Olatunji Alabi Oyeshile

• Ph.D
• Professor at University of Ibadan

Almost a decade ago, specifically in January 2002, scholars within the University of Ibadan, including Professor George Mclean, founder of Centre for Research in Values and Philosophy (CRVP), Washington D.C., brainstormed a theme which eventually appeared as on The Idea of an African University: The Nigerian Experience (Washington D.C., 2007). Cons...

[C]oncepts like black personality or Negritude will remain empty slogans unless it helps black peoples to embark on a candid self-examination of their past, their present, and their future. It is the belief that black peoples are today leaving the substance for the shadow.

Philosophy from the ancient period to the contemporary period is regarded as the basis for rationality in all human societies. It is thus a veritable framework for showcasing, transmitting and developing the constitutive elements necessary for growth and development. The African philosopher, very steep in western philosophical orientation, is more...

Philosophy, going by its historical trajectory emerged from a thorough-going quest for understanding the world. This ‘understanding’ is held, on the one hand, as an end in itself and, on the other hand, as a further means to manipulating the ‘other,’ object-world, to the ‘self’ or the subject-inquirer’s, upliftment/development. In this chapter, thi...

The pivotal role which education plays in helping humanity to come to terms with existential imperatives cannot be over emphasized. It is the management of the flux concomitant to existential imperatives that can ensure social order, understood in normative perspective. In this paper, I address the development and conception of education within the...

The human quest for the meaning of life is an unending one marked by undulating landscapes. In order to confront the flux of experience generated by this quest for meaning, the human embraces science, morality, politics and religion. Religion is said to provide the basis for transcendental values which give humans succour after the physical and mat...

INTRODUCTION Almost a decade ago, specifically in January 2002, scholars within the University of Ibadan held a seminar with Professor George Mclean, founder of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP), Washington D.C., which eventually appeared as The Idea of an African University: The Nigerian Experience (Washington D.C.: RVP, 2007...

To what extent and in what ways can our conception of justice enhance democratic governance in Africa? In this disquisition, we took as our foil two dominant conceptions of justice, namely: (1) the contractarian/arrangement-based, and (2) the comparative/realization-focused. We examined these two broad conceptions, particularly Amartya Sen’s critiq...

There is little or no dispute about the existence, extent and the negative consequences of poverty, especially in the continent of Africa. What perhaps may be in dispute are the sources of poverty and means or ways of alleviating it. Poverty is simply a situation of lack concerning basic necessities of life. And where such deprivations exist, human...

This essay takes a deviant stance against the prevailing perspective on globalization as an imperialistic enterprise championed by the Western nations to perpetuate their exploitative tendencies on the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. While it acknowledges that globalization has sometimes been used to exploit third world co...

Sense of Community and its Sustenance in Africa There is no gainsaying the fact that Africa is inundated with many problems which have made the development and the attainment of social order, conceived in normative terms, daunting tasks. It is also a fact that there are many causes of this scenario such as political marginalization, ethnic chauvini...

Chapter V Idealism Versus Pragmatism in the Production of Knowledge in Nigerian Universities Olatunji A. Oyeshile Some questions can be answered in the laboratory, while others cannot. One cannot measure happiness in the laboratory. – Harry Schofield, 1972 The challenge of advancing scientific and technological frontiers became an inescapable...

Africa today is enmeshed in a deep developmental crisis arising not only from economic stagnation, which has made nonsense of the traditional laws of demand, supply and production, but also from the crisis of social order which is rooted in the absence of a stable political order. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda,...