Who should keep cultural artifacts looted from Africa by colonialists, and what arguments can be made in defence of the choice we make? Kwame Appiah invites us to see stolen cultural artifacts not as properties of the societies from which they were stolen, but as individual works of art that exude attributes of our shared humanity. Many of those works, he argues, are no less meaningful to their present locations than they are to people of their places of origin. He advanced the retention and custody of such artifacts in their present locations where, in his view, they best embody the normative idea of cosmopolitanism. I argue in this article that the cosmopolitan argument is an inadequate justification of the retention of stolen African artifacts in Western museums. I argue further that the view of European and American museums as sites of the sublime expression of cosmopolitan ideals speaks to the very need for its deconstruction as a Western idea that seeks the universalisation of a hegemonic culture. Decolonising the normative underpinning of the place of Western museums in the management of stolen African artifacts requires an appreciation of the African attitude to the history, meaning, significance and essences of looted artifacts under a reflexive framework that is multiple and inclusive. I further explicate the epistemic, historical and ethical basis for the reimagination of the idea of restitution and the inclusion of Africans in the management of stolen artifacts. The achievement of this requires a proper acknowledgement of theft, unethical profiteering and meaningful restitution. This approach, I conclude, represents a more ethical, inclusive and universal management of looted cultural artifacts.

Virtue ethics has faced a substantial challenge in recent years from philosophical situationism. In this essay, I argue that the challenge has remained intact due to a seeming difference between the sentiments of situationists and those of virtue ethicists regarding the scope and robustness of virtues, as well as a fixation on robust character traits. Although some defenders of virtue ethics have proposed empirically plausible accounts of character traits, these tend to deflate the concept of virtue such that it loses its usual scope and exemplary status. I propose my own theory of virtue as self-sustained proper deliberation in an attempt to meet the situationist challenge. I argue that we can provide a satisfactory answer to the situationist challenge if we reframe the aim of virtue ethics as therapeutic, clarify the plausible moral psychology, give an account of cultivating and sustaining virtue, and justify the morally exemplary and praiseworthy status of self-sustained virtues. To do this, I draw on the empirical and philosophical work of therapists and the later stoics such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

The global COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 coincided with another incident that made global news, namely the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in the United States. While the novelty of the pandemic wore off relatively quickly when things “went back to normal”, the death of George Floyd inspired a radical global movement relating to the treatment of black people (by both police and civilians) worldwide, namely the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement. The force of the 2020 BLM movement arguably resulted in greater social activism relating to the treatment of minorities in the US and UK in a matter of a few weeks than the almost unfathomable number of deaths from COVID-19. The aim of this article is to critically analyse this particular phenomenon through the lens of so-called “memory culture”, and specifically the role of spectacle in digital mnemotechnologies in circulating videos, images and appeals to empathetic engagement with the collective memories of violence against black minorities in the West. This trend supports the argument that will be made, namely that we live in a memory culture which has become obsessed with the fetishisation of the spectacle in order to induce the collective imagination, leading towards empathy for different groups. This provides a perspective on how the notion of the spectacle seems to be more effective in our contemporary memory culture at garnering sociopolitical action than appeals to scientific reason, or even just narratives unaccompanied by shocking videos or images.

Contributions of Pierre Hadot pertaining to the notion of philosophy as a way of life have had a profound and enduring influence upon philosophical counselling. Philosophical counsellors, such as Robert Walsh and Arto Tukiainen, embrace this imperative by living their philosophical counselling practices. A prevailing trend among these practitioners lies in their almost exclusive reliance upon either ancient Greek philosophical traditions as expounded by Hadot and Martha Nussbaum, or in their adaptation of Western philosophy. Regrettably, a conspicuous omission prevails regarding the incorporation of contemporary African philosophy, notably their philosophical praxes as a way of life/living, within the philosophical counselling discourse. The integration of African philosophy into philosophical counselling holds significant promise, particularly concerning the potential to impact ways of living within a southern African context. Within the wider landscape of contemporary African philosophy, certain authors have already conceptualised Ubuntu philosophy as a way of life/living. Notwithstanding, I undertake to introduce two additional African philosophical practices, namely hermeneutic African philosophy and conversational philosophy. I advance a novel interpretation of both by positioning them as relevant praxes for philosophical counselling. Emphasis is placed on interpretative actualisations in response to lived experiences, contextualised within a conversational framework. The implications for philosophical counselling are threefold: first, there is a disclosing of alternative ways of living/becoming along with the creation of new concepts; second, the relational dimension of philosophising is emphasised; and third, methodological constraints concerning the practice of philosophical counselling are transcended while embracing the transformative potential of reflective, creative and critical conversations.

