Actualizing the ECOWAS Dream of a Borderless Region: Issues, Prospects and Options
American Journal of Social …, 2012
... 4 . The diaries of Captain High Clapperton and the Lander brothers (Richard and John), showed... more ... 4 . The diaries of Captain High Clapperton and the Lander brothers (Richard and John), showed the remarkable extensiveness of socio-economic interaction among West Africans before the European political interventions 5 . The formation of ECOWAS was a legal seal on ...
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Books by Godfrey Ozumba
my thoughts and engraving them on the pages of paper in order to
vouchsafe them for posterity. My reading of the
positions/contentions/submissions and general propositions of
postmodern Scholars led me into a philosophical eclipse and
disillusionment. I began to ask myself, if Richard Rorty merely
announced the demise of philosophy even though it is contestable
whether he actually meant what he said because, in the same vein, he
suggested conversational Hermeneutics as a new way of doing
philosophy, then, what are we still doing as philosophers? With this,
one can say that philosophy has survived after all, after the postmortem.
But the most fearsome vitriolic against philosophy is the post
modern orientation in philosophy because, it left philosophy bleeding
from all pores. If standards, rationality, structure, logic, order,
consensus, objectivity, some forms of absolutism and values are
despised and relegated to the background, it is enough signal that the
philosopher should go home to his uneventful cradle since the child of
knowledge he was raised to tend has died before childhood.
My sense of propriety and rationality was provoked that with my
training as a professional philosopher, that everything should be done
to reveal the misguidance coming from postmodernism and to indeed
point to the door now open to us for consummating our grooming of
the vineyard of knowledge. You tend and groom knowledge, you don’t
hush it to death through rash and impatient husbandry. We have
reached the watershed of our epistemological husbandry and all that is
left is a circumspect prospecting and engineering of the tendrils and
shoots of the knowledge tree to bring about its fruiting and
consummation.
Integrative humanism became the inspiration that is about
opening the doors of this consummation. We are proposing that
integrative humanism be seen as a philosophical epoch transcending
the postmodern epoch. Our attempt is to show how hope, life, vision,
enthusiasm and zest can be restored to our unfaltering search for
more acceptable and inclusive knowledge.
In this work therefore, we have attempted to define what we
mean by integrative humanism. We have provided a background to
integrative humanism, we have adumbrated the vision and general
proposition of integrative humanism. We have also looked at most
philosophical methods vis-a-vis the method of integrative humanism.
Attempts have also been made to point out possible merits and
demerits of this philosophy cum method of doing philosophy.
Since integrative humanism encourages insight through
revelational knowledge, we have included a chapter on the reasons for
validity of the bible and other corroborations authenticated by the
divinity of Christ. We have also gone ahead to include chapters on
epistemology, ethics, politics and political education, mind/body
problems, globalization and issues on African interests in order to
show how research can be carried on in the spirit of integrative
humanism.
It is my firm belief that as we all digest the materials contained
in this book and approach its propositions with an open heart, with
minimum or no prejudice, we shall come off our study better
enlightened. Like Berkeley’s advice in his Principles, we advice that we
approach this work as thinking readers and not as destructive
animadversionists. When we do this, we shall be able to build a
philosophy and a method that will take philosophy beyond the present
realms of inertia that the postmodernists have left it.
Papers by Godfrey Ozumba