A Report on Ubuntu

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-1-86914-256-8
Verlag: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 171 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 531 g

Reihe: Thinking Africa Series

Twenty years after the end of apartheid rule, the claim that democratic South Africa is founded on the ‘spirit of law’ (nomos) of our shared humanity is questionable, to say the least.

Some would argue that all talk of Ubuntu (or African humanism) should be dismissed as a passing fad of an exhausted nationalism. But a different response to the present is possible, one that proceeds from a temporary suspension (epoché) of the nationalist matrix and all the dead-end questions that have resulted from it, in order to reposition Ubuntu in the more cosmopolitan terms of a critical humanism that must always remain irreducible to the politics of the day. This is a project that has to return to, in order to retrace, the founding claim that a politics premised on our shared humanity is, after all, perhaps possible.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Praeg, Leonhard

Über Autor(innen)

Leonhard Praeg is associate professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His previous publications include African Philosophy and the Quest for Autonomy: A Philosophical Investigation (2000, Rodopi), The Geometry of Violence: Africa, Girard, Modernity (2007, SUN Press) and Creating Destruction: Constructing Images of Violence and Genocide (co-edited with Nancy Billias, 2011, Rodopi).