This article pays tribute to Mabogo Percy More by exploring his salience to recent calls for “critical phenomenology”. The notion of critical phenomenology is explored through Lisa Guenther’s influential advocacy and Elisa Magrì and Paddy McQueen’s effort to offer an overview and definition of the field. I contend that the most laudable aspects of critical phenomenology are achieved in More’s phenomenological work on antiblack racism and black consciousness, but that More’s work nonetheless points to limitations in what its advocates have articulated critical phenomenology to be. I argue against Guenther’s case that critical phenomenology must abandon the transcendental for the “quasi-transcendental”, showing that More’s focus on contingency and its significance in the phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre means that his work is ultimately transcendental existential phenomenology. I then extend the issue of contingency in relation to Magrì and Paddy McQueen’s suggestion of critical phenomenology as centring corporeality. Taking seriously More’s emphasis on the contingency of embodiment points to the matter of what I term “paracorporeal embodiment”, which suggests phenomenological questions that go beyond many of the articulations of critical phenomenology in the contemporary literature.

The algorithms and processes of modern technologies affect almost all aspects of our lives. No human being is making individual subjective choices in each, or any, instance of these processes—all cases are treated with perfect technological indifference. Hence, a commonsense assumption about the technologies we interact with, and the algorithms many of them implement, is that they are neutral and impartial. Of course, this is simply not the case. As has been extensively documented and discussed, bias exists in all facets of technology, from how and why it was first conceived and then developed to its inputs, processes and outputs. I examine instances of technological bias in visual representation and criminal justice technologies, and argue that they produce, among other epistemic concerns, a form of hermeneutical injustice by means of obstructing the deployment of the necessary and otherwise available hermeneutical resources needed to accurately understand these technologies and their effects. Such epistemic harm is inevitable, unless the relationship between our human biases and the technological processes produced by us is made explicit and significantly rethought.

The technological virtual demands philosophical scrutiny. Existing methodologies, like pragmatism and social constructivism, often limit the examination of technology to the social, neglecting questions of embodiment. Said approaches tend to overlook the intricate existential connection between the embodied individual and digital technology artefacts. This article argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology may be mobilised to describe, understand and reconceptualise the category of the virtual and the dynamic relation between the digital technology artefact and its user. The result is a clearer description and deeper understanding of the richly intertwined reversible relationship between the embodied individual and the artefactual – two poles or points from which virtual space as emergent perceptual characteristic arises. Questions of the body and the artefactual are therefore not tangential to the question of virtual space; rather, the redeployment and development of key concepts from Merleau-Ponty’s work shows that such considerations are crucial for the ongoing development of a phenomenological account of the phenomenon of digital technology. We thus see that digital technology artefacts constantly, and in an encompassing manner, challenge perceptual faith, necessitating increased imaginative signification to make sense of a world via these technologies. In this manner, the process of sense-making as regards the self, world and others is modified.

In this paper, I am expressly concerned with issues emanating from the taking of p to be the case in evidence-based medicine. I interrogate the tenability of statistical generalisations with regard to reference classes and, in particular, demographic groups. Upon the grounds of my estimations, I contrarily make a moral argument that the credence of statistical generalisations should not categorically license outright rational belief in evidence-based medicine as supported by the opacity of bare statistical generalisations, the problem of reference classes and inappropriate credence projection, even when such generalisations may appear epistemologically sound.

In his analysis of consumerism, Baudrillard argues that consumerism is premised upon the assumption that consumption offers personal happiness and secures any individual a degree of self-expression. Modernity, according to Baudrillard, is beset by an unfortunate trend towards disabusing the individual of all things dream- and imagination-like, displacing the latter with a technico-operational reality betokened by the materialisation of such dreamscapes. As such, the individual’s essentially inscrutable constellations of thought and inner epistemic vistas are rendered in terms of a public vernacular – that, in short, of objectification. As such, it is an ethos of personalisation and espouses the importance of self-differentiation. In the consumer culture, prevalence is given to the individuation of the person, often at the expense of the group to which they belong. Little to no import is given to the integration of the individual within the group, and great stock is placed in personal well-being. This article compares two possible responses to consumerism: Sartre’s notion of authenticity, and Gyekye’s view of African communalism and argues that the latter is the more promising candidate. First, I consider the social logic of consumption, according to Baudrillard, so as to create a context for the following consideration of Sartre’s notions of bad faith and freedom. It will be argued that freedom fails to extricate the individual from the homogenising grip of the consumer paradigm and that, rather, an African communitarian approach is best suited to the resurrection of authenticity and authentic relationships.