Browsing by Author "Hull, George"

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    Analysing Authenticity: Explaining What it is to be True to Yourself and Why this is Good
    (2021) Mogomotsi, Olerato Kau; Hull, George
    My project is a conceptual analysis of authenticity that seeks to achieve reflective equilibrium with our considered judgments about authenticity. Given that we ordinarily take authenticity to mean “being true to oneself” and to generally be a good thing, I develop a philosophical conception of authenticity that can adequately account for the following questions: “What is it that we are being true to?”, “What does being true to oneself entail?” and “What is good about being authentic?” I take particular interest in Aristotelianism virtue Eudaimonism and how it can help in providing a tenable understanding of what authenticity is. In answering the first question, I seek to develop a modified account of Alasdair's MacIntyre's (1981) narrative unity of the self, which I term the Extrapolated Narrative Unity of Self [ENUS], as a tenable understanding of the self which we are being true to when being authentic. The ENUS, in short, is a configured narrative unity of self that combines an individual's actual past and present with their projected future self where the projected future self is a function of their telos. Thereafter, I will take being true to ones ENUS to be laden in the effort and wholesome commitment required for one to put into configuring, expressing, maintaining and reasserting the self. Finally, I argue that we ordinarily understand authenticity to be good because we generally take it to require and reinforce a virtuous life for the individual who is authentic. In addition, I argue that we generally understand authenticity to be good because of its inextricable link to a characteristically Eudaimonic life.
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    Establishing an immanent counterhumanism for the un-foreclosure of the future: Deleuze, Mbembe, Hartman and the anarchic Open World
    (2021) Berti, Daniel Jonathan; Hull, George; Gray van Heerden, Chantelle
    This dissertation addresses the political form of the human, its multiply-stratified nature, and the world it makes up - by focusing first on a tension between two broad kinds of approaches in philosophy of race that intend to unmake that stratification. One, called counterhumanism and exemplified by the work of Sylvia Wynter, is deeply prevalent in antiracist struggles, and argues that a false image of the human is at the core of oppression, that a new, all-inclusive image must be fostered to replace it. The other, nonhumanism, emerges from some Deleuzo-Guattarian scholarship as a contingent critique of transcendence – value frameworks imposed from outside – and argues that no model is adequate to the complexity of reality - that State thought, the kind of thinking involved in such modelling, is inherently conservative rather than liberatory, maintaining a more fundamental oppressive element. The second part of the dissertation teases out some core developments in Achille Mbembe's conceptual and historical cartography of race and the human in Critique of Black Reason (2017), ones that avoid the issue of transcendence in counterhumanism. On his account, contemporary race begins with the European creation of an enclosure that claims humanness for itself, excluding those from the World-outside. Through negative resentment critique and positive critiques based in calculated creation (e.g. religious and artistic), Mbembe resolves the tension in creating an immanent counterhuman as dis-enclosed world, through immanent and transversal thinking. The political form of the human as understood here is fundamentally tied to all aspects of human relations, and as such when changed will come with a corresponding fundamental change in our political arrangements. This final part of the dissertation expands Mbembe's human as the Open world, to outline the various social and political arrangements compossible with it. This part answers how we may organise ourselves politically to seek humanness in the present, less-than-human, enclosed world. What we will find, through an engagement with a range of anarchist and anarchistic theory, is that Mbembe's Open World has deep resonances with the world sought by anarchists; it is an anarchic world rooted in a prefigurative practice that un-forecloses the future.
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    The citizen: an Ubuntu personalism conception
    (2025) Seale, Wade; Hull, George
    In this thesis, I argue for an Ubuntu personalism conception of the citizen as a foundationalist account of a grounding for the pluralist political arrangement based on human rights. I start with John Rawls who employed what he called a political conception of the citizen to develop a neutralist theory of justice. In expounding this, I argue that he excluded certain categories of human beings in an unacceptable way, most notably the severely cognitively disabled; and that the neutralism he targeted – his major contribution – is illusive. I then go in search of an alternative grounding for the pluralist political arrangement based on human rights. I explore philosophical personalism as an alternative, identifying major strengths in the intellectual movement for the purposes of grounding the pluralist political arrangement. But I also identify major weaknesses in personalism – in the thought of Juan Manuel Burgos, which is a current, cutting-edge version of personalism; as well as in the thought of the older John Macmurray – an excellent example of social constitution of persons theory. This opens the way for an exploration of Ubuntu personalism. I explore a metaphysical account of Ubuntu, as well as Ubuntu as an ethic, and show how this leads to a socially constituted conception of the person which sits at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics. I say how the citizen is this kind of person and show how it is this conception of the person that best grounds the pluralist political arrangement based on human rights.