The University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica: UWI Journals
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MDGs and the Neglect of Anyiam-Osigwe’s Third Dimension of the Human Person: A Bane of Inclusive Development in Africa
Get PDFThe idea of sustainable development as a universal desideratum led to the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 with 2015 as their target. They were designed to mitigate fundamental problems that impinge upon human wellbeing or the attainment of a good life in developing societies.
With barely five years to the target of 2015, this paper contends that despite marginal and disparate improvements in quality of life in Africa, the MDGs have been doomed to be unattained on the continent from the onset. A reason usually offered for this conclusion is that the real needs of many African nations are greater and deeper than what could be addressed by the minimalist goals of the MDGs. Another is lack of commitment on the part of some key stakeholders.
This paper contends that beyond the often identified reasons, the MDGs cannot be achieved in Africa because while they focus on the physical and mental domains of the human person, they completely ignore what Anyiam-Osigwe identifies as the third dimension of human nature: spiritual/moral dimension. Deriving from Anyiam Osigwe’s position on human spirituality, the thesis of this paper is that the MDGs need to be reformulated to accommodate the crucial spiritual/moral aspect of human nature for them to be effective in addressing the challenges of development in Africa.
With Anyiam-Osigwe’s understanding of human spirituality/morality in terms of an awareness and respect for the intricate interconnection and interdependence of all humans and also between humanity and divinity, the paper elucidates how the MDGs could be modified to render them more achievable in Africa
Optimal glucose modelling for diabetes}
No full textAn optimal control strategy has been done for a simple model of blood glucose dynamics. We control the external glucose intake, in order to minimize it and/or the plasma glycemia level. Existence of the optimal control is established and Pontryagin's maximum principle is applied to characterize it in each case. Numerical simulations will be included to illustrate our theoretical results and choose good formulation of optimal control problem for mathematical modellings of diabetes mellitus
On the Semantics and Ontology of Race: Constructivism against Realism
Get PDFThis paper is an essay in philosophical ontology tasked with defending a constructionist approach to race. Anthony Appiah, in his In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture , argues that the concept of race is an “empty concept” precisely because it is both a semantic and an ontological fiction. He advises us to segregate race to the realm of the vague and fuzzy because all racial discourse, which he claims must transcendentally presuppose a biological notion of race in order to be meaningful, seductively misleads us to the extent that such discourse presupposes that the term "race" names a natural kind. While identifying the concept of race as deficient, he challenges us to learn “to think beyond race.” His rebuke of race as a dysfunctional concept takes the form of casting race as a virus spreading the contagion of bad thinking, that is, delusional, even paranoid thinking.
This paper argues that while Appiah's theoretical interrogation of the concept of race is mainly accurate, race, nevertheless, is meaningful from a socio-cultural perspective . Discourse about race need not require that races exist in the sense of being natural kinds. Race, I shall be arguing, is a construction, i. e., human agents with varied interests, purposes, and linguistic resources devise the conditions of meaningfulness for the term "race".
The general structure of the paper is as follows. I first present a critical discussion of Appiah’s view on race by examining his realist view of meaning and reference. Next, I critically review his main arguments against the concept of race. In part two of the essay, I offer a discussion of constructionism. I describe this position, offer examples, and say why it more adequately accommodates a defense of the concept of race by treating it as a socio-historical construction rather than a scientific natural kind. It is obvious that I challenge Appiah’s realist view that a meaningful concept is one that is intelligible and that the deciding grounds of the intelligibility is a matter of a concept referring to something that has existence. Meaningful concepts refer to objects whereas meaningless concepts do not refer to anything that has being
Some perspectives on meaning in life: a partial review of Susan Wolf et al., Meaning in Life and Why it Matters, and Paul Thagard, The Brain and the Meaning of Life.
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The Explanatory Gap Argument and Phenomenal States: A Defense of Physicalism
Get PDFThe explanatory gap argument has been presented to justify the dualist reconstruction of the mind/body problem as a hard problem of consciousness. It is argued that there are some distinctive properties of the mind, construed as phenomenal states or properties, which are not susceptible to any physicalist explanation. Hence, the distinction between the mind and the body is further widened. This paper critically explains the explanatory gap argument. It argues that the argument, contrary to its aim, fails to undermine physicalism because there is, in reality, no gap in the world. The paper submits that the gap that exists in the explanations of consciousness is a conception, about and not any feature, of consciousness (by extension, the mind). Hence, even if the explanatory gap is sustained, it proves no point against physicalism and the physicalists’ account of the nature of consciousness in the world
Discourse on colonial epistemicide and contemporary attempts to re-affirm indigenous knowledge systems, with particular reference to South Africa
Get PDFDisenfranchisement-counterculture dialectic in the South African story of water access and its impact: A critical reflection
Get PDFThe paper is a philosophical reflection on social and hydropolitical issues in South African water story with special reference to water procurement and distribution. The article explores the problem of political disenfranchisement and its reaction in the form of political counterculture in the South African story of the right to access water. It sets the exploration within the framework of disenfranchisement-counterculture dialectic. The former portrayed in the water laws passed by the then successive South African governments and the latter showed by numerous boycotts that took place. The dialectic framework will lead to the preference of a Yin-Yang approach to explain a possible synthesis achievable in an attempt to deal with ongoing boycotts for paying water services delivery. The article advances an argument that a close look at the story of water rights through South African history shows that there is a disenfranchisement-counterculture dialectic underpinned and propelled by social and political drives that are rooted in the past