Malesela John Lamola

University of Johannesburg | uj · Insititute for Intelligent Systems

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian...

Jéan-Paul Sartre crafted himself a controversial profile that radically deviated from his natural identity. How do we reconcile the paradox of his national-intellectual heritage of a bourgeois white male native of the République française with his role as the collaborator with the founders of the Negritude Movement and the later Africanist antic-ol...

The practice of the construction and articulation of knowledge according to principles that allow for universal comprehension and progressive appraisal has established itself as one of the self-distinguishing features of 'the Sciences'. An insistence on adherence to this methodological practice in the Humanities has been dubbed scientism. This arti...

Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanis...

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution advances, socially-situated robots are increasingly not exclusively human-like (i.e. humanoids). They also include socially interactive animaloids. How does this myriad of socially intelligent artefacts emerge as members of a cyber-physical social system in which they are accorded the standing of social robots? A...

The very claim of the historical instance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is increasingly being subjected to critical interrogation from a variety of cultural and ideological perspectives. From an Afrocentric theory of history, this questioning of the ontology of the 4IR is sharpened by Africa’s experience of the claimed progressive mutat...

Given the affective psychological and cognitive dynamics prevalent during human–robot-interlocution, the vulnerability to cultural-political influences of the design aesthetics of a social humanoid robot has far-reaching ramifications. Building upon this hypothesis, I explicate the relationship between the structures of the constitution social onto...

As the prevailing marker of the development of human productive forces, and as utilised as a historical paradigm for the justification of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as the necessary and eventual feature of human life, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by cultural assumptions and intellectual presuppositions that are informed...

As the prevailing marker of the development of human productive forces, and as utilised as a historical paradigm for the justification of Artificial Intelligence technologies as the necessary and eventual feature of human life, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by cultural assumptions and intellectual presuppositions that are informed by t...

A discursive canon around transhumanism and posthumanism as beliefs in the efficacy and necessity of technology as the beneficial transformer of human life "for the better" is well-established in the Western philosophical tradition. However, none of the theorists and protagonists of this technological reconfiguration of humanity could ever have pre...

ABSTRACT Hinged around Ramose’s axiomatic observation that “the struggle for reason—who is and who is not a rational animal—is the foundation of racism”, this essay posits how Africans from Ramose’s immediate linguistic community have had an indigenous conception of rationality, moônô, a Sesotho expression laden with a meaning that simultaneously e...

https://social-epistemology.com/2019/01/17/africa-in-van-nordens-philosophical-manifesto-and-kings-multicultural-canon-john-lamola/

This essay highlights the root causes of the pervasive discomfort with Africanness common among a significant portion of the South African population. It claims that this collective national psyche manifests as a dysfunctional self-identity, and is therefore akin to a psychosocial malaise we propose to name "the Limpopo River Fever". The root cause...

Background: An era and academic milieu that clamour at post-racialist and globalist theoretical frameworks juxtaposed with evidence of growing anti-black dehumanizing racism, and the persistence of psycho-social alienation of black learners in multi-racial educational institutions. Aim: To engage in a critical philosophical–phenomenological and po...

Can religious epistemology aid in the transformation of the world to the same effect as Marxist Theory? Utilizing an approach derived from Louis Althusser’s isolation of the radical implications of the epistemological break of Karl Marx, from his Feuerbachain theological thought to a materialist epistemological tradition, we probe the relationship...

This chapter is a proposition of a philosophy of liberation that is rooted in Africa’s existential realities. It contends that when philosophical practice in Africa becomes authentically contextual, it will discover that the most critical challenge of postcolonial African life is an imperative for an authentic African identity. In demonstrating thi...

The fulcrum of this article is its exposure of postcolonial African modernity as being both historically and philosophically, an anachronistic colonial modernity, or simply Afrocoloniality. I explicate this anachronism by pointing out that while the cultural and intellectual edifice of Afrocoloniality was built on a colonial European Modernism, who...

A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation, offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. We subject Senghor’s life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James’s critique of g...

Going beyond the contention that a radical methodological overhaul of doing and presenting philosophy in postcolonial Africa is required, we turn attention to the methodological complications and a possible ethical imperative this, in the South African national geo-cultural context, entails. Our argument is that before we demand a transformed Afroc...

Black Consciousness, as seminally constructed by Steve Biko as a political philosophy of struggle against apartheid racism, has been subjected to a wide range of explications, which, in the main, have been from a perspective shaped by political activism. Here, in a deliberately philosophical project, we demonstrate how the rational structure of Bla...

A reflection on the challenges of African identity within the context of the persistence of European Modernity as the ideal of globalisation offers an opportunity for a fresh perspective on the life and work of Léopold Sédar Senghor. We subject Senghor's life and intellectual output to a critical triangular prism of: (1) Paul James's critique of gl...

From a perspective of an advocacy for a multi-culturally sensitive epistemology, as well as from the context of the politics of decision-making on which thinkers get inaugurated into a community of what is regarded as standard-bearers of what passes as philosophy, Peter King's One hundred philosophers: The life and work of the world's greatest thin...

Inspired by Louis Althusser's polemic that Marxism is a science and not a philosophy, we enquire about the nature of this ‘scientificity’ of Marxism. The result is a clarification that Marxism is a social theory within the discourse of hermeneutics. Drawing on William Dilthey's categorisation of human science as Geisteswissenschaft, which essential...

The emergence of Latin American theology of liberation was inspired by vistas exposed by a Marxian analysis of society and international power relations. This fact is attested to not only by critical analysts of liberation theology but by liberation theologians themselves. For the latter, the attestati on of this fact is backed by deliberate attemp...