Dylan B Futter
Biographic Data
| ID | 5659883 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dylan B Futter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dylan B |
| FAMILY NAME | Futter |
| SIGNATURE | FUTTER D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1863-6838 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Can Philosophy Be Decolonised
Recent discussion of how to decolonise philosophy overlooks a fundamental question: can philosophy be decolonised? This paper argues that if philosophy is a self-reflexive activity of critical examination, then it cannot be, since it would be either part of decolonisation or eliminated by the process. Conceptual decolonisation is thus best seen as philosophy's attempt to realise its own emancipatory potential
Decolonising Philosophy
In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contrad…
Wiredu on Conceptual Decolonisation
Kwasi Wiredu defines conceptual decolonisation as an activity in which Africans divest themselves of undue colonial influences, but his descriptions of this process are either unrelated to divesting or work quite generally, and not in favour of an African point of view. Wiredu's approach to decolonisation appears to be largely indistinguishable from the business of philosophy
Socrates’ wisdom in definition
Why does Socrates favour definitional speech discussion of virtue’s instances and attributes? Why does he take such a dim view of applied ethics? In this article, I criticise the received answers to these questions and offer a different view. I argue that Socrates favours definitional dialogue because it actualises knowledge that the logic of his argument shows to be essential to virtue. By leading the interlocutor to a paradoxical definition of …
Socrates, Crito, and emigration from South Africa
This article uses Plato’s Crito as a lens through which to consider the question of whether a South African citizen should emigrate from South Africa. While this question is not exactly parallel to that of whether the condemned Socrates should flee Athens, it has much more to do with justice than is commonly thought. For in order for one to know whether one has an overall duty to remain in or leave South Africa, one must determine what one owes t…
Socrates’ Search for Laches’ Knowledge of Courage
In Plato’s Laches , Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches’ utterances. Socrates’ method in …
Socrates' Human Wisdom
The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of theApology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollo's oracle, when he falsely believed that he was not wise at all. I argue that a satisfactory interpretation of human wisdom can be given in terms of "philosophia". Socrates was humanly wise before the o…
Gorgias and the Psychology of Persuasion
Although the stated objective of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen may be doubted1— to free Helen from blame for leaving her home and husband to go to Troy withParis (2) — it surely contains a serious point. The speech seems more accurately anencomium of the logos, than Helen, leading Charles Segal to conjecture that it‘may even have served as a kind of formal profession of the aims and the methodsof his art’ (1962:102). Some regard it as one of our bes…
Plutarch, Plato and Sparta
In the Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch appears to say that Plato embraced the Spartan constitution as a socio-political ideal. This claim generates a puzzle. On the one hand, the Republic’s preferred form of government, a meritocratic aristocracy, is incompatible with the ‘mixed’ Spartan constitution, which balances power between different organs of state; on the other, the ardent Platonist Plutarch cannot reasonably be thought to have misunderstood t…
Exploring and Communicating Whiteliness
In this commentary, I suggest that Sam Vice’s exploratory and communicative goals in ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ are not appropriately advanced by the form of her writing. In particular, her analysis and recommendations—which I regard as perceptive and profound—would have been better presented in a non-argumentative format, and by employing a less direct mode of communication
Socratic “Argument” in Plato’s Early Definitional Dialogues
It is widely assumed that the Socrates of Plato’s definitional dialogues is an arguer, that is, someone who argues, or presents arguments. This conception of Socrates is so entrenched in the scholarship that it is built into the best English translations of Plato’s texts, which render the Greek word ‘logos’ – a word with a bewilderingly large number of possible meanings – as ‘argument’ in contexts in which this is highly disputable. This essay ex…
The Concept of Persuasion in Plato’s Early and Middle Dialogues
Plato’s early dialogues represent the failure of Socrates’ philosophical programme. They depict Socrates as someone whose mission requires that he make an intellectual and moral impact on those with whom he converses; and they portray him as almost never bringing about this result. One central problem, dramatised throughout the early dialogues, is that perceptual moral intuitions undermine the possibility of reason’s making significant changes to…
Socrates' Human Wisdom
The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of theApology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollo's oracle, when he falsely believed that he was not wise at all. I argue that a satisfactory interpretation of human wisdom can be given in terms of "philosophia". Socrates was humanly wise before the o…
Socrates’ Search for Laches’ Knowledge of Courage
In Plato’s Laches , Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches’ utterances. Socrates’ method in …
Exploring and Communicating Whiteliness
