Development Of African Historiography Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 2

Development Of African Historiography - Essay Example The historians, mostly hailing from European nations, who relied on material and tangible discoveries as the only sources of information about the early life of any culture, classified the world into â€Å"civilizations† based on an inappropriate definition of the term referring only to societies that left evidences of complex social and cultural systems with a centralized authority that controlled labor, wealth, military forces and commissioned the construction of cities and towns and other public buildings, as well as works of ‘monumental’ art. (Ehret)This approach led to a distinction between different cultures around the world on the basis of intelligence that was measured mostly from written texts that could be translated and could provide a vision into the life of the early people, dismissing the rest of the world as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘unintelligent’ (Ehret) Such attitudes assisted the slave traders in undermining the humanity of the African people, looking down upon their traditional values as ‘primitive’, their ethnic communities as ‘tribes’, their nation as a ‘race’. (Ehret 4-9)These terms though originally meaning nothing degrading have come to be associated with ideas denoting a distinction from what is considered to be ordinary and accepted in a ‘civilized’ society and consequently such dismissals prevented the historians of that time to investigate events that accounted for African history. Thus the rich cultural life of a huge percentage of the population of the world has been left undiscovered due to the limiting beliefs and predetermined superiority of smaller class. Historians today, however, have understood the implications of such an error and have made efforts to develop unique research methodologies for investigating past events through mainly Oral Tradition and Archeology as well as other interesting sources such as genetics, linguistics, and botany.

Mental Causation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Mental Causation - Essay Example The problem of mental causation is one that has been described to be an intuitive one, focusing on the possibility that mental events cause physical events and physical events cause mental events. The major problem put forward by mental causation has to do with how mental events have causal effects on physical events, given the fact that the body, which is responsible for physical events is deemed to be independent of the mind. The main issue with mental causation has to do with a non-correspondence in explanation that seems to underline the understanding that the body is only physical and material. This is because if the body is only physical and material, then it should be controlled only by physical and material motivations for the body to act. For example, a person should decide to buy a certain color of a shoe because the leg has the material urge to wear that shoe. But once the problem of mental causation is brought into the argument, a new position is taken that it is possible for the mind, rather than the leg to be the source of motivation as to why a person would want to buy the said color of the shoe. This makes the problem of mental causation a highly dualistic situation, whereby the mind and the body are seen to relate together and affect each other.The whole problem of mental causation has been claimed by some to be a dualist philosophy rather than a generalized philosophy of mind. This is because as the name implies, dualism takes the position that the mind and the body are not identical.