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Christian Truth in an Age of Coronavirus Pandemic: Guarding the Contours of Catholicity in Zimbabwe
Robert Matikiti,
Isaac Pandasvika
Issue:
Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2023
Pages:
11-16
Received:
20 February 2023
Accepted:
25 April 2023
Published:
10 May 2023
Abstract: This article will argue that the church is the mystic body of Christ that believers must guard from purveyors bend on twisting the truth. There is no doubt that the Catholic social teaching on medical and moral matters has proven to be pertinent and applicable to the ever-changing circumstances of health care and its delivery. In response to today’s challenges, these same moral principles of Catholic teaching provide the rationale and direction for the community of faith. In times of coronavirus characterized by falsehoods, the truth is a virtue the church must strive for: “… If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”(John 8: 31-32). The truth is Christ; it is Christological. Christians must understand the clash of worldviews that is changing the face of Zimbabwean society. A worldview is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world; Christianity is a worldview that directs our daily decisions and actions. Worldviews affect the way we think. A worldview is a well-reasoned framework of beliefs and convictions that gives a true and unified perspective on the meaning of human existence. To paraphrase from the book of First Samuel (16: 7) – to see as God sees and not how the world sees. Beliefs are not simple propositions held inside us which drive our outward behaviour in predictable ways, they are more of acts of commitment than anything else. There is no doubt that the future of Catholicism lies in the hands of the church’s leadership and the believing Christians. Catholics look to their faith leaders for guidance on big decisions as regards COVID-19 issues. Conspiracy theories around COVID-19 deny that the COVID-19 pandemic is a biological virus. Catholics require direction from the Pope down to the episcopal leadership to chart the way forward. A worldview not only impacts how one understands and makes sense of the world but also influences how one expresses oneself in the world. The constellation of personal values, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ideas that make up our worldview have an effect on our understanding of reality. Coronavirus has caused uncertainty among believers and confusion as to how to cope with the complex problems that arise in COVID-19 related issues. This article will aver that the nature of drawing the contours of catholicity regarding the biblical foundations of the health falls in the hands of orthodox Catholic teachings.
Abstract: This article will argue that the church is the mystic body of Christ that believers must guard from purveyors bend on twisting the truth. There is no doubt that the Catholic social teaching on medical and moral matters has proven to be pertinent and applicable to the ever-changing circumstances of health care and its delivery. In response to today’...
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Plato’s Crito and the Contradictions of Modern Citizenship
Issue:
Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2023
Pages:
17-27
Received:
20 December 2022
Accepted:
5 January 2023
Published:
24 May 2023
Abstract: Citizenship, with its presumptive rights, privileges and obligations, has been a fundamental challenge confronting the state since the classical Greek era and the transformation and reorganization of the centralized medieval Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War. With the changing patterns of state formation from the large and unwieldy empires organized into absolutist states to the more nationalistic/linguistic formations a recurring issue has been the constitutional or legal guarantees of the rights of the citizen as well as his/her obligations to the state. This paper engaged in a nuanced study of Plato’s Crito as it relates the contradictions of citizenship as social membership and as participation in the modern state. The primary objective was to adapt Socrates’ experience to discuss the citizenship challenge in the modern state and driven by the research question on the implications of the emergence of new challenges to the contradictions of citizenship. Social contract theory by Thomas Hobbes served as the theoretical framework. Data collection was mainly from secondary sources such as academic journals, books, newspapers and internet sources, and data analysis based on the content and textual analysis of extant and relevant literature on the subject matter. Conclusively, the study realized that citizenship in the modern state is determined largely by the protection, in various ramifications, given to the citizen by the state, but that given a change in the circumstances many would decline to die for the state. Accordingly, it recommended a mutualism in the relationship and responsibilities between that state and the citizen of the modern state, particularly the underdeveloped states of the Third World.
Abstract: Citizenship, with its presumptive rights, privileges and obligations, has been a fundamental challenge confronting the state since the classical Greek era and the transformation and reorganization of the centralized medieval Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War. With the changing patterns of state formation from the large and unwieldy empir...