In this commentary, I suggest that Sam Vice’s exploratory and communicative goals in ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ are not appropriately advanced by the form of her writing. In particular, her analysis and recommendations—which I regard as perceptive and profound—would have been better presented in a non-argumentative format, and by employing a less direct mode of communication
Socratic “Argument” in Plato’s Early Definitional Dialogues
It is widely assumed that the Socrates of Plato’s definitional dialogues is an arguer, that is, someone who argues, or presents arguments. This conception of Socrates is so entrenched in the scholarship that it is built into the best English translations of Plato’s texts, which render the Greek word ‘logos’ – a word with a bewilderingly large number of possible meanings – as ‘argument’ in contexts in which this is highly disputable. This essay ex…
The Concept of Persuasion in Plato’s Early and Middle Dialogues
Plato’s early dialogues represent the failure of Socrates’ philosophical programme. They depict Socrates as someone whose mission requires that he make an intellectual and moral impact on those with whom he converses; and they portray him as almost never bringing about this result. One central problem, dramatised throughout the early dialogues, is that perceptual moral intuitions undermine the possibility of reason’s making significant changes to…
Exploring and Communicating Whiteliness
In this commentary, I suggest that Sam Vice’s exploratory and communicative goals in ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ are not appropriately advanced by the form of her writing. In particular, her analysis and recommendations—which I regard as perceptive and profound—would have been better presented in a non-argumentative format, and by employing a less direct mode of communication
Socratic “Argument” in Plato’s Early Definitional Dialogues
It is widely assumed that the Socrates of Plato’s definitional dialogues is an arguer, that is, someone who argues, or presents arguments. This conception of Socrates is so entrenched in the scholarship that it is built into the best English translations of Plato’s texts, which render the Greek word ‘logos’ – a word with a bewilderingly large number of possible meanings – as ‘argument’ in contexts in which this is highly disputable. This essay ex…
Gorgias and the Psychology of Persuasion
Although the stated objective of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen may be doubted1— to free Helen from blame for leaving her home and husband to go to Troy withParis (2) — it surely contains a serious point. The speech seems more accurately anencomium of the logos, than Helen, leading Charles Segal to conjecture that it‘may even have served as a kind of formal profession of the aims and the methodsof his art’ (1962:102). Some regard it as one of our bes…
Plutarch, Plato and Sparta
In the Life of Lycurgus, Plutarch appears to say that Plato embraced the Spartan constitution as a socio-political ideal. This claim generates a puzzle. On the one hand, the Republic’s preferred form of government, a meritocratic aristocracy, is incompatible with the ‘mixed’ Spartan constitution, which balances power between different organs of state; on the other, the ardent Platonist Plutarch cannot reasonably be thought to have misunderstood t…
Socrates' Human Wisdom
The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of theApology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollo's oracle, when he falsely believed that he was not wise at all. I argue that a satisfactory interpretation of human wisdom can be given in terms of "philosophia". Socrates was humanly wise before the o…
Socrates, Crito, and emigration from South Africa
This article uses Plato’s Crito as a lens through which to consider the question of whether a South African citizen should emigrate from South Africa. While this question is not exactly parallel to that of whether the condemned Socrates should flee Athens, it has much more to do with justice than is commonly thought. For in order for one to know whether one has an overall duty to remain in or leave South Africa, one must determine what one owes t…
Socrates’ Search for Laches’ Knowledge of Courage
In Plato’s Laches , Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches’ utterances. Socrates’ method in …
Socrates’ wisdom in definition
Why does Socrates favour definitional speech discussion of virtue’s instances and attributes? Why does he take such a dim view of applied ethics? In this article, I criticise the received answers to these questions and offer a different view. I argue that Socrates favours definitional dialogue because it actualises knowledge that the logic of his argument shows to be essential to virtue. By leading the interlocutor to a paradoxical definition of …
Decolonising Philosophy
In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contrad…
Wiredu on Conceptual Decolonisation
Kwasi Wiredu defines conceptual decolonisation as an activity in which Africans divest themselves of undue colonial influences, but his descriptions of this process are either unrelated to divesting or work quite generally, and not in favour of an African point of view. Wiredu's approach to decolonisation appears to be largely indistinguishable from the business of philosophy
Can Philosophy Be Decolonised
Recent discussion of how to decolonise philosophy overlooks a fundamental question: can philosophy be decolonised? This paper argues that if philosophy is a self-reflexive activity of critical examination, then it cannot be, since it would be either part of decolonisation or eliminated by the process. Conceptual decolonisation is thus best seen as philosophy's attempt to realise its own emancipatory potential
Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (7 works) · SOCRATES (7 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · African cultural and philosophical studies (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works)