Philosophy quotes — page 27

Our ambition is to help build a Civilization of the Universal, a rendezvous of giving and receiving among the cultures of the world.

Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.

The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference.

Relativism of that sort isn't a way to encourage conversation; it's just a reason to fall silent.

A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.

Cosmopolitans begin with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything.

We have obligations to others that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind; and we must take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives.

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification."

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape… No human contact, but relations of domination and submission.

The human mind, insofar as it is a simple substance distinct from the body, can neither suffer from the body nor be confused with it, but by itself, according to its own operations, understands and wills.

Sensation does not belong to the mind; living and sensing belong to the organic body.

To philosophize soberly and accurately is to distinguish carefully what belongs to the mind from what belongs to the living body.

Ubuntu is the root of African philosophy. The be-ing of an African in the universe is inseparably anchored upon ubuntu. … Ubuntu then is the wellspring flowing with African ontology and epistemology.

In spite of decolonisation, the philosophical character of European standpoint on colonisation together with its corresponding practices remains unchanged in its relations with the erstwhile colonies. It is precisely this condition which calls for the need for the authentic liberation of Africa.

Ubuntu is the principle that we act humanely and with respect towards others as a way of demanding the same from them.

To be a human being is to affirm one's humanity by recognising the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them.

The African who has learned philosophy in English, for example, has most likely become conceptually westernized to a large extent not by choice but by the force of historical circumstances.

It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows.

Philosophy, by definition, is an individual critical activity; the myth of a collective, unanimous African philosophy must be discarded.

They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them.

Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. … It is a way of living history within history.

There is no one word in Akan for truth.