Philiminality – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Technical and general information from the podcast's RSS feed.

Philiminality

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/35d. Total Eps: 33

Philiminality Oxford is a student-run platform for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary philosophy. We discuss philosophical ideas, thinkers, and approaches which are frequently marginalized in both Anglo-American and “continental” academic circles. We engage with broader horizons of what it means to do philosophy by discussing intersectional perspectives on brands of thought from across the world. We also recognize the value of exploring how philosophical issues interrelate with other disciplines, such as politics, theology, sociology, classics, history, psychology and natural science.

Read moreCollapse

Site

RSS

Apple

Data updated on 04/07/2026

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇬🇧 Great Britain - Philosophy
24/03/2025
#89

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.

See all

No links shared by this podcast

RSS feed quality and score

Technical evaluation of the podcast's RSS feed quality and structure.

See all

RSS feed quality

To improve

Score global : 33%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

Recent episodes with titles, durations, and descriptions.

See all

14. Brooh Asmare - The Authenticity of the Hatata from the Perspective of the Cultural History of Ethiopia

Episode 15

Wednesday, November 23, 2022 • Duration 19:09

Since the publication of Conti Rossini’s notes on Tekle Haymanot, an Ethiopian Catholic priest and Rossini’s testimony that made the Hatatas are of Giusto d’Urbino, in 1916, the controversy of authorship over the Hatatas remained hot debate among the Ethiopian as well as the Western scholars. These scholars present their argument from different perspectives, such as Testimony (Rossini 1916, 1920), Calendar (Getachew Haile 2014), Philology (Alemayehu Moges 1969) and Colonial Thesis (Daniel Kibret 2018 and Fasil Merawi 2020). The findings of their research, however, went to diametrically opposite directions. While the perspectives of Testimony and Colonial Thesis favor Giusto d’Urbino as the authentic author of the Hatatas, the argument from Calendar and Philology went to favor Zara Yaqob. These perspectives, however, missed to consider the importance of the cultural history of Ethiopia in providing hints for the ongoing debate on the problem of authorship of the Hatatas. This approach has a crucial importance to understand whether the central issue of the Hatatas has a cultural foundation in Ethiopia or not. The paper finds out that the central issue upon which both Zara Yaqob and Wolde Heywot repeatedly and fiercely criticized and were obsessively concerned is Monasticism (Asceticism), the center of religious, social, cultural and developmental problems of the Ethiopian society, according to them. The paper will show how this central issue of the Hatatas is articulated as existential predicament from the cultural history of the country. Moreover, identifying this central issue of the Hatatas will help us trace the genealogy of the problem. The result of this cultural genealogy makes the Hatatas the product of the dialectical relationship between the inquisitive mind of Zara Yaqob and the established ascetic culture of the country, which, in turn, addresses the problem of authorship.

Read moreCollapse

13. Teshome Abera - Zara Yacob's Hatata: Its Historical and Social Reality

Wednesday, November 23, 2022 • Duration 37:45

The seventeenth century philosophical work of Zara Yacob, the Hatata, is the result of both internal and external issues that led to controversies. Zara Yacob as a philosopher exercised the use of logic over the immediate environment and developed an all rounded philosophy arising from his own life and the life of the society he was living in. The contribution of Sumner in introducing the works of Zara Yacob is immense. His huge publications are permanent evidence of his contribution to Ethiopian philosophy. It is he who for the first time translated the works of Zara Yacob into English. Zara Yacob’s Hatata reveals that there are certainly distinctive traditions of philosophical reflections in Ethiopia. There has been doubt about the existence of philosophy in Africa when there is vital evidence that Africa had its own philosophy even in ancient times - the works of Zara Yacob disproved the doubt. Ethiopia as a country is embosomed in Africa, and is a cradle of mankind - in a similar vein there is evidence that suggests that Africa is also the cradle of philosophy and human civilization. There was, and still is, a strong debate regarding the authorship of Hatata; the author of Hatata is no doubt Zara Yacob. His philosophy is original to Ethiopia, the ancient country in the African continent and the ancient country which is the cradle of human beings. The philosophy of Zara Yacob is rational in the sense that all his analysis regarding the existence of God, truth and his ethics which include vital principles such as the Golden rule, mercy, work, and some of the forbidden practices by man such as killing, stealing, lying, and adultery are all analysed by the philosopher in his work Hatata.

