II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

4. Whole World Philosophy: An Ubuntu Universe

Khroutski, Konstantin. Personalist Cosmology as the Ultimate Ground for a Science of Individual Wellness. Ultimate Reality and Meaning. 29/1-2, 2006. The physician and educator further evokes and updates the Russian tradition of viewing life’s dynamic cosmic milieu. In this regard, a universal dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, moving beyond Hegel or Marx, can from our vantage can be observed to have three meta-phases. World history commenced with a holistic “Eastern episteme,” later followed by an object-based, particulate Western mindset, which just now can meld into a third resolve of a “cosmos-centric humanism.” This is not an anthropocentrism, but reflects the actual role of human persons in a progressive cosmic genesis. What is thus achieved, one might note, is how humanity’s cerebration recapitulates that of each person – right to left to imminent whole brain.

Khroutski, Konstantin. Russian Philosophical Cosmology. Journal of Future Studies. 10/2, 2005. The Russian mind has traditionally had a holistic cast, more aligned with the East, as expressed through integral visions of a human universe. This survey broaches a new sense of a micro/macro similarity within a dynamically unfolding evolution.

Clearly expressed in the Eastern and Ancient philosophy, the macrocosm/microcosm principle has emerged and enriched human culture, by introducing the attitude and mentality of seeing reality as a whole and noticing patterns that are universal throughout all levels of reality. This philosophical conception runs through ages and epochs, having reached the Russian culture and awoke Russian cosmological development, including Russian Cosmism. (98) In Russian cosmological tradition, the Eastern and Greek “man is a small cosmos” has acquired a great “active-evolutionary personalist” significance – of a Cosmist agent, responsible both for her or his personal wellness of microcosm Humankind, and for wellness of the entire MacroCosmos. (98)

Kimmerle, Heinz. The Concept of Person in African Thought: A Dialogue Between African and Western Philosophies. Wautischer, Helmut, ed. Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. An emeritus Erasmus University (Rotterdam) philosopher first notes the common ‘We’ or ‘I’ contrast between Africa and the West (North). Although broadly applicable, a more fitting appreciation would be to witness a true African penchant for a mutuality of person and community, in academic terms, a ‘moderate communitarianism.’ With regard to cerebral hemispheres, one may add, the male brain generally emphasizes the left, object out of context, mode. The female brain, however, does not alternatively favor the right, holistic field view, but as neuroscience confirms, a balance of both sides. Such a complementarity is just what the renowned African philosopher Leopold Senghor recommends. Compare with James Maffie’s paper on Mexican wisdom in the same volume.

Kitcher, Philip. Philosophy Inside Out. Metaphilosophy. 42/3, 2012. In this Fortieth Anniversary Issue as The Future of Philosophy: Metaphilosophical Directions for the Twenty-First Century, the Columbia University philosopher chides the old boy field for attending too much to its vested core, while not giving a younger, radical periphery its due. Not surprisingly in subsequent issues ranks close with criticisms that any such turn is needed. And one might note a similar situation holds for evolutionary theory where there is wide opinion that a major revision is overdue, which ultra Darwinians deny and obstruct.

Philosophy is often conceived in the Anglophone world today as a subject that focuses on questions in particular ‘‘core areas,’’ pre-eminently epistemology and metaphysics. This article argues that the contemporary conception is a new version of the scholastic ‘‘self-indulgence for the few’’ of which Dewey complained nearly a century ago. Philosophical questions evolve, and a first task for philosophers is to address issues that arise for their own times. The article suggests that a renewal of philosophy today should turn the contemporary conception inside out, attending to and developing further the valuable work being done on the supposed ‘‘periphery’’ and attending to the ‘‘core areas’’ only insofar as is necessary to address genuinely significant questions.

Knobe, Joshua, et al. Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology. British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. 57/1, 2006. n essay based on the string theory, multiverse school of Susskind, Vilenkin, et al, which infers an infinite number of civilizations, both similar and different from our own, each on the way to a local and universal doomsday. But could real philosophical reflection see how absurd is this running out of the male physics agenda of down, back, and outward, losing any touch with reality in the process? An organically self-developing cosmos, which a worldwide humankind is just realizing, shifts to a future focus of whom may be in creation, acorn to oak, fertile egg to earthling. Such a vista is more in accord with Hawking and Hertog (Quantum Cosmology) who muse about a universe more knowable from its complex emergence.

Kolakowski, Leszek. Reviving Natural Law. Critical Review. 15/3, 2004. The veteran philosopher writes a cogent summary of this concept from ancient historical roots to a proposal for its rehabilitation as an innate, ordained knowledge to complement and complete revelation.

