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...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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)...

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...