Read moreCollapse

12. Henry Straughan & Michael O'Connor - Grace and Reason in the Hatata Zera Yacob

Wednesday, November 23, 2022 • Duration 30:01

In this talk, Henry Straughan and Michael O'Connor seek to illuminate the philosophical method of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob. In particular, they trace the interaction between reason and grace, and the role of discursive argumentation versus immediate intuition. They draw out Yacob’s method by explicating and examining his discussion of the epistemic significance of disagreement and his distrust of testimony; his argument for the existence of God; his theodical response to the problem of evil; and his practical ethics. In doing so, they suggest that Yacob’s central method of argument is abductive, resting on something like a principle of sufficient reason. They also suggest that for him reason cannot operate without grace–that reason is, in a sense, a movement of grace. They further outline how Yacob’s application of the principle of sufficient reason provides him with ethical guidance. They conclude by considering the connection of the Treatise’s form to its content, and suggest that the biographical material is not merely of historical interest but rather is of central importance. The text’s fragmentary, allusive compression means that we must be careful with our conclusions, but they track Yacob’s trains of thought and movements of style as best we can, re-tracing the jagged path between grace and reason in his footsteps.

Read moreCollapse

11. John Marenbon - Does it Matter Who Wrote it? Zera Yacob, Forgery and Pseudonymity in the History of Philosophy

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 34:21

Philosophers often talk as if it does not make much difference who wrote a piece of philosophy, when, and where, but only whether the arguments it contains are sound. Historians of philosophy should always treat that attitude with suspicion. Philosophical texts about which questions of pseudonymity arise (are they really by the person who claims to have written them?) help to show why, because how they are to be understood is bound up essentially with the question about their authorship and, if they are in fact pseudonymous, what is the purpose behind the apparent deception? The case of the texts attributed to Zera Yacob is a striking example of where the date and identity of the author matter centrally, whether the texts we have are in fact original, heavily adapted or forged. My talk will try to provide some context. I shall begin by looking at philosophical texts that have been, deliberately or otherwise, attributed to authors who did not write them, such as pseudo-Aristotelian texts, the pseudo-Dionysian corpus, Augustinus Hibernicus, Aethicus Ister, the Epistola Trajani (in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus), the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I shall then focus on one particular comparative example: the famous correspondence of the twelfth-century philosopher, Peter Abelard, and his wife-turned-nun, Heloise (and another set of letters that, more recently, has been claimed as an earlier exchange between the two when they were lovers). Like the Ḥatatā, there has been and remains much debate about the authenticity of these texts, and the parallels and divergences between the two discussions throw light on both.

Read moreCollapse

10. Justin E.H Smith - Assessing the Evidence for Zera Yacob's Authenticity from the Point of View of the History of Philosophy

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 35:25

There are several ways by which to approach the question of the authenticity of Zera Yacub's work. One is philological, by careful attention to the linguistic hints in the manuscripts that the work is not by a native writer of Ge'ez, or that otherwise suggest a later invention or conscious fabrication. Another is so to speak psychobiographical, by close attention to the character of Giusto d'Urbino, particularly as revealed in his correspondence from Ethiopia with the Parisian manuscript collector Antoine d'Abbadie. In a series of articles, Anaïs Wion has compellingly adopted both of these approaches. Less developed in her work is the approach informed by the history of philosophy, to wit: are there Latinate philosophical concepts in Zera Yacub's work, the circulation of which in 17th-century Ethiopia we might have reason to doubt? If there are, three possibilities present themselves. One is that, in spite of our surprise in finding them there, networks of circulation, likely headed up by Portuguese Jesuits, can be discovered that account for their presence. A second possibility is that the appearance of these terms is in part a consequence of lexical choices made by the first translators of the work and adopted in later scholarship. A comparative study of the two most significant translations of the Hatata, B. A. Turaev's Russian translation of 1904 and Enno Littmann's Latin translation of the same year, shows that both authors interpolate terminology that almost certainly comes from their own philosophical educations based on distinctly 19th-century curricula (e.g., Turaev's use of свет разума [“light of reason”] for a Ge'ez term that could be rendered otherwise with far less distinctly Cartesian resonance). A third possibility is that we can account for the presence of these concepts neither as signs of the inclusion of Ethiopia within the broader early modern connected history of Latinate philosophical ideas, nor as artifacts of the translational and scholarly traditions in which Zera Yacub was taken up, but rather as evidence that the work was in fact produced in the 19th century by a learned and deceptive Italian.

