Philiminality

The Jesuit missionaries’ encounter with Ethiopian Christians at the outset of the 17th century was an unparalleled period of cultural and religious interchange. During this  period, European Jesuit missionaries attempted to ‘clean out’ the ‘flawed’ elements in  order to proselytize the Catholic faith among the Ethiopian Orthodox believers. Their  main goal was to convert those local religious expressions into a uniform faith that  subscribes to European Catholicism. 

However, and with the sole exception of the Antonio Fernandes’ Mäqśäftä hassätat, all these works were deliberately burned and destroyed after 1632. This lucky exception  will be an essential source for the development of this paper. The survival of the  Mäqśäftä hassätat provides us with a unique opportunity to look into a testimony of the  language and nature of the theological dispute between the Latin Catholic and the  Ethiopian Orthodox sides during the 17th century. The Mäqśäftä hassätat covers some  of the theological and sacramental practices that were at the center of the Catholic Ethiopian debate during the 17th century.  

The Däqiqä Ǝsṭifanos is one of the medieval Ethiopian texts which predates the Hatatas of  Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and his disciple, containing profound ideas regarding the relationship between the public and private spheres, the critical role of religion as a redemptive form of discourse and a utopian imagination that radically interrogates existing human relations. The text shows the remarkable effort of individuals that revolted against the dogmatic emphasis in the religious thoughts and practices of fifteenth century Ethiopia, and thus, it can be read as a revolutionary document which problematized the way Orthodox Christianity has been perceived in Ethiopia. The paper argues that the study of Ethiopian philosophy needs to be grounded in these precursors of modernity and that there is a need to extend the foundations of Ethiopian philosophy beyond the Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob's Ḥatäta. Though the Däqiqä Ǝsṭifanos are historically associated with the medieval geist of valuing religion as an ideological weapon of defining life with metaphysical abstractions, there is a concerted social critique which is disclosed in a revolutionary and systematic manner. There is a secret philosophical attitude among Abba Ǝsṭifanos and his followers where we can find both historical and ahistorical potentials for refuting the irrationally imposed by authorities of the medieval and modern societies. This paper seeks to explore the historical significance of the Däqiqä Ǝsṭifanos’ movement, the philosophical relevance of the text in redefining both Ethiopian and African critical traditions and searching for its relation with the liberation discourses of religion in the contemporary world.

In this talk Peter Adamson will attempt to set a context for the other contributions in the volume, by discussing the whole phenomenon of philosophy in Ethiopia and, more specifically, how it fits into the broader landscape of philosophy in the late ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. In particular, he compares this tradition to philosophical developments in other Christian communities outside Latin Christendom, e.g. philosophy written in Arabic and Syriac. He will conclude by suggesting that contact with Islamic culture could explain certain features of Zera Yacob's own thought.

In making a new translation into English of the Hatata I have developed some reflections on the work, its authorship, and its context. In particular I will focus on the writers use of the bible in the works, and what this tells us about the author(s).

Introductory remarks for the In Search of Zera Yacob Conference, contextualising the aims and intentions of the conference, the texts of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the Ḥatäta Walda Heywat themselves and their historical context. These texts have fascinated and puzzled alike on account of their philosophical depth, beauty and apparent historical singularity. They have been called the ‘jewel of Ethiopian literature’, and served to demonstrate, in the words of Claude Sumner, that “modern philosophy, in the sense of a personal rationalistic critical investigation, began in Ethiopia with Zera Yacob at the same time as in England and in France”. Contributors to the conference will explore the text's philosophical arguments and their significance, the historical context of intellectual exchanges in Ethiopia, issues of translation and the forging of philosophical vocabularies, notions of authorship and authenticity in philosophical writing, the legacy of colonialism for Ethiopian studies, and the methodology of a truly global history of philosophy.

The history of philosophy is a history of men talking to men, about other men. Our answer to the question ‘What is philosophy for?’ has been shaped by this historical narrative. My talk explores an answer to this question posed by the woman philosopher Mary Midgley. Midgley argued that philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury. She described it as ‘something we are doing all the time, a continuous, necessary background activity which is likely to go badly if we don’t attend to it’ (2018:81). These insights of Midgley’s have been systematically underappreciated and overlooked within the academic discipline of philosophy. My talk questions the connection between Midgley as a philosophical practitioner, and her conception of philosophy as a practise. I will ask whether and to what extent being a minority in philosophy impacted the way Midgley conceived of the practise of philosophy. And further, how our accepted practise of the history of philosophy sustains and perpetuate the neglect of women philosophers (and other minorities). Overall, our standard story of men, talking to men about men, needs disrupting to include the (her)stories of overlooked philosophers. And doing so might change our conception of philosophical practise itself.

Discussions about the decolonization of philosophy take place within the wider context of efforts to interrupt inherited hierarchies of knowledge and reimagine higher education as we know it. In this presentation I offer some insights from recent research and pedagogical experiments that engage the challenges and complexities of undertaking decolonizing work in a contemporary educational context characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). Rather than prescribe a single pathway forward, I invite people to develop the capacities and the stamina to walk toward as-yet-unimaginable futures with more honesty, humility, and hyper-self-reflexivity. In particular, drawing on my work with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures research/arts collective, I will review a series of pedagogical frameworks that we have developed for inviting intellectually and relationally rigorous engagements with social and ecological challenges.

There has been a lively debate over the relationship of Confucianism to democracy. Samuel Huntington’s dismissal of Confucian democracy as an oxymoron has been overtaken by a variety of different proposals on whether or not the Confucian political ideal could be democratic. Disagreements among the participants in this debate include issues to do with interpretation of Confucian canonical texts, the most important of which is arguably the Analects. This talk will discuss some of the key passages in the Analects for understanding the political thought of Confucius and its implications for constructing a Confucian democracy today.

A major controversy in the study of the Analects has been over the relation between the two central concepts of li (rites, rituals of propriety) and ren (humanity, human excellence). Confucius seems to have said inconsistent things about this relation. Some passages appear to suggest that ren is more fundamental than li, while others seem to imply the contrary, and it is therefore not surprising that there have been different interpretations and characterizations. In this presentation, I will present an interpretation that I believe best characterizes the relation between li and ren. Using the analogy of language grammar and mastery of a language, I propose that we should understand li as a cultural grammar and ren as the mastery of a culture. In this account, society cultivates its members through li toward the goal of ren.

This talk explores the advantages and disadvantages of viewing the Analects through the lens of contemporary moral theory. It looks in particular at Kantian deontology, which Sinophone scholarship on the text has tended to stress; virtue ethics, which is more prominent in Anglophone secondary literature; and role ethics, which has emerged as a potential alternative to both deontology and virtue ethics. These discussions reveal that Sinophone and Anglophone philosophers are starting to engage one another, which is helping to spur the related (though not identical) process of dialogue between Western and Chinese philosophical traditions. Concern about an unhealthy hegemony of Western categories is by no means a thing of the past, but we are beginning to see glimpses of a future that is pluralistic, open, and global.