The non-phonetic moment in writing challenges the metaphysic of the proper (self-possession). It is chiefly concerned with speaking pictures. We are still into logocentrism as we are into philophemes of sight and voices. This realization is in indeed important because what we call Big Data Analytics desemiotizes, squeezes, and hollows out speaking pictures and converts them as figures of...
Axel Honneth and Human Struggles for Recognition
‘Man is born free but everywhere is in chains’ goes the famous dictum of Jean Jack Rousseau. Rousseau appears to be assuming a state of nature which accepts innate freedom. Is that really so? Axel Honneth seems to indicate that our freedom is an achievement and not something that is thrust onto our throats by destiny. The moral life...
Hermeneutics of un Homme Capable (A Able Person)
Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics can be broadly called the hermeneutics of un Homme capable. His hermeneutics is about human capacities and vulnerabilities. This takes us to a phenomenology of human ability or capacity. It centres around the capable and fallible human. Richard Kearney inspired by Ricoeur talks about the capable God, a God who may be. This reflection on the...
The Imperative of Dialogue: towards a Phenomenlogy of being able (un Homme Capable)
Our society stands in need of dialogue. This dialogue is vital for peace, harmony and progress. This dialogic exchange is not based on Platonic or Hegelian dialectic. Neither it is to be based on Habermasian communicative rationality. We do not so much need rational meaning. What we need is relational hermeneutical meaningfulness. What we need is a radical openness...
Social Neuroscience and Human Behaviour
Social neuroscience enables us to study how our brain is assisting us in our social interactions. Neuroscientists are looking for neural correlates of our consciousness and are trying to uncover the neural mechanism that governs our social behaviour. We have a social brain and are not just able to read the minds or mental states of others but are...
Historiography, Regimes of Historicity and Chronopherence
There is a meta-history to the writing of history. There is a plurality of methods, perspectives and ethico-political frameworks of writing history. These are cognitive writing practices that are used by historians to narrate history. There are positivist , marxist, nationalist, liberal etc historiographies that animate the works of writing history. They are epistemological sets of practices, ideological as...
Spiritual Democracy of God’s Creatures
Today the global community is threatened by habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. Hence we are called for serious philosophical, theological and ethical reflection. This challenge has led thinkers to develop several creative responses. Here I intend to look at eco-deconstruction. It is a cousin to eco-phenomenology and eco-hermeneutics. Maybe we can begin by asking the following question:...
The Face of God in the Cat of Derrida and the Bodhi tree of Buddha
Continental Philosophy has taken our thinking to the horizon of the other. It has opened our eyes and mind to alterity. But there is some sameness in this alterity. It only limits itself to our human other. It has not fully embraced our non-human other. The only non-human others that it exhibits concern are the cosmos and the theos...
Deconstructing our Lyconomy
The animal has no place in the human world. This is because we are enclosed in the human-centred language. Can we reach out to the world beyond the boundary of human speech? In an enclosed human speech we have a monologue and everything that is beyond human has to fit into it. Can we be spoken to or addressed...
Apophatics of the Human and the Animal Binary
Anti-humanism is gaining currency. Gills Deleuze and Felix Guattari signal it, when they position becoming-animal, as the higher moral goal in their book, Thousand Plateaus. Anti-humanism is not all that is to be detested. There is a lot of light that we can draw from the anti-humanism of some contemporary Philosophies. We can find shades of anti-humanism in Derrida...