Read moreCollapse

9. Anke Graness - Of Forgeries and Misinterpretations

Episode 10

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 29:05

This paper discusses the authenticity debate on the Ḥatäta of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat from the perspective of a historian of philosophy. From this perspective, the case of the Ḥatäta and the discourses that developed around the manuscripts raise a number of interesting questions and problems. The most important point is undoubtedly that we are witnessing here a process of canonization. To a large extent, philosophical work relies on inherited philosophical-historical narratives, which are deepened and legitimized by each individual work within the framework of these narratives. The broad European discourse on ancient Greek philosophy is a striking illustration of such canon forming processes. Based on oral traditions and third-party sources (often written down centuries later), as well as a few fragmentary snippets, a comprehensive philosophical discourse has developed that would endure even if it could one day be demonstrated that neither Thales nor Socrates were historical persons.

The paper argues that the debates about the Ḥatäta provide a vivid example of a process of forming a narrative of the history of philosophy in Africa. On a meta-level and in a comparative manner – particularly with regard of origin, transmission, and the various translations of one of the founding texts of European history of philosophy, Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the paper discusses the question of what it means when the authenticity of a foundational text is suddenly called into question. Moreover, the paper addresses the particular explosiveness of such debates in the context of reconstructing philosophical traditions in formerly colonized and still marginalized regions of the world. Furthermore, ethical questions of scientific practices are raised in view of the asymmetries in the academy today and the task of decolonizing the history of philosophy.

Read moreCollapse

8. Fasil Merawi - Examining the Hatetas as a Foundation of Ethiopian Philosophy

Episode 9

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 50:15

In this talk Fasil Merawi argues that Ethiopian philosophy is grounded in an illusory foundation that takes the Hatatas as a foundation of philosophical criticism. It is an intellectual exercise that is born from a Eurocentric discourse that is involved in the search for an Other that can think like the European man. The picture of Ethiopian philosophy as being founded on the Hatatas is part of a larger effort to introduce an Ethiopian philosophical tradition that is made up of written philosophy, adapted philosophical wisdom, and societal wisdom and proverbs. Such an understanding of Ethiopian philosophy has not only failed to establish the authorship and philosophical worth of the Hatatas, but it also does not explain the epistemic context within which such an exercise originated in the first place. In this paper, it will be argued that Ethiopian philosophy is still in the making and that the idea of an Ethiopian philosophy that is founded on the Hatatas exhibits three basic limitations. First of all, it has emerged in a Eurocentric discourse and its real purpose is to identify a form of subjectivity that participates in the European form of individual rationality. Secondly, the proponents of the Hatatas did not prove the philosophical nature of the texts and instead equated philosophy in the broadest sense with a strict philosophical culture that is founded on metaphysical, epistemic, and axiological considerations. Thirdly, the defenders of the Hatatas have failed to prove that the texts are authored by Ethiopians and not by Giusto D’urbino. As a result of this, most commentators on the Hatatas have accepted the validity of the Hatatas without properly explaining the striking similarities that are found between the personalities of Zera Yacob and Giusto D’urbino. The paper thus argues that Ethiopian philosophy is still searching for its identity and that it is not grounded in the Hatatas.

