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The fiction of scarcity: conceptualising scarcity in terms of global justice

  • Authors: Brotherton, Michelle
  • Date: 2022-04-07
  • Subjects: Scarcity Philosophy , Distributive justice , Political science Philosophy , Philosophy , Justification (Ethics) , Fallacies (Logic)
  • Language: English
  • Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/294526 , vital:57229 , DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.21504/10962/294526
  • Description: This thesis intends to contribute to the discourse on global justice as it pertains to resources, the distribution of resources, and the allocation of resources. The focus is on the concept of scarcity. I examine scarcity for how it is understood, interpreted, and applied in the literature on global justice. This thesis argues that scarcity lacks conceptual clarity in the discourse on global justice and argues that if scarcity is misconstrued, the consequences can be severe. Conceptual clarity is thus necessary to ensure that scarcity is properly referred to in the discourse on global justice so that scarcity is not erroneously used when justifications are sought for material deprivation and consequent human suffering. In the process, I will also examine how scarcity is used as a justification in instances of material deprivation and why this is problematic. Given the lack of conceptual clarity regarding scarcity, I argue that reliance on scarcity as justification may be erroneous. The conflation of absolute scarcity and relative scarcity may amount to a category mistake. This thesis purports to clarify scarcity conceptually in the context of global justice. In doing so, I recommend that a resource-centric approach to resource scarcity is adopted to accurately account for the scarcity status of resources. A resource-centric approach to resource scarcity based on a more nuanced understanding of scarcity avoids the potential category mistake. Such an approach ensures that material deprivation and consequent human suffering are not wrongfully attributed to scarcity. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Philosophy, 2022
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  • Date Issued: 2022-04-07

Introduction to Philosophy: PHL 111F

  • Authors: Van der Nest, M , Olivier, A
  • Date: 2011-06
  • Subjects: Philosophy
  • Language: English
  • Type: Examination paper
  • Identifier: vital:18207 , http://hdl.handle.net/10353/d1011197
  • Description: Introduction to Philosophy: PHL 111F, examinations June 2011.
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  • Date Issued: 2011-06

Introduction to Philosophy: PHL 111

  • Authors: Van der Nest, M , Louw, T
  • Date: 2010-06
  • Subjects: Philosophy
  • Language: English
  • Type: Examination paper
  • Identifier: vital:18202 , http://hdl.handle.net/10353/d1011191
  • Description: Introduction to Philosophy: PHL 111, supplementary examinations July 2010.
  • Full Text: false
  • Date Issued: 2010-06

Philosophy of Science and History: PHL 323

  • Authors: Louw, T J G , Vice, S
  • Date: 2009-01
  • Subjects: Philosophy
  • Language: English
  • Type: Examination paper
  • Identifier: vital:18195 , http://hdl.handle.net/10353/d1011184
  • Description: Philosophy of Science and History: PHL 323, supplementary examination January 2009.
  • Full Text: false
  • Date Issued: 2009-01

Reconciling Western and African philosophy : rationality, culture and communitarianism

  • Authors: Vitsha, Xolisa
  • Date: 2002
  • Subjects: Philosophy, African , Africa -- Intellectual life , Philosophy, Comparative , Philosophy , Communitarianism , Self
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:2838 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003807 , Philosophy, African , Africa -- Intellectual life , Philosophy, Comparative , Philosophy , Communitarianism , Self
  • Description: This thesis attempts to reconcile Western and African philosophy with specific reference to the issues of rationality, culture and communitarianism. It also discusses the post-Enlightenment, Western philosophical concept of liberal "atomism" and the primacy of the individual and the emergence of a communitarian critique in response. This thesis intends exploring how Western notions of individuality and the communitarian response can be reconciled with contemporary African philosophy and African communitarian thought in particular. To do this, it is necessary to explore the problem of liberal individualism and how African communitarianism might reinforce the Western communitarian critique. African communitarianism has a processual understanding of personhood that underpins its conception of the Self. In contrast to this view, Western communitarianism has a relational conception of the individual Self. Thus, this thesis argues that African communitarianism has a more profound understanding of the constitution of the Self. To demonstrate these claims, this study discusses notions of rationality which inform each of the philosophical traditions. This will enable a comparative analysis of the above-mentioned philosophical traditions with the intention of uncovering the concepts that provide the platform for their reconciliation.
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  • Date Issued: 2002