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A Critical Assessment of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education
Issue:
Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2023
Pages:
28-31
Received:
10 November 2022
Accepted:
4 January 2023
Published:
5 June 2023
Abstract: This essay on John Dewey, a prominent educator of the 20th century, explores his pedagogical theories and writings that influenced teaching-learning procedures. Dewey's influences are vast and overwhelming in the fields of aesthetics, politics, humanism, and logic. In the center of his educational concept is the child. His democratic leanings and pursuit of liberty, justice, and the value of a child's experience are the roots of Dewey's conception of humanism. Dewey's main concern was the gap between a child's experiences and the expectations put on him. He emphasizes the need of teachers showing sensitivity to the unique differences and needs of their students. A youngster has the potential to be nurtured by a skilled mentor since they are naturally curious, companionable, and productive. As a result, it is the responsibility of the instructor to create a welcoming and productive environment for the students in order to give them excellent educational experiences. These environments are developed by the joint testing of effective teaching and learning strategies by instructors and students. The objective is to promote student independence. Dewey viewed his school as a community where the students are actively involved. This paper focused on Dewey's educational theory, pedagogical considerations, and the links he drew between education, democracy, experience, and society.
Abstract: This essay on John Dewey, a prominent educator of the 20th century, explores his pedagogical theories and writings that influenced teaching-learning procedures. Dewey's influences are vast and overwhelming in the fields of aesthetics, politics, humanism, and logic. In the center of his educational concept is the child. His democratic leanings and p...
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Interdisciplinarity as a Tool to the Understanding of Global Behavior Under Uncertainty in Science and Society
Issue:
Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2023
Pages:
32-45
Received:
22 May 2023
Accepted:
13 June 2023
Published:
27 June 2023
Abstract: Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we can know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art uniqueness. Uniqueness is strongly correlated with essentialization. Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is essentialization. Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal.
Abstract: Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to so...
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Wittgenstein’s Interpretations of Essences: Both in Tractatus & Philosophical Investigation
Issue:
Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2023
Pages:
46-50
Received:
28 May 2023
Accepted:
15 June 2023
Published:
27 June 2023
Abstract: Wittgenstein in his early work viz. Tractatus argued that there is a common, essential, underlying structure that links logic, language and the world. He also argued about the need for an analysis of ordinary language in terms of a perspicuous symbolism that would display a one to one relationship between a proposition and a fact – when both of them are broken down to their simplest components – viz. to atomic propositions and atomic states of affairs. All propositions are ultimately truth-functional combinations of atomic propositions – thus all language is resolvable to a unique constant. So for early Wittgenstein, though there is an apparent complexity and diversity of propositions still there lies a uniform, essential structure of truthfunctional propositions and that can be reduced to a single constant. And language to have a determinate sense must be ultimately based on objects – the absolutely simple logical atoms of the world. These objects imbibe their range of combination with other objects, which implies that any genuine propositions – however unusual and unconventional it may seem to be – must ultimately be constrained by the permissible range of combination of the objects. In this way early Wittgenstein sought to secure an essential metaphysics via an essential structure of language. However in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein attacked essentialism by rejecting the picture theory, and the search for commonality and uniformity. He denied essence, the universal, the common element present in all the objects of a class and accepted only an indeterminate and incomplete flow of the criss-crossing, the overlapping features. For him language is constituted by an ever expanding flow of uses, which he called language-games. The significance of the term ‘language-game’ lies in the fact that like games language too is not based on any ontology that would confer a common essence across all the widely divergent uses. Nor did Wittgenstein accept any hidden essence behind appearance. In PI the later Wittgenstein denied both analysis and essence and propagated description of usage and behaviours as the only method of philosophy. Later Wittgenstein will neither commit himself to ontological necessity, nor to necessity being a matter of scheme-relative propositions in the Quinean sense. For later Wittgenstein all attempts to establish essences, or the contrary exercises to relativise them to a particular set of presumptions, are themselves language-games – they boil down to usage and practices that do not rest on any foundation.
Abstract: Wittgenstein in his early work viz. Tractatus argued that there is a common, essential, underlying structure that links logic, language and the world. He also argued about the need for an analysis of ordinary language in terms of a perspicuous symbolism that would display a one to one relationship between a proposition and a fact – when both of the...
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