Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.

A themed issue on the work of Michael Oakeshott.

Gellner relied extensively on the work of Ibn Khaldun to understand both the dynamics of social order in North Africa and Islam’s alleged resistance to secularization. However, what the two scholars also shared is their focus on the social origins and functions of group solidarity. For Ibn Khaldun the concept of asabiyyah was central in understanding the strength of long-term group loyalties. In his view, asabiyyah was a fundamental and elementary cohesive bond of human societies which originated in nomadic tribal (...) structures and retained significance in the early formation of complex states and empires. For Gellner, the shape and character of group solidarity is heavily dependent on the economic foundations of a particular social order: foragers require small group bonds for mere survival, the agrarian universe stratifies solidarity and utilizes cultural bonds to differentiate between the ruling aristocrats and the plough-tied serfs, whereas the industrial world generates solidarity from incessant economic growth and state-induced, cross-class, national identifications. Thus, for Gellner, solidarity remains the central force that keeps social orders together. This paper provides a critical analysis of the Khaldunian and Gellnerian models of group solidarity and offers an alternative interpretation that places the social impact of micro-solidarity in the long-term development of ideological and coercive forms of social organization. (shrink)

This article stages a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in order to think through what is at stake in demands that universities should produce graduates who are sensitive to social diversity and attuned to the contemporary realities of globalisation. The argument is that, although ‘graduate attributes’ are no doubt an effective management tool in a massified higher education system, they can also be used to focus attention on what dispositions it is reasonable and desirable to expect graduates to develop. The (...) arguments about cosmopolitanism of Jeremy Waldron and Martha Nussbaum are considered. (shrink)

Mucho se ha escrito para analizar y dar sentido a dos términos que vienen intrínsecamente unidos, el nacionalismo y la nación. La principal consecuencia positiva de esto ha sido un vasto debate teórico sobre el nacionalismo y la nación que indudablemente los enriquece. La principal consecuencia negativa, por su parte, es que el desarrollo del propio debate, y cómo se ha ido formando, ha recibido poca atención. El objetivo de este artículo es exponer cómo este debate se ha sido desarrollado (...) alrededor de los cuatros paradigmas clásicos del nacionalismo. Para ello, se aplica el esquema kuhniano para saber cuándo, cómo, y por qué se articularon estos paradigmas clásicos en torno a estos dos términos. Con esto se pretende profundizar en la explicación histórica de Moreno Almendral (2015), pero desde la filosofía de la ciencia, desarrollando una visión mucho más detallada del debate en torno al nacionalismo y la nación. (shrink)

Gellner is mostly known for his theory of nationalism, which he saw as antithetical to the principle of the multinational, hierarchical, empire. But like his LSE colleague Elie Kedourie, Gellner was fascinated by empire. In his last, posthumously published work, Language and Solitude, Gellner returned to the region of his childhood, the former Habsburg Empire, to explore its impact on the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein. This essay will reflect on Gellner’s thoughts about empire, and the way in which he (...) assessed their necessary disappearance – as he thought – in the modern world. (shrink)

The article begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded in the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalized within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for this failure, but finally suggests that a normalized sociology of art requires a normalized conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The article also has (...) an autobiographical subtext. (shrink)

La crisis del Estado en Chile en el siglo XX es un problema crucial para una nación que, según la tesis de Mario Góngora, fue “creada por el Estado”. Este artículo analiza dos temas centrales de esta interpretación: 1) el significado de esa primacía estatal –si es, efectivamente, una propuesta descriptiva, sustentada en el uso empírico de la razón, o posee el mismo carácter de ficción constituyente de su inversa –; y 2) la crítica de las “planificaciones globales”, especialmente aquella (...) iniciada con la reforma neoliberal del Estado. Esta postura constituye una crítica historicista, conservadora, del neoconservadurismo, argumenta el autor. Esa primacía del Estado implica, por otra parte, una concepción de la política que la identifica con la acción de gobierno y asimila el poder con la dominación. Lo que está en juego, entonces, con la crisis del Estado sería la destrucción de la esfera pública, la privatización de la política. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Academic administration is not to be construed simply as a technical practice, the development of efficient management systems, nor as reactive, as response to the collective views of the academic community, nor in terms of academic leadership, the establishment and implementation of institutional aims. A full account of academic administration will provide a sense of the integral relationship between the academic administrator and the academic community. For that, a prior notion of the academic community is required. Such a notion, (...) giving a central place to structured discourse, can be derived from the German idea of the university and particularly from the writings of von Humboldt, Karl Jaspers and Jurgen Habermas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT National identities have tended to be established by elites who universalize deep cultural conformity to key cultural artefacts such as language and religion. But this approach can provoke intergroup conflict when the official national identity clashes with other social identifications (e.g., religious, ethnic, or regional ones). Research based on the Social Identity Theory of Henri Tajfel and John Turner indicates that collective identities can be easily induced, through ?minimal? cues of group membership, suggesting a strong and innate need to (...) identify with larger groups and to share in and contribute to their achievements. Instead of insisting on deep conformity, therefore, national identification might be achieved through the use of simple cultural cues, banal national symbolism, and mass political participation. (shrink)

Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. £8.95, 260 pp. Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. £35.00/£10.99, 259 pp.