricos. A mithopoiésis (Ferreira Santos) aqui entendida como a elaboração de sentidos dada pelos congadeiros à sua própria vida orientada pelo fundo mítico de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, se tornou a metodologia mais adequada para o estudo. Os resultados encontrados possibilitaram a construção de novos conhecimentos sobre as comunidades afrodescendentes, ampliando a nossa compreensão sobre a sociedade brasileira, e sobre nós mesmos. Palavras-chave: congado; mito; imaginário; festa.Nossa Senhora do Rosário's Reign (also known as Congado), Catholic manifestation, typicaly of black people, popular and important party in the State of Minas Gerais is founded on a mythical narrative about the Saint of the same name and establishes the imagination of its devotees . Understanding how this mythical religion was established in Brazil is the purpose of this article. The data is part of the doctoral thesis which adopted the theory of complexity (Morin), depth psychology (Jung, Campbell, Bachelard), anthropology of the imaginary (Durand) and anthropology of the party (Duvignaud) with their main representatives in dialogue with other authors, as theoretical reference. The mithopoiésis (Ferreira Santos) here is understood as the elaboration of senses given by the Congadeiros to their own lives, guided by the mythical background of Nossa Senhora do Rosário has become the most appropriate methodology for the study. The results allowed the construction of new knowledge about the afro-descendent communities, enlarging our understanding of the Brazilian society, and ourselves. Key words: congado ; myth; imaginary; party. (shrink)

Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty, ethicists call for effective measures of global justice to set up just institutional structures. Their arguments for a transnational obligation to help however remain contested, one of the main reasons for that being the lack of motivational support for trans-national visions of global justice. This articles suggests that the debate will gain new and helpful insights if it studies the motivational mechanisms at work in the dominant religious and cultural traditions, asking: How (...) do these particular traditions conceive of social justice; how do they motivate their adherents to extend solidarity? And how can the similarities surfacing in their motivational strategies be informative for the quest to devise a motivationally saturated account of global justice? The article demonstrates the potential of such an concrete-universal discourse in an exemplary manner by staging a dialogue between public Christian Social Ethics and African Ubuntu Ethics. (shrink)

Buddhist Formal Logic. A study of Dignaga's Hetucakra and K'uei-chi's Great Commentary on the Nyayapravesa. R.S.Y. Chi. Royal Asiatic Society, London 1969; revised edition, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1984. lxxxii + 222 pp. Rs. 100.