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The papers presented in this volume honor Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Furman University where he taught for more than forty years. Several of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of fourth generation Personalism, and Boston Personalism in particular. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought which holds that the ideas of "person" and "personality" are indispensable to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, as well as are keys to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being. The Boston Personalist tradition was inaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The nature of human reason is one of the thorniest of mysteries in philosophy. The reason appears in many specific forms within general areas such as cognition, thinking, experiencing beauty, and moral judgment. These forms are "perfectly" known in philosophy, yet an unknown pattern has been noticed which shows us that they are all a variation of the same theme: truth is an identity relation between the "thought" and "reality"; justice is an identity relation between the given and the deserved; beauty is an identity relation as rhyme is an identity relation between the final sounds of words; rhythm is an identity relation between time intervals; symmetry is an identity relation between two halves; proportion is an identity relation between two ratios; anaphora is an identity relation between the initial words. Particular things are identities in themselves and universals are identities between particulars. One idea associates another idea identical to it; an analogy is an identity between relations; induction is an identification between the known and unknown instances; and all the logic rests on the law of identity. What is common for all of them is the nature of reason itself.

This book is about an African philosophical examination of the death penalty debate. In a 21st century world where the notion of human right is primed, this book considers the question of the death penalty in two sub-Saharan African countries namely, Zimbabwe and Nigeria, notorious for their poor human right records. This edited collection comprises of 11 essays from Zimbabwean and Nigerian philosophers. As opinions continue to divide over the retention or abolition of the death penalty, these African philosophers attempt to localise this debate by raising the following questions: What is the meaning of life in the African place? Is it proper to take the human life under any guise at all? Who has the right to take the human life? Can the death penalty be justified on the bases of African cultures? Why should it be abolished? Why should it be retained? Indeed, this book is the first of its kind to engage the tumultuous issue of capital punishment in the postcolonial Africa and from the African philosophical point of view.

Almost five decades after his death, there is still ample reason to pay attention to the life and legacy of Bertrand Russell. This is true not only because of his role as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, but also because of his important place in twentieth-century history as an educator, public intellectual, critic of organized religion, humanist, and peace activist. The papers in this anthology explore Russell's life and legacy from a wide variety of perspectives. This is altogether fitting, given the many-sided nature of Russell, his life, and his work.The first section of the book considers Russell the man, and draws lessons from Russell's complicated personal life. The second examines Russell the philosopher, and the philosophical world within which his work was embedded. The third scrutinizes Russell the atheist and critic of organized religion, inquiring which parts of his critical stance are worth emulating today. The final section revisits Russell the political activist; it directs an eye both at Russell's own long career of peace activism, but also at his place in a highly political family tradition of which he was justifiably proud.This book thus constitutes an invitation, if one were needed, to the world of Bertrand Russell. Those new to Russell, but with an interest in biography, philosophy, religion, or politics, will hopefully find something to learn here. This may spark an interest in learning more about Russell. But this book is not just intended for the Russell neophyte. The book sheds fresh light on a number of topics central to Russell studies-his connections to other philosophers, for example. Scholars well-versed in Russell studies will enjoy grappling with the treatment given to these topics here.

Within current political, social, and ethical debates - both in academia and society - activism and how individuals should approach issues facing nonhuman animals, have become increasingly important, 'hot' issues. Individuals, groups, advocacy agencies, and governments have all espoused competing ideas for how we should approach nonhuman use and exploitation. Ought we proceed through liberation? Abolition? Segregation? Integration? As nonhuman liberation, welfare, and rights' groups increasingly interconnect and identify with other 'social justice movements', resolutions to these questions have become increasingly entangled with questions of what justice and our ethical commitments demand on this issue, and the topic has become increasingly significant and divisive.The book considers how this question, and contemporary issues facing nonhumans (such as experimentation, hunting, and factory farming) should be answered by drawing on both theory and practice in order to provide grounded, yet actionable, ways forward.Indicatively, the book covers topics such as:- The intersection between interspecies ethics and the ethics of war and self-defence- Nonhuman animals as political subjects and acting agents- Whether we should intervene for nonhuman animals in cases of natural disaster- Various explorations of why the nonhuman movement may not be succeeding as well as it could be- Comparisons between the nonhuman movement and other social movement- Arguments for and against intervening to help or save nonhumans, and how far we may go- What intervention could ultimately mean for nonhumansThe book is therefore intended not only to provide new and interesting insight into the area and important contemporary discussions, but also to constructively aid the nonhuman movement and unite theory and practice on the crucial issues. With the nonhuman movement and its past approaches currently being questioned as a success, more nonhumans than ever being harmed and exploited, and a growing gulf between activists and scholars, this book will not only be a timely addition to the literature, but an attempt to bridge these gaps and move both theory and practice - and thus the movement and field - forward.