Read moreCollapse

7. Anaïs Wion - The Place of the Hatata in African Philosophy since the 1960s

Episode 8

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 41:35

As initially planned in the series of articles I dedicated to the Hatata (HZY and HWH) in 2013, I would like to examine the roles that these texts have played in the birth of the philosophical discipline, as an academic milieu and an intellectual trend, in Africa and then in the diasporas and black communities worldwide. From the early enthusiasm largely supported by Claude Sumner, who co-founded the philosophy department at AAU, to the current debates, how had those texts been received by African and Western scholars? What does this tell us about the possible tensions between the need to legitimise an 'African thought' and the Western quasi-hegemony on philosophical legitimacy until the second half of the 20th c.? Are the dimensions of the hatata(s) in Ethiopia (and to whom in Ethiopia?) and elsewhere in Africa similar? Could a comparison with the situation of Asian philosophical traditions, rooted in a textual tradition, be useful for understanding the crystallisation that took place around the Hatata? Isn't this call for writing to legitimise African cultures (as was the case with the Charter of the Mandé) a response to a Western model from which it would then be necessary to break away in order to really move towards a decolonisation of minds, or at the very least, which should be recognised as such in order to better understand the effects of intellectual globalisation and the possible mechanisms of domination? All these questions give the directions towards which I would like to orient my analysis in anticipation of the May 2022 conference.

Read moreCollapse

6. Neelam Srivastava - Italian Colonialism and Orientalism in Ethiopia

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 37:17

This talk examines some aspects of Italy’s colonial relationship with Ethiopia in the 20th century, and how it can be brought to bear to the debate around the authorship of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob, with especial reference to Carlo Conti Rossini, the Italian Ethiopianist who wrote an influential refutation of its attribution to the seventeenth-century Ethiopian thinker Zera Yacoub. The history of the text’s reception by Conti Rossini, a prominent 20th century Orientalist and Ethiopianist, can be traced back to the origins of the Italian colonial enterprise in the Horn of Africa and its discursive justifications for conquest that rested on the appropriation of knowledge about Ethiopia and surrounding region. Conti Rossini’s argument that the text was a forgery by Giusto D’Urbino, the 19th century Italian Capuchin monk who purportedly “discovered” the text, is underpinned by a European civilizational worldview which he projected onto his understanding of Ethiopian literature and philosophy. Conti Rossini can be defined as a “scholar-functionary”, having worked as a civil servant in the new Italian colony of Eritrea from 1899 to 1903. His understanding of Ethiopian society and culture become more ideologically racist after the advent of fascism and the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. His refutation of the authenticity of the Hatata is prior to this period, however, and drew on his immense knowledge of Ethiopia and its languages. But it is an orientalist interpretation of societal and cultural evolution that posits a “stagist” view of history onto the Ethiopian past. He thus considered it to be improbable for the Hatata to be a work of Ethiopian philosophy because it did not fit his teleological, Eurocentric view of intellectual progress. This position by itself does not disprove his argument about the text’s authorship, of course, but it does suggest that his interpretation is profoundly influenced by the intellectual paradigms he uncritically applies to his reading.

Read moreCollapse

5. Eyasu Berento - Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat - 17th C Ethiopia Freethinkers: Exceptionality and Situated-ness of the ‘Hateta’ in the Ethiopian Intellectual Tradition

Episode 6

Friday, November 11, 2022 • Duration 36:35

This paper will assess the nature of the Ethiopian written intellectual tradition (mainly history of ideas), and its relation to the controversy on the authenticity of the texts, and their philosophical significance for Ethiopian and/or African philosophy studies in particular and history of ideas in human civilization in general. An examination of external sources related to religious, historical documents and the literature from scholarly research, and in-depth content analysis of the original Hatatas (the Ge’ez, Amharic and English versions) reveal both the exceptionality and situated-ness of the Hatatas in the Ethiopian intellectual tradition from which they originated. Informed by the careful analysis of scholars like Claude Sumner, I argue that the Hatatas are authentic and attributable to the Ethiopian Authors of the 17th century by examining new findings from the documents on Ethiopian history of the time, a rather untouched issue so far. While the social and historical context, the cultural bases and educational background of their authors bear the signature of Ethiopian philosophy, as outcomes of freethinker individual’s rational reflection, they entertain elements of exceptionality. Regardless of the exceptionality and some possibility of European elements in the texts, one cannot deprive them of the Ethiopian soil in which they are grounded. But by no means are the Hatatas the sole examples of philosophical treatises, nor do they showcase a peak in the history of ideas in Ethiopia; nevertheless they can be examples that give us a flashlight in search of philosophical wisdom. Apart from their contemporary contribution to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and social-political philosophy they are pathways to the studies of the hidden voices of the non-Western world.

Read moreCollapse

Philiminality – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Philiminality – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify