women-philosophers

"As a species, humans have become the Earth’s number-one predator."

"Environmental degradation is calling us to the witness stand of history. It demands we testify against ourselves and mount a case in our defense. Ultimately, we are all agents of history. To reduce ourselves to a role of mere observation is to deny us of our humanity."

"Climate change is a transenvironmental challenge that requires the integration of transgenerational, transpeciesist, and transnational practices and knowledge."

"12. Some human mathematics is fiction."

"8. Model theory provides the correct picture of how mathematical languages describe mathematical reality."

"4. Human mathematics is the cultural product of a community of rational beings."

"5. We come to know about mathematics by abstracting structure from the world around us and focusing on the structure of Being mirrored in us."

"13. The universe of sets V cannot be Gödel’s L; it must be something like Woodin’s Ultimate L which contains all possible large cardinals and has the semantic resources to witness them."

"9. No mathematics is surplus."

"2. Mathematics is necessary and true."

"3. Mathematical objects do not exist in a mysterious Platonic heaven totally independent of the physical world. Rather, physical reality is a mental interpretation of a subset of mathematical structure."

"7. There are rational beings with mental powers surpassing those of humans who have a deeper insight into mathematics than we do."

"6. Mathematics is applicable because it truly describes the fundamental structure of reality."

"1. Mathematics is about the structure of Being."

"11. There are no absolutely undecidable propositions in mathematics."

"10. There is one, true mathematics."

"She lived and fought for gender equality not women empowerment."

"Oluwole infused a couple of philosophy courses in the curriculum, thus exposing Mass Communication students to philosophical tools to enhance academic and professional competence."

"She contributed immensely to scholarship in African philosophy and culture and was well known for her publications and lectures."

"We should pray that her work as an African philosopher should not be in vain. We should also pray that people will remember what she stood for all her life and all she taught about the importance of African languages and culture. She was an expert in Ifa literature and Yoruba culture."

"Nigeria’s first female doctorate degree holder in philosophy, she truly earned her stripes. She believed in and practiced what she taught and preached."

"Oluwole’s agility was something that was phenomenal. For somebody of that age, it was as if she got better with her energy, her intellectual energy grew with age and for us, it was very remarkable."

"She shall be remembered as a distinguished scholar who touched many lives and as a dogged fighter and a Yoruba nationalist who never joked with the things that concerned her people. Hers was a life well spent in the service of mankind."

"Nigeria has indeed lost a great academic at a time when our educational system is facing a serious challenge."

"It’s a big loss to the country and the university community. She was a founding member of the African philosophy community, where she spent the largest part of her life training students."

"She was a very good woman, quite outspoken and one of the foremost African philosophers."

"Prof Oluwole had great respect for African traditions, in terms of fixing them into the broad spectrum of philosophical thinking across the world and showing how we could make use of them for a more advanced African civilisation."

"Prof. Sophie Oluwole loved and celebrated Yoruba tradition and philosophy so much that she was nicknamed Mamalawo (female herbalist). Nigeria, the Yoruba race and all those who admire pristine traditions will sorely miss her."

"Prof Oluwole was a teacher with a difference, a distinguished scholar with an unusual approach to teaching. She was indeed a woman of honour and distinction."

"Reality contains matter and non-matter"

"Look at Christianity and Islam. They have the Bible and the Koran. The books have ensured the continuity and spread of the religions – but, perhaps more important, the culture and tradition of the nations where the faiths originated from. Now, where is our own book on Orunmila? It is a question that should worry all rational Yoruba and African people, indeed."

"There is nothing that is absolutely material. There is nothing that is absolutely non-material. And in all phenomenons in the world, the two are there together"

"She was a particularly interesting woman in the sense that she liked to do what was unusual. No matter how people talked about modernisation, she did it in her own way and not by following convention."

"She was a trail blazing academic for whom I would continue to have huge affection for, especially in her candour and quest for distinction."

"When it came to defending women’s rights, she worked it out herself without being a follower of any specific modern trend. She was a feminist with a difference. In any case, she was particularly good at stating her position without making her being a woman to disturb whatever she thought about anything."

"She was also fairly unusual in her approach to philosophy. She did not just treat African myths and ideas as belonging to the past. She tried to make them part of the world movement of philosophies from ancient Europe to the present day."

"She was also, to the best of my knowledge, the first and only female Dean of Student Affairs at the University of Lagos, an assignment she took on even in perilous times."

"Prof. Sophie Oluwole believed in and advanced the contribution of Africa to global discourse and civilisation. She confronted issues head on and made frequent appearances on television to advance the cause that she believed in."

"It would be ridiculous to raise the question as to whether or not Ọ̀rúnmìlà was religious. He was the leader of a religious cult which established a school structured like Plato's Academy, in which various themes and subjects, including religion, science, morality, mathematics, the social sciences, etc., were taught."

"In Africa, you share what you have. Our sense of hospitality is communal. It will be improper for me to have such an important visitor without letting her also have a sense of the environment."

"They said Africans could not think,” Oluwole told the Punch newspaper, “that we were not thinkers, that we were primitive. I felt challenged and said I was going to find out if truly we could not think. I wanted to prove them wrong"

"They disrupted our culture"

"Africa is the only continent that uses foreign language as a medium of expression in institutions of learning despite the reports of many studies confirming the fact that the mother tongue is the best medium of instruction that facilitates better understanding of knowledge"

"I am particularly interested in what made her compare Orunmila with Socrates in her book."

"I loved the opportunity to think about the big questions philosophy asks, and the rigorous way in which philosophy trains the mind to answer them. What is ultimately real? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a necessary being or are all beings contingent? What is knowledge and what can we know? Is there something which is objectively right or wrong, or is everything relative? Most people, at some point, will be confronted with some of these questions and will try to answer them in a more or less informal way. Philosophy has been tackling them over the centuries in a formal, rigorous way, engaging in a deep, fascinating, and exciting conversation which continues nowadays."

"It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connexion between 'injury' and the things that are to be avoided, is to say that it is only used in an 'action-guiding sense' when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all."

"There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him."

"Philosophers who have supposed that actual action was required if 'good' were to be used in a sincere evaluation have got into difficulties over weakness of will, and they should surely agree that enough has been done if we can show that any man has reason to aim at virtue and avoid vice. But is this impossibly difficult if we consider the kinds of things that count as virtue and vice? Consider, for instance, the cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, courage and justice. Obviously any man needs prudence, but does he not also need to resist the temptation of pleasure when there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good? It is not obvious what someone would mean if he said that temperance or courage were not good qualities, and this not because of the 'praising' sense of these words, but because of the things that courage and temperance are."

"We will be asked how, on our theory, justice can be a virtue and injustice a vice, since it will surely be difficult to show that any man whatsoever must need to be just as he needs the use of his hands and eyes, or needs prudence, courage and temperance? Before answering this question I shall argue that if it cannot be answered then justice can no longer be recommended as a virtue."

"The whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations. … If a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. With evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based."