The papers in this collection were originally presented at the 13th International Conference on Persons, held at the University of Boston in August 2015. This biennial event, founded by Thomas O. Buford and Charles Conti in 1989, attracts a host of international scholars, both the venerable and the aspiring. It is widely regarded as the premier event for those whose research concerns the philosophical tradition known as 'personalism'. That tradition is, perhaps, best known today in its American and European manifestations, although there remains a small but fiercely defended stronghold in Britain. Personalism is not an exclusively Western development, however; its roots are also found in India, China, and Japan. What unites these disparate intellectual cultures may seem quite small. There is little, if any, methodological or doctrinal consensus among them. They are all, however, responses to the impersonal and depersonalising forces perceived to be at work in philosophy, theology, and, most recently, the natural and political sciences. Their common aim is to place persons at the heart of these discourses, to defend the idea that persons are the metaphysical, epistemological, and moral 'bottom line', the vital clue to knowledge of self, reality, and all conceivable values. The authors in this collection do not simply reflect upon this tradition, they put it to work on a range of philosophical and theological problems, both classical and contemporary; problems of free will, personal identity, and the nature of reality, as well as the very current concerns of environmental philosophers, bio- and neuro-ethicists. Their perspectives, too, are many and varied, so offer profound insights into key debates among other philosophical traditions, such as the Kantian, Hegelian, phenomenological, and process schools.

The purpose of the book is to examine the theological claims of ethics, faith and belief from a philosophical perspective. The Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants of the Old Testament, Jesus of the synoptic gospels, and Paul's writings serve as the frame of reference in examining a biblical expression of reason and structured logic.The message of Jesus centered on the Kingdom of God, defined the meaning of faith and belief, established a new ethic, and framed the message in logic forms. The life and death of Jesus brought the realization of God's final covenant as prophesied by the Old Testament. However, Paul appropriated and developed the Jesus of history into the mythological eschatological Christ figure.The clash of philosophy and theology is evident with theological presuppositions that are based on spiritual insight and divine revelation. Logic in scripture employs propositions based primarily on revealed proof that is within the context of that which cannot be proven absolutely.Uncovering the identity of YHWH in the manuscripts and religious practices of Canaanite culture clearly associated YHWH with the polytheism of the Ugarit texts. YHWH was one of the seventy sons of the Canaanite Most High God El and took on a unique identity that was rooted in El and the polytheistic nature of the pantheon of gods.Theological truths stand within the context of faith and reason stands apart from faith and infers only that which can be proven based on evidence. That which is knowable by faith cannot be known by reason since reason cannot validate that which is not proven to exist.

Be it Foucault's insight into a society based on 'power-knowledge' or Fukuyama's attempts to predict the future based on the end-game situation of 'liberal democracy', both are like trying to work out a curvature of a line from a given point by using pre-calculus maths. No amount of elaborate narratives based on a quasi-dynamic, phenomenological concept like 'discourses' or a static concept like 'liberal democracy' will capture the dynamism of moving events and their fluid directions called 'future'. You need the methodology of operative concepts that process moving events.My essay is based on a holistic and dynamic concept with logical progressions. Instead of capturing movements as a still picture I try to record constantly changing situations in terms of modality of history. It is the necessity of tangencies and encompassments for Circles of Identity (CI) that forms history. The momentum of 'self' that bridges the past and the future is the propellant of CIs, which follows certain rules to suggest our destiny.

This collection is about composing thought at the level of modernism and decomposing it at the postmodern level where many cocks might crow with African philosophy as a focal point. It has two parts: part one is titled 'The Journey of Reason in African Philosophy', and part two is titled 'African Philosophy and Postmodern Thinking'. There are seven chapters in both parts. Five of the essays are reprinted here as important selections while nine are completely new essays commissioned for this book. As their titles suggest, in part one, African philosophy is unfolded in the manifestation of reason as embedded in modern thought while in part two, it draws the effect of reason as implicated in the postmodern orientation. While part one strikes at what V. Y. Mudimbe calls the "colonising structure" or the Greco-European logo-phallo-euro-centricism in thought, part two bashes the excesses of modernism and partly valorises postmodernism. In some chapters, modernism is presented as an intellectual version of communalism characterised by the cliché: 'our people say'. Our thinking is that the voice of reason is not the voice of the people but the voice of an individual.The idea of this book is to open new vistas for the discipline of African philosophy. African philosophy is thus presented as a disagreement discourse. Without rivalry of thoughts, Africa will settle for far less. This gives postmodernism an important place, perhaps deservedly more important than history of philosophy allocates to it. It is that philosophical moment that says 'philosophers must cease speaking like gods in their hegemonic cultural shrines and begin to converse across borders with one another'. In this conversation, the goal for African philosophers must not be to find final answers but to sustain the conversation which alone can extend human reason to its furthermost reaches.