Natural law is supposed to be a law that we do not invent; we find it ready-made, independent of our conventions, customs, and regulations. It provides us with supreme normative rules; it is to those rules that our constitutions and codes have to conform themselves if they deserve to be called just. (195) It does imply, nevertheless, a certain metaphysical faith that goes back to the Stoics, a faith in a Reason that rules the universe, a Reason the nature of which is in our power to recognize, and which enables us to discern truth and falsity as well as good and evil. (199)

Krieglstein, Werner. Toward a Universal Ethics Based on a Naturalistic Foundation of Community. Dialogue and Universalism. 15/7-8, 2005. This journal from the University of Warsaw is in quest of “Metaphilosophy as the Wisdom of Science, Art and Life.” Articles are interdisciplinary and holistic as they seek for a better world. But one notices that all the editors and advisors are men. Is it so that even with good intentions, unless this psychic and cognitive imbalance is recognized righted a new genesis vision will not be forthcoming? The subject article is a typical contribution. Although not in gender terms, a prior fault has been the exclusion of cooperative tendencies. A revolution in social evolutionary thinking is thus called for. The old mechanistic reduction is to be set aside in favor of quantum wholeness and self-organizing complexity. One may locate this paper within among a growing number (Ingold, Chela-Flores, Anthony, Ulanowicz, Khroutski, et al herein) that contend an animate, conducive universe is next door (per e. e. cummings) if we could only shift our perception from insensate machine to rising life, mind and selfhood. (*Gay, William and Tatiana Alekseeva, eds. Democracy and the Quest for Justice. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)

Once panpsychism, quantum animism, and Collective Orchestration become part of the way science views the universe, I am convinced, humanity will finally evolve to a new level of cooperation, among each other and with the rest of the natural world. It just might help bring about the bold vision of Tatiana Alekseeva* in her dream of a new global community enabling a new non-ideological philosophy that is based on the principles of self-organization, cooperation, solidarity, and mutual respect. (63)

Kwa, Chunglin. Romantic and Baroque Conceptions of Complex Wholes in the Sciences. Law, John and Annemarie Mol, eds. Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. In a work of mostly postmodern obfuscation, a remembrance and marriage of the complementary wave and particle, top down and bottom up, modes of Romance and Baroque traditions.

Leslie, John and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, eds. The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything at All. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. The editors are a University of Guelph emeritus philosopher and the founder director of the Closer to Truth video series. We enter the volume as an example of our conceptual quandary, and a window upon its resolve. A list of chapters is A Blank is Absurd, No Explanation Needed, Chance, Value/Perfection as Ultimate, Mind as Ultimate, Fine Tuning and Multiverse. But the many past and present voices are all men, not one woman is mentioned. As a result we are left with abstractions alone, a greater procreative reality of which people are a phenomenon is inadmissible. If there is a theme running through, it might be that in some way this existence needs to somehow witness, verify, and selectively bring itself into full extant being. Rather than another man’s opinion, this website is based on the premise that an emergent Earthwise bicameral personsphere is now coming to her/his own knowledge. By these lights, a discovery of a revolutionary family genesis cosmos with a natural parents to progeny genetic code could just become possible.

This compelling study of the origins of all that exists, including explanations of the entire material world, traces the responses of philosophers and scientists to the most elemental and haunting question of all: why is anything here—or anything anywhere? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why not nothing? It includes the thoughts of dozens of luminaries from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Leibniz to modern thinkers such as physicists Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg, philosophers Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, philosophers of religion Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, and the Dalai Lama.

A Self-Explaining Universe: The universe is self-creating and self-directing, and therefore self-explaining. In Paul Davies’ formulation, the emergence of consciousness animates a kind of backward creation to select from among the untold laws and countless values that seem possible at the beginning of the universe to actualize those that would prove consistent with the later evolution of life and mind. In this teleological schema the universe and mind would eventually meld and become one, so that it could be the case that the purpose of the universe is to allow or enable it, is some retroactive sense, to engineer ist own self-awareness. (optional model 1.6, 251)

Licata, Ignazio and Ammar Sakaji, eds. Physics of Emergence and Organization. Singapore: World Scientific, 2008. An understanding of cosmic material nature as vitally spontaneous in its essence and development is becoming increasingly apparent. As these select contents below attest, humankind’s collaborative ability to quantify and express an organic genesis universe grows apace. But much work of literacy and translation remains to move from abstractions to phenomenon.

