This essay examines how somaesthetics is related to the field of fine arts, though the scope of somaesthetics is indeed wider, extending into all practices of life in which we can enhance our perception and performance through improved somatic self-use and self-knowledge. I first explain the project of somaesthetics and why it is needed to counterbalance the strong tendencies in mod-ern aesthetics, beginning with its founder Alexander Baumgarten, to neglect or reject the body’s role in aesthetic experience. Because Hegel is a crucial figure in this anti-somatic tradition, I then critically examine his ranking of the arts in terms of their relation to material embodiment. Using his classificatory scheme heuristically to highlight the body’s wide-ranging role in the different arts, the essay demonstrates how somaesthetics can improve our understanding and performance of that role and thereby improve the arts and our aesthetic experience.

One among the concepts strongly defended by Léopold Sédar Senghor is what he called the civilization of the universal, which forms an essential component of his thought. This concept has been thoroughly commented and, at times, wrongly or controversially interpreted. My approach consists of a personal reflection on the backgrounds of Senghor’s thought. First of all I will deal with Senghor’s conception of Negritude and what it implies in terms of black identification, recognition of Africa as birthplace of races. Then I will examine the civilization of the universal as defended by Senghor and its link to the thought of Father Teilhard de Chardin, a French palaeontologist. Finally I will present the passionate debate on his work and thought. Senghor was among the African writers and thinkers probably the most admired, the most awarded throughout the world, but also the most criticized and hated.

It is a question of seeing through the study of certain philosophical positions of Marcien Towa how philosophical activity is an experience of freedom, an active consciousness in motion. Indeed, in Marcien Towa, freedom is the result of a process of rediscovery of self that animates the subject aware of its existence in the world. The unveiling of the essence of me is a necessity or an imperative whose effectiveness is the result of questioning the essence of the self that is reborn from its treating myself as a goal, as a consciousness of freedom. This is where there is reconciliation of the self with itself, the advent of a new subject that can take care of themselves as free and autonomous entity and that supports his destiny.

The paper attempts to elucidate the nature and action of feeling: a subject corresponding to the original conception of aesthetics by Baumgarten. It analyzes several different uses of the verb “to feel” in order to bring out the difference between simple perception and feeling. Feeling, it emerges, is an overtone given to a perception that has something particular, or ineffable, about it. With reference to Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification, and the Kantian conception of reflective judgment, feeling is defined as a resonance that arises spontaneously in us, in response to the perceptive stimuli of an object, from the depth of our memory as the store of past experience. Lastly, the paper explains the basis of freshness of feeling, and the individuality and universality of feeling.

The notion of the sublime, which since the nineteenth century is one of the dominant aesthetic categories, is strongly connected with (the artistic representation of) overwhelming nature. In this article it is argued that in the course of the 20th century the sublime increasingly becomes entangled with the experience of technology. However, in the age of biotechnologies, such as genetic modification and synthetic biology, the sublime regains a natural dimension. Taking Eduard Kac’s Alba fluo rabbit (a ‘transgenic’ bunny, that resulted from the injection of green fluorescent protein of a Pacific jellyfish into the egg of an Albino rabbit) as an example, it will be argued that in the age of biotechnology the difference between nature, technology and art will gradually vanish, and new dimensions of the sublime will become manifest.

Thanks to the current communication and information technologies, it is now possible to create a virtual space where a sincere dialogue could take place between African and non-African philosophers. All of them were educated to free thinking and to respecting the freedom of their interlocutors. This is the way how they will be able to build not only a philosophia africana but also the African philosophy.

This article represents a programmatic attempt to relate the subject of aesthetics to the wider scope of issues concerning the nature of the human mind. In addition to a criticism of the aesthetics’ isolationism, it provides an outline of orthodox cognitivism and also of the more recent philosophy of embodiment, and sees the latter as a natural context for aesthetic concerns. The author argues that not only may the results of brain research be instructive for a more profound understanding of beauty but also that the subtlety and richness of aesthetic studies can be insightful for empirical studies of the neural system. That beauty is not reducible to brain processes does not mean that a possible lesson from neuroscience has no explanatory value for aesthetics; at the same time the article affirms the stand that the aesthetic, being one of the most profound traits of the human mind, cannot be fully captured in empiricist terms. What is needed is a multidisciplinary exchange that requires a shift from the comfort of the traditional views and an opening that might prove potent for the aesthetics of the present times which should not deprive itself of an ambition to participate in deciphering the ‘mysteries’ of the mind, cognition, and action.

