Diversity Reading List

Abstract:
In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume published the groundbreaking 'Male Daughters, Female Husbands' to critical acclaim. This compelling, enduring, and highly original book argues that gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference. Amadiume examines the African societal structures that enabled people to achieve power within fluid masculine and feminine roles. At a time when gender and queer theory is viewed by many as overly focused on identity politics, this apt text not only warns against the danger of projecting Western notions of difference onto other cultures, but also questions the very concept of gender itself.

Abstract: In his Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell distinguished knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of truths. This paper argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between these two species of knowledge. I argue that knowledge by acquaintance of an object neither suffices for knowledge that one is acquainted with the object, nor puts a subject in a position to know that she is acquainted with the object. These conclusions emerge from a thorough examination of the central role played by attention in Russell's theory of knowledge. Attention bridges the gap between knowledge by acquaintance and our capacity to form judgements about the objects of acquaintance.

Publisher's Note: In the past few decades, scientists of human nature—including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioral economists—have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel?

In Experiments in Ethics, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of “experimental philosophy,” provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.

Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.

Back matter: "A welcome attempt to resurrect an older tradition of moral and political reflection and to show its relevance to our current condition." -- John Gray "Cosmopolitanism is... of wide interest-invitingly written and enlivened by personal history... Appiah is wonderfully perceptive and levelheaded about this tangle of issues." -- Thomas Nagel "Elegantly provocative." -- Edward Rothstein "[Appiah's] belief in having conversations across boundaries, and in recognizing our obligations to other human beings, offers a welcome prescription for a world still plagued by fanaticism and intolerance." -- Kofi A. Annan, former United Nations secretary-general "[Appiah's] exhilarating exposition of his philosophy knocks one right off complacent balance... All is conveyed with flashes of iconoclastic humor." -- Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature "An attempt to redefine our moral obligations to others based on a very humane and realistic outlook and love of art... I felt like a better person after I read it, and I recommend the same experience to others." -- Orham Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Back matter: Africa's intellectuals have long been engaged in a conversation with each other, and with Europeans and Americans about what it means to be African. At the heart of these debates on African identity are the seminal works of politicians, creative writers and philosophers from Africa and its diaspora. In this book, Appiah draws on his experiences as a Ghanaian in the New World to explore the writings of these African and African-American thinkers and to contribute his own vision of the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century. Appiah sets out to dismantle the specious oppositions between "us" and "them," the West and the Rest, that have governed so much of the cultural debate about Africa in the modern world. All of us, he maintains, wherever we live on the planet, must explore together the relations between our local cultures and an increasingly global civilization. Combining philosophical analysis with more personal reflections, Appiah addresses the major issues in the philosophy of culture through an exploration of the contemporary African predicament.

Abstract: The main theoretical gap in In My Father's House - in the opinion, at least, of its author - is the lack of a proposed alternative to the account of identity in the black diaspora that the book criticizes. The pseudo- biological essentialist account of black identity is, in my judgment, now generally understood to be untenable; what is lacking is an alternative positive account of black identity. In the book I criticized the biological account as a proposed basis for identities in the continent as well: but I offered, in the chapter on "African Identities," some suggestions for a positive basis for a range of continentally based mobilizations of Africa as what I called "a vital and enabling badge." But what I had to say about diasporic identities was, to put it kindly, perfunctory. Katya Azoulay's critique of my work ("Outside Our Parents' House: Race, Culture, and Identity" in RAL 27.1 [1996]: 129-42) identifies this theoretical gap and rightly draws attention to it. Let me offer at least a sketch of an approach.

Abstract: This essay explores the theories of the person within Western and Akan traditions. It identifies six obstacles to theory comparison. It argues that there may be no non-question begging way of comparing theories since these theories themselves play key roles in understanding how each is to be used.

Abstract:
I begin by arguing that our model of religion is often based on Christianity. A Christian model of religion is going to look for gods and creeds, churches, priests, prayer, collective worship, moral codes, each of which is absent in some of the things we might want to call religions. And it may well ignore dietary and sumptuary rules or cult for ancestors, which are important in some of them. Religion is a paradigm of what Wittgenstein taught us to call a “family-resemblance” concept: each religion, like each member of a family, is like every other, in some respect, but there are few, if any, characteristics they all share. So the first thing we need to do in trying to decide what it is we're explaining is disaggregate the elements that come together in Christianity; if we find that they usually come together that will be one of the things that we need to explain. What then are the questions worth focusing on? I think that, from an evolutionary point of view, it will be two families of issues. First will be the social and the cognitive features of religions that make their explanation challenging. A second family of issues worth exploring, once we have identified these components, is how they fit together. Why, for example does belief in invisible beings go with rituals dealing with disaster? Why does agreement in creeds go with creating powerful social groups that last across the generations? When one finds broad patterns across many societies there are usually two natural types of explanation that spring to mind. One is that the pattern reflects shared solutions to common problems, independently discovered: evolutionary homology, as it were. The other is diffusion from common sources: in a word, copying. I suspect that much of what is share in the organization of religions globally today is the result of diffusion. But, of course, why some patterns diffuse successfully and others don't is itself something that needs explaining.

Abstract:
This manuscript is from a collection of poems written by Nana Asma'u Bint Usman 'dan Fodiyo, a nineteenth-century Muslim scholar, who lived in the region now known as northern Nigeria and was an eyewitness to battles of the largest of the West-African jihads of the era. The preparation and conduct of the jihad provide the topics for Nana Asma'u's poetry. Her work also includes treatises on history, law, mysticism, theology, and politics, and was heavily influenced by the Arabic poetic tradition. Asma'u rallied public opinion behind a movement devoted to the revival of Islam in West Africa and organized a public education system for women.

Abstract:
This manuscript is from a collection of poems written by Nana Asma'u Bint Usman 'dan Fodiyo, a nineteenth-century Muslim scholar, who lived in the region now known as northern Nigeria and was an eyewitness to battles of the largest of the West-African jihads of the era. The preparation and conduct of the jihad provide the topics for Nana Asma'u's poetry. Her work also includes treatises on history, law, mysticism, theology, and politics, and was heavily influenced by the Arabic poetic tradition. Asma'u rallied public opinion behind a movement devoted to the revival of Islam in West Africa and organized a public education system for women.