Diogenes

The author distinguishes two features of the encounter between rationalities: a postulate, and a problem. The postulate concerns the existence in the history of different societies and civilizations of rationalities defined by experts in the various academic disciplines relating to society, humanity and philosophy. He focuses on the problem of the encounter, outlining some pointers to its clarification and discussing it particularly in its historical sense, referring to past experiences.

Words, as well as ways of behavior, can be the objects of value judgments. The term ‘rational’ is such a word: to be rational is to be good. This is probably why, as a reaction to ‘western rationality’, people began to speak of many ‘rationalities’, a claim propounded by postmodernists. Rather than dwelling on the historical developments that led to such a claim, the author looks at concepts relevant to the colloquium ‘The encounter between rationalities’ (on which this issue of Diogenes is based), within their intellectual framework: the modernist–postmodernist debate.

Masolo takes as his starting point a dinnertime discussion between two teenagers on the role of tradition, a discussion that led into a debate on the merits of the idea of autonomous reason. The author was struck by their cosmopolitan multiculturalism and by the transient nature of the communities from which people source their points of view, allowing them to question the rationality of opposing views. This article expands such theoretical concerns and applies them to an assessment of Kant’s culture-free moral principles against a communitarian view of the resources of reason.

In the area of questions, or rather responses, around the subject of madness (research, treatment, etc.), ‘scientific’ rationality falls back on simple causality, together with a concern for generalization. Drawn from the pure sciences, these categories admit no exceptions, even (and particularly) if the borderlines of madness touch upon the borders of rationality. The clinical experience and rigour of working with madness may lead one to conclude that other criteria are needed. The rationalities at work in the treatment of madness (medical, economic, ideological) are in line with habitual categories, but the specific research area opened up by each disturbed person challenges a causality that has no sense or efficacy except in the dimensions of homogeneous time, oriented from the past to the future. The transferential particularities of the analysis of madness and trauma demand that we critique these principles and describe ways of working with another logic, one that aims to recover lost facts rather than modifying the discourse that represents them.

The meeting of rationalities is the core of the psychoanalytic treatment of madness. We see madness as a field of research in the area of historical, political and natural disasters where the social bond disintegrates, language slips away, the unimaginable happens and tried and tested rationalities fail. Faced with the irrationality of a behaviour or delusional episode, we need to find the ‘reason for this unreason’. The patient is a searcher in a disaster area, looking for someone to share the craziness of what is discovered. An analysis of madness more often than not consists of discovering excised – not repressed – truths that are revealed during a heuristic journey taking place over often turbulent sessions. It is the end result of a continually surprising encounter with the rationalities carried by the analyst emerging from similar areas of disturbance, bringing to light common points of view, or transcultural invariants. Based on a brief clinical exchange with an African patient, in which the man who discovered the equations of quantum mechanics had a role, the author draws on the work of Schrödinger with its warnings not to give in to objectivization when we are struggling for meaning.

There are three facets to the colonial project: a practice, a body of knowledge, and mental engineering. The third is the result of colonialism as text, for such a text bolsters the minds behind colonizing practices and is simultaneously a prison house for the minds of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to decolonization. Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit) and Achebe (Things Fall Apart) are shown to exemplify this struggle.

Taking together place, time and manner, it would be possible to describe the encounter as comprising at least six modes: fragility, temporality, activity, integrity, causality and disparity. The author then explores what is meant by a rationality, and discusses the encounter between legal rationalities in Africa. The suggestion is that the law exists in Africa only in the tension between old and new, imposition and negotiation; the question at issue is the possibility of thinking ‘between-two-realities’, the ‘space-between’.

The seemingly intractable economic, political and social problems of Africa demand urgent attention from the intellectuals on the continent. The challenge facing the continent is perceived as that of seeking all possible means of reasoning its way out of customs, beliefs and traditions which keep it bound in a frigid past, incapable of making the kinds of fundamental changes that normally lead to development. This is exemplified by the Yoruba belief in famished roads. The linguistic phenomenon of pre-constructed domains in the Yoruba language is seen to be closely tied with a world-view founded on pre-determination. It is argued that the typical African resistance to change, and the blind promotion of the communal over the individual, need to be supplemented by a critical engagement with tradition, especially within the educational system.

Many scholars say, even demand, that research on Africa should be intensified and increased. Its destiny is linked to the future of Africans’ self-awareness and their radical de-alienation. However, the current direction of some projects gives cause for concern in that the fundamental question they raise is whether what drives them is science or a certain unstated but active ideology. In other words, has science become a slave to or a pseudonym for an ideology? What are the motives of researchers, and what are the structural constraints framing their discourse?

The author was invited by the organizers of the Benin symposium on the encounter between rationalities to contribute from the particular perspective of his research experience in ethno-mathematics – the study of mathematical ideas and practices as embedded in their cultural contexts. In this article he tries to contribute to the understanding of mathematical reasoning, as embedded in cultural practices, by means of illuminating some complementary aspects of geometrical exploration in diverse cultural contexts. He ends by offering a few comments on possible educational implications.

This contribution is a presentation of the encounter between Greek philosophy and Islam and of the way in which philosophical thought was consequently appropriated by the Muslim world. What made this encounter possible was the existence, within the Muslim world, of a spirit of openness able to overcome the fear of a ‘pagan’ thought: this spirit helped develop the position that Greek philosophy, qua wisdom, could not be ‘foreign’ to the universe of the Koran. The Arabic language, as it became a philosophical language, bears traces of such an appropriation. Today, in Africa, the debate on philosophy could usefully take into account the tradition of Islamic philosophy which is also African to some extent and which would help enlighten, in particular, the question of transforming African tongues into philosophical languages.

Relativism has been a central topic of philosophical discussion for centuries. This is because the very idea of philosophy was a product of Plato’s reaction to Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things. The Platonic distinction between mere sophists and true philosophers incorporates the conviction that there is something beyond humanity that sets a standard that humans must respect. Plato did his best to make ‘relativist philosophy’ a contradiction in terms. We are still being told that we should guard against relativism. In this article the author considers what happens if one takes Protagoras’ side. In the process he aims to differentiate pragmatism and romanticism, traditions he has in the past ‘tried too hard to assimilate’. He shows that pragmatism could offer a third way between universalism and romanticism.

This appreciation outlines the life and work of Giulio Preti, a philosopher of the critical rationalist movement. His was a tormented and conflictual philosophical itinerary from his intellectual roots in 1930s Italy, via the philosophical journal Studi filosofici in the 1940s, to his major works Praxis and Empiricism and Rhetoric and Logic in the 1950s and 1960s. His anxiety about the ambiguity of contemporary reality, it is suggested, is also ours.