In general, discussion about cosmopolitanism is predicated on the assumption of community either already existing or yet to be realised. A common feature of this assumption is that community represents the boundary of “us” inclusion and exclusion of “the other”. Accordingly, the strife to reach out to “the other” constitutes the quest for the cosmos – order – and its realisation is cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is thus based on the ontology of opposition tending towards synthesis. The thesis defended here is that the ontology of boundary as a coupling point and not a moment of the exclusion of “the other” is a necessary reaffirmation as well as complement of “us”. This ontology, supported by polylogue among the peoples and cultures of our planet, is the means to transcend cosmopolitanism and constitute a planetary human community.

The arts can contribute to an intimate, engaged experience of landscape, and this process can itself be construed as an art. Experiencing landscape through the arts and as an art, the art of environmen-tal appreciation, offers a clearer understanding of landscape, of environment, and of art, as well as what it is to “know” in the context of environmental experience. This essay offers a new fabric for understanding the relation of art and landscape by combining a fresh understanding of four threads: art, environment, landscape, and knowing through appreciation. It shows how the loose-knit texture they form can be spread metaphorically over a particular landscape in such a way that the landscape will fill the fabric and the fabric integrate the landscape.

In this article I am arguing that the concept of Ubuntu which means humanness was articulated against a situation of the dehumanization that was meted to the Africans during the eras of slavery and colonialism. It is further argued that since Ubuntu implies character qualities such as compassion, kindness, courtesy and respect for other persons, the ethic of Ubuntu remains indispensable to the reconstruction of post-colonial African societies. Ubuntu is indispensable to the post-colonial African quest for an identity in the spheres such as the public sector and the business sector because Ubuntu is mostly valued as the ideal for human conduct in all spheres of life. Lastly, I have also argued that because of its relational worldview and individual ontology, Ubuntu connected with the concept of Ukama implies that human existence cannot be separated from the generality of existence.

In the essay Aesthetics of Urban Design it is argued that contemporary aesthetics should have a base in the design of the city. It is in the everyday life of the city that people can train, exercise, improve and enlarge their aesthetic sensibilities. Given this context, two different approaches have to be distinguished. On one hand Lewis Mumford praised the medieval city as leading to the “dilation of the senses”. This is the historical approach to the question. On the other hand, however, urban design could play an important role in reconstructing the aesthetic sensibility especially today. Different reasons are relevant here. Since we can’ t presuppose that in the time after postmodernity people easily find access to the aesthetics, urban life could function as a new beginning. City life in many ways makes us acquainted with the aesthetic. The architecture of the houses, the layout of the street pattern or the atmospheres of a square have to be mentioned here. The relevance of urban design for the foundation of aesthetics can in different ways be argued from pragmatism’ s connecting the art more closely with the everyday life. John Dewey did so. But also neo-Marxism’ s idea of “sublating” art by realizing its promises in everyday life is relevant here. The essay argues that the slums, which are to be found all over the world sets some limits to the thesis that aesthetics, today, originates from urban design.

The challenges of building community based on a common identity that also respects differences has two different kinds of chasms to cross. There is the division of ethnic groups, and there is also the generational gap. Given recent problems of ethnic violence that broke out during the December 2007 elections, can contemporary Kenyans build community, coming to common understanding with others on issues such as value and identity? This is not a new problem. It has often been expressed as the need to develop a common Kenyan “national culture.” After a survey including Okot p’Bitek, Frantz Fanon, Bethwell Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s contribution to the topic in the context of the 1960s and 70s, I will then go on to discuss the contribution of Kenyan Philosophy professor Henry Odera Oruka, who was greatly influenced by the ongoing discussions regarding national culture when he began his sage philosophy project – a project he clearly described as being able to play a role in the creation of Kenyan national culture. I explore some of Odera Oruka’s unpublished work on this topic. Chaungo Barasa has continued this project. I move on to survey how current academics in Kenya are working to describe and forge national values as a meaningful alternative to Kenyan government ongoing endeavors to promote culture as a tourist commodity.

