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In Very Practical Ethics David Benatar discusses some of the moral problems that ordinary people face in their everyday lives. These are not moral problems that arise only in extraordinary circumstances, nor those which are confronted only by select people in their professional or public roles; rather, they are problems that most people face on a daily basis. Written accessibly and covering topics not often discussed by moral philosophers, Very Practical Ethics will be of interest to students and other readers who care about how we might resolve the kinds of ethical issues we all face every day.
In South African higher education, the images of dysfunction are everywhere. Student protests. Violence. Police presence. Rubber or real bullets. Class disruptions. Burning tyres. Damaged buildings. Injury and sometimes death. Reports of wholesale corruption. Year after year, often in the same set of universities; the problem of routine instability seems insoluble. The financial, academic and reputational costs of ongoing dysfunction are high, especially for those universities caught-up in the never-ending struggle to overcome apartheid legacies. Any number of explanations have been ventured, including a lack of resources, shortage of capacity, rural location, corrupt officials, and endemic ...
How porous is the border between life and death? How do the dead influence the living and in what way? What can Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and the two Limbos tell us of our contemporary world today? In The Mirror of Death, Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte explores the hermeneutical potential of the regions in the hereafter. After an exciting voyage through the emergence of the afterlife and of the constancy of death’s presence in the history of humanity, Vanhoutte shows, through the study of the nature and genealogy of the various realms in the beyond, how an invigoratingly new and critical perspective of a wide variety of contemporary phenomena is unveiled when reading them through the interpretative lens of these regions where the dead dwell. Modern politics, our fellow human beings, the times of our lives, the capitalistic economic system, medicalization, wokism, and living in crisis will never look the same.
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Revealing the globalization, homogenization and variation that have come to characterize the collegiate system, this volume considers the future of the higher education system, and how we can consciously shape it moving forward.
Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC leadership and their relatives who ruled apartheid's foremost "tribal" Bantustan, the Transkei. In the early 20th century, the chieftaincies had often been well-springs of political leadership. In the Transkei, political leaders, such as Mandela, used regionally rooted clan, schooling and professional connections to vault to leadership; they crafted expansive nationalisms woven from these "kin" identities. But from 1963 the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism. While historians often suggest that apartheid changed...
A scholarly analysis of how state capture unfolded in South Africa and how it was contested by a range of actors in civil society, political organizations and within the state itself.
Nation-building imperatives compel citizens to focus on what makes them similar and what binds them together, forgetting what makes them different. Democratic institution building, on the other hand, requires fostering opposition through conducting multiparty elections and encouraging debate. Leaders of democratic factions, like parties or interest groups, can consolidate their power by emphasizing difference. But when held in tension, these two impulses—toward remembering difference and forgetting it, between focusing on unity and encouraging division—are mutually constitutive of sustainable democracy. Based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2012–13, The Black...
This enlightening book focuses on the history of how the ethnic groups of Africa, eventually joined by white colonizers from Europe, created the seedbed for the hateful apartheid system in Southern Africa. The reader learns how apartheid began, the dehumanizing effects it had on the black population, and how it was finally abolished in its ‘zero hour’ in 1994. Written by historian, writer and researcher Geoffrey Hebdon, this is the second in a series that covers the experience of a British citizen who emigrated to South Africa during that era, and records in vivid detail his responses to the apartheid system and how South Africa and neighbouring countries evolved after apartheid was abol...
Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa's leading university. This book tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad - the deranged, deluded, the depraved - have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others. The decline began in 2015 with the Rhodes Must Fall protest that resulted in the offending statue's removal within a month, and which spawned similar protests abroad. Emboldened by their local success, the protestors issued new and ever-increasing demands later that year and then again in 2016 and 2017. Their methods also became criminal - including intimidation, assault, and arson. The university leadership capitulated to this behaviour, and this fostered a broader and now pervasive toxic environment within the institution. These developments offer important lessons for universities around the world that are yielding to the forces of a faux "progressivism".
Although early Zionist thinkers perhaps naively believed that anti-Jewish persecution would end with sovereignty, anti-Zionism has become one form of the “new” antisemitism following World War II. Because antisemitism has not been effectively addressed, anti-Jewish rhetoric, activism, and deadly violence have flourished around the world. In Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel editor Robert S. Wistrich and an array of notable academics, journalists, and political scientists analyze multiple aspects of the current surge in anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric and violence. Contributors Ben Cohen, R. Amy Elman, Lesley Klaff, Matthias Küntzel, Nelly Las, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, and Efraim Sicher, among others, examine antisemitism from the perspectives of history, academia, gender, identity, and religion. Offering a variety of viewpoints and insights into disturbing trends worldwide, the contributors provide a basis for further discussion and increased efforts to counter the increasingly vocal and violent hatred of Jews and Israel.