A logos of difference: the Kantian roots of Derrida's deconstructive thinking

  • Authors: Hurst, Andrea Margaret
  • Date: 1999
  • Subjects: Derrida, Jacques -- Philosophy , Deconstruction , Philosophy
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:11003 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/d1015554
  • Description: This study concerns a contemporary articulation of the age-old limit/possibility (truth/scepticism) contest in Western metaphysics. Traditional `either/or' logic advises that scepticism is a necessary consequence of the assailability of truth; hence the concerted effort in the history of philosophy to preserve the possibility of truth against any flicker of uncertainty. Here, it is argued that contemporary thinking sees the possibility of `absolute' truth lose its ground. However, a concomitant shift to a `logos of difference' averts the consequence of scepticism. Thus, the justification for this study could be articulated in terms of the imperative, if a cardinal moment in contemporary thought is to be sustained, to understand this shift in logos, work through its implications and learn to live with its effects. In this respect, an attempt is made throughout to situate and interpret Derrida's `deconstructive thinking' as exemplar. Derrida's thinking finds roots (not without signs of insurrection) in Kant's `Copernican revolution,' construed as the first shift towards the contemporary logos in question. Here, Kant refuted the postulate of an independent `world' by demonstrating that `reality' was the result of a cognitive order imposed on what `exists' by the rational subject. Knowledge, therefore, depended not on matching statements with pre-existing `things,' but on knowing the `rules' that determined how an object had to be if it was to be known at all. Kant maintained that certain, objective knowledge was possible, due to the completeness and universality of the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. Kant's `Copernican revolution' provided the opening for a second shift inaugurated by the so- called `linguistic turn.' Here, thinkers contested what Kant took for granted; namely that `constitutive interpretations' (cognitions/concepts) formed a `reality' independently of language. The basic premise underpinning the `linguistic turn,' therefore, is that language (signification) and `reality' are inseparable. Henceforth, the possibility of final, enduring `constitutive interpretations' whose `truth,' in principle, is discoverable, depends on whether or not the language which mediates human rationality can form a complete and universal system. This question resurrects the very limit/possibility debate (in the form of a structuralism/postmodernism stand-off) that Kant thought he had resolved in mediating between rationalist and empiricist extremes. In contemporary terms, philosophers who, bound by either/or logic, wish to avoid the sceptical trap of `anything goes' postmodernism, must assume that language (signification) can form a complete and universal system. However, in his deconstructive readings of Husserl, Saussure and `structuralism,' Derrida demonstrates the untenability of this assumption. At the same time, he shows that the sceptical `alternative' may be avoided by recognising the limitations of `either/or' logic. Again, Derrida's thinking may be traced to Kant's; this time to his analysis of the `first antinomy.' In accordance with Kant's analysis here of what is ultimately the logic of `complex systems' (Cilliers), Derrida offers a `logos of difference,' which skirts the strictures of structuralism while avoiding the trap of postmodern scepticism by accommodating both moments of limit and possibility in an indissoluble interplay.
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  • Date Issued: 1999

Reason and eros

  • Authors: Chalmers, W D
  • Date: 1967 , 2014-06-09
  • Subjects: Philosophy , Love , Reasoning
  • Language: English
  • Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
  • Identifier: vital:2748 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013331
  • Description: This study is not intended as a work of research into any existing body of philosopny. It is, rather, an independent inquiry into the origins and the objective of philosophical activity. In this it assumes the somewhat enigmatic role of a philosophy of philosophy.
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  • Date Issued: 1967

The sceptical chemist and the unwise philosopher : inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University

  • Authors: Oosthuizen, D.C.S. (Daniel Charl Stephanus)
  • Date: 1960
  • Subjects: Philosophy , Science
  • Language: English
  • Type: Text
  • Identifier: vital:657 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020726
  • Description: Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University , Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation)
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  • Date Issued: 1960

Africa‘s Heritage No. 2: Bantu religious beliefs

Discourse, cinema and desubjectification: from Foucault to Deleuze and beyond.

  • Authors: Konik, Adrian
  • Subjects: Philosophy , f-sa
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article , Lectures
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/31594 , vital:31617
  • Description: To be clear, this was not philosophy as a discipline, which like all canonical edifices can come across as weighty, dusty and extremely boring; especially when it rather arrogantly assumes the position of arbiter of truth, and tries to determine what everybody else can or cannot think, or what they should or should not say. Rather, what I encountered again in that Honors-level philosophy module was something that I had glimpsed during my undergraduate studies, but which I had yet to fully appreciate, namely an approach to thinking that was also an approach to life, on the part of certain people who, in their time, had to a large extent philosophized privately as they carried out their many other duties, or philosophized outside of the academy, or remained on the margins of academic philosophy – men like Marcus Aurelius, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benedictus Spinoza.
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