This paper discusses the ideas of Asres Yenesew, who was a leading clerical scholar during Haile Selassie’s reign. Frustrated by the marginalization of Ethiopia despite the preservation of its independence, Asres identifies the introduction of Western education as the main culprit and derives the economic satellization of Ethiopia from the cultural ascendancy of the West. As a remedy, he proposes a return to the source by which alone Ethiopia can again recenter itself and make choices in accordance to its interests. He supports his proposal by expounding the empowering forces of some important components of the traditional system of social organization and cultural beliefs. The paper underlines the revolutionary message of Asres’s discourse, but also shows how the timidity of his political stand singularly diminished its resonance.

Landscape is analyzed here principally in terms of its aesthetic value and function. As an expression of a sentimental response it is concerned not only with natural beauty but also the world of human beings, since it has always been integral to the creativity of our visionary sensibility. In it we find ethical truth since we celebrate not only the wildness of nature but also the life-space that unifies human beings and the site of the contingent and the possible, that which Aristotle referred to as endekhomenon. Modern history serves as a starting point for an examination of the present significance of the landscape in Europe. The image of its countless particulars and nature’s “spiritual physiognomy” seem to respond to the full spectrum of our most intimate emotions; we are convinced that something that transcends the vast panorama of discrete elements must exist, namely the landscape. It is more than the sum of the parts, the individual fragments of our perception scattered along the continuum of our sensibility or the attraction of mental processes. It is the spirit of an infinite and magical connectedness of forms. The notion of landscape and beautiful landscape develops both in history and in individuals, bound up with the rhythm of lines and surfaces that human beings invent almost instinctively. It is the outcome of the art of culture, the poesis of individuals and communities.

The practice of family solidarity is a fact in African societies even if the people are facing all kinds of risks from an early age, before they exert their activity to take charge. There is lack of civil protections as “social security” which covers individuals from illness and other risks thus transforming African societies into scenes where violence and social insecurity reigns. Under these conditions, the freedom of the individual is in question as well as the protection of citizens, taking into account the risks to life, work, education, health, other environment. The social role to be played by the rule of law is also in question. But the bond of solidarity is primarily ethical. It binds one human to another, beyond the laws and social institutions.

Part I of this essay will examine how the interplay between philosophy and art over the past century is reflected in the aesthetic theories of four leading Twentieth century aestheticians: Walter Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Arthur Danto. The philosophers’ theories are linked to the developments in art most directly related to their respective approaches to problems in aesthetics. Part II will explore selected non-philosophical social and technological developments that are in the process of altering the course of contemporary art today. Among these are globalization, the art market, social/political issues, popular culture, virtual reality, and new manifestations of the avant-garde. Key factors that warrant consideration for future developments in aesthetics are identified in the hope that today’s and future aestheticians will begin to consider what changes are required in aesthetics to address these new developments in art.

In this paper, I offer a partial picture of my conceptual location as a US black feminist, professional philosopher and, by doing so, illustrate one of the ways Africana philosophy is being shaped and engaged. I offer a portrait of my conceptual location by identifying a value shared by some ‘anti-theory’ black feminists and some Africana professional philosophers in the US that ultimately recommends a consistent engagement in black feminist/philosophical praxis.

The difference between European and Chinese traditions of painting has been widely discussed. This study argues that this difference can be seen in the different use of copybooks: a source from which many interesting theories can be developed. The paper compares several medieval European books, including Villard de Honnecourt’s Constructions: The Wheel of Fortune, with the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting from China, and argues that, while the Europeans lay emphasis on geometric forms and the mathematical laws behind them, the Chinese learn painting in the manner of practicing calligraphy, paying more attention to the way of making lines and dynamic structures. The author argues that this divergence between the Chinese and Europeans in painting is based on their different views on the nature of creation.