Emergence and Computation at the Edge of Classical and Quantum Systems (I. Licata), Gauge Generalized Principle for Complex Systems (G. Resconi), Process Physics: Quantum Theories as Models of Complexity (K. Kitto), Phase Transitions in Biological Matter (E. Pessa), The Dissipative Quantum Model of Brain and Laboratory Observations (W. J, Freeman & G. Vitiello), Turing Systems: A General Model for Complex Patterns in Nature (R. A. Barrio), Primordial Evolution in the Finitary Process Soup (O. Görnerup & J. P. Crutchfield), Order in the Nothing: Autopoiesis and the Organizational Characterization of the Living (L. Bich & L. Damiano), Emergence of Universe from a Quantum Network (P. Zizzi).

Lutz, David. African Ubuntu Philosophy and Global Management. Journal of Business Ethics. 84/313, 2009. A Holy Cross College, South Bend, IN, philosopher proposes that this traditional wisdom of a reciprocal complementarity between an individual person and their community could provide a vital, wholesome guidance. Ubuntu is a Bantu expression from Umuntu, ngumuntu ngabantu which means a person is oneself through other selves. As advocated by Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama, a familiar capsule is “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” The well researched and referenced paper finds this organic viability to have affinities with Confucian ways and Platonic-Aristotelian essences. For more, see Ubuntu: A Transformative Leadership Philosophy by Lisa Ncube in Journal of Leadership Studies (4/1, 2010) and On the Nurturing of Strategic Foresight: The Ubuntu Perspective by David Sarpong, et al in Futures (76/1, 2016). And my Teilhard 2015 in the Writings section tells how this palliative mutuality is nature’s way from proteins to ecosystems.

In our age of globalization, we need a theory of global management consistent with our common human nature. The place to begin in developing such a theory is the philosophy of traditional cultures. The article focuses on African philosophy and its fruitfulness for contributing to a theory of management consistent with African traditional cultures. It also looks briefly at the Confucian and Platonic-Aristotelian traditions and notes points of agreement with African traditions. It concludes that the needed theory of global management should regard the firm as a community, not a collection of individuals, and should understand the purpose of management as promoting the common good. (Abstract)

MacDowell, Marsha, et al, eds. Ubuntutu: Tributes to Archbishop Desmond and Leah Tutu by Quilt Artists from South Africa and the United States. East Lansing: Michigan State University Museum, 2017. A luminous illustrated volume to accompany an exhibit of quilts at this museum in October 2016 to honor the Tutu’s lifetime mission for tolerant sanity and peace in their native land across the fraught world. The clever title by a quilter lady draws upon Desmond Tutu’s writings (search), along with Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, for Ubuntu conveys an organic African wisdom we so desperately need. Its essence is a reciprocity of me + We to achieve a viable, peaceful community, search the word for more on this site. In regard our great America could not be further removed, polarized, or dysfunctional as me versus We political parties fight each other.

Ubuntutu: Life Legacies of Love and Action features quilts that pay tribute to the indelible contributions that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first black Archbishop of Cape Town, and his wife Leah, have made in addressing human rights, advancing social justice issues, and advocating for peace in South Africa and around the world. Archbishop Tutu is one of the most well-known champions of antiapartheid in South Africa and is a vigorous campaigner for many human rights causes. Leah, a founder of the South African Domestic Workers Association, has worked alongside her husband to advocate for peace and social justice. These art pieces also honor the Tutus’ faith and the enduring love they have for each other. The word ubuntutu, coined by one of the quilt artists, combines the name Tutu with the Nguni word ubuntu, which can be translated as "human kindness." In the spirit of ubuntu, the quilts featured in this catalog remind us we are all interconnected. (Abstract)

The word ubuntutu used as the title of this book and the exhibition was the creative invention of quilt artist Diana Vandeyar and it combines the name Tutu with the word ubuntu, a Nguni word that roughly means “human kindness.” In more contemporary times it has become an oft used word in South Africa that means roughly I am what I am because of who we all are” or more simply “I am because of us.” Through his published writing and speeches Desmond Tutu helped spread the concept of ubuntu to those outsid South Afric as in this oft-published statement: Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you con’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnected ness. You can’t be human all by yourself and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. (2)

Quilting Imitates Ubuntu: Each piece of a quilt is dependent on each other piece for its structural integrity and legibility. Each layer fulfils its own function, and each section of the jigsaw puzzle making up the top layer contributes to telling its story. In these characteristics, quilts reflect the essence of human life: our interdependence. Without each other, without love, we become unstitched and inarticulate. (Excerpt from a Preface by Desmond Tutu)

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