Other more experienced scholars can read our exchange. Many of them have kept a dignified silence. If it does not involve a field in which I have decades of vested interests I would too. We would not suffer our field to be misrepresented using terms such as 'reworked' and' universal' this and that as camouflage.
Intellectual greatness entails intellectual humility. There are many people publishing privately without first bringing their work to forums such as this. Once such works are presented on forums such as this, they are public and nevitably attract comments from people knowlegedgeable in the field.
Commentators do not have to be flattering if they are honest scholars. I thought that was the goal of such presentations. Silence can imply acquiescence when there isnt and the presenter lulled into a sense false confidence. Then we have people declaring themselves as genius in fields where they are hardly beginners. This erodes standards.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Date: 21/11/2020 09:26 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Adepoju System ofInitiationintoAfrican, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities:UnprecedentedImaginative and Intellectual Force in Engaging With theseLivingSystems of Thought
Bros
As long as you keep arguing that "nonsense" and "meaningless" are valid parts of your discursive lexicon in the way you have used them, I am not motivated to engage with you.
When you present a case free from such self justifications and such ad hominems as "a writer who has a track record of deliberately taking readers for a ride" then we can be in business.
Until then, sorry.
In the meantime, you are free to read Adepoju's various writings on the fields he has referenced, the piece you are responding to being a summation of part of his work, correlating these developments in terms of a transdisciplinary quest for knowledge.
The links at the Cognitive Platforms section of his Compcros website takes you to those works.
You are also free to read his unfolding correlations of these diverse bodies of knowledge and make your input.
It simply has to be done in terms mutually agreeable to both of us, not to you alone.
Thanks bro.
Toyin
On Sat, Nov 21, 2020, 02:27 OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
My dear sir,
To say a statement is meaningless is not rudeness. It is a matter of fact declaration in philosophical reasoning and disputations. If I say to you 'Men are the greater gender.' You are free to tell me it is a meaningless statement and I would not feel touchy or offended. I would expatiate what I meant and you would educate me with the other facts and angles I missed that made my statement a fallacy. Sentences, philosophically are honed to mean what they state, and state precisely what they mean. When you appear to ramble philosophers will point that out to you to let you know what you stated does not either convey what you intended in the context you present them or in any context at all.
The same goes for ' nonsensical.' If supported with textual proof, which I did. Plain terms: it makes no sense to me. We have been here before. It is up to you to demonstrate how it makes sense.
It is not an invitation to bolekaja. It is a round about way of saying with your learning you can do more than that with a little more intellectual rigour. It is not an attempt to belittle you but a challenge to you to not belittle yourself. I have not actually attacked the writer I have critiqued the written piece posted.
Let me back up a bit and develop further on my position. For you to present a unifying scenario you need a unifying theory. ( I said the same of your earlier attempt with the Falola/ Adepoju thing. If you are at a loss as to how to fashion such sociological theories, thats why we have the likes of Oga Biko ( Agozino) on the forum. Sociological theories are part of their forte.
It is not a sign of intellectual weakness to admit one does not know everything. This was what Oga Bolaji Aluko was driving at in the anecdote about their group's graduation dissertations( unless you want to walk and run without crawling like Olayinka Agbetuyi did in his infancy. But this is hardly possible in adult engagements.)
After you first construct the impregnable theory to make your task feasible, then you hang your postulations on the theory and people can see how they fit ( you dont assume readers can see the implicit theory where none is provided- hence it appears' meaningless' to them and that was what I was modelling in my previous post.) It is at this stage that methodology shows in bold relief in relation to the theory advanced. I . As you can see its not an easy task to gloss over as you have attempted to.
But let me assure you it can be done with more work and more meticulousness. After all Levi Strauss did it, Max Weber did it and Ferdinand De Saussure did it.
In the Interim while waiting for the theory to be hewn out why not attempt first a modest engagement with the three systems presented as a well researched chapter per system of thought. People will be quite interested in different systems of thought under one cover. Stage two can develop the chapters into book length further down the years.
As people begin to recognize your expertise still further down the years in the various systems you are busy honing a theory that can attempt a systematisation in collaboration with theory savvy sociologists and philosophers ( you may never get a homogenisation because of the career closure it portends for experts in each systemic field. I made the same error at the start of my graduate studies in an essay I wrote about the world going ' babel- wards' when they should be unifying linguistically, before an expert and mentor pointed out to me the errors of my ways. I humbly accepted)
A reader may react bluntly ( but not rudely) to a writer who seems to have a track record of deliberately taking readers for a ride. The same reader may react in an urbane manner to another meticulous writer who made an occasional slip. The difference is the style of each writer. We just need to raise the level to a healthy minimum standard for scholarship.
OAA.
Mr. President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 20/11/2020 21:32 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Adepoju System of InitiationintoAfrican, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities :UnprecedentedImaginative and Intellectual Force in Engaging With these LivingSystems of Thought
My dear OAA,.--
I hereby remind you of rules of engagement on my posts, principles which I have had course to call your attention to more than once.
No rudeness.
Make your case in the spirit of mutual respect that defines the best scholarly traditions or I will not engage you.
So, when you are ready to make a careful, analytical case, not " it is nonsense", "it is meaningless," avoiding overt or covert hostility or snide or cynical comments, I will respond.
I have no interest in scholarship of agression, "bolekaja" scholarship, comedown, let's fight scholarship.
These issues constitute the air I breathe, so I love discussing them from every angle.
I'm happy to discuss principles of comparative religion, of comparative cognition, of cultural convergences and divergences, to reference Mircea Eliade, Jung, etc but the discourse.must be mutually respectful.
You may advance the course of scholarship by making a serious effort to state and justify your views, so we can have an enriching discussion.
If you engage in one liners or throw away comments, even if you avoid rudeness, I will respond likewise.
If you present a carefully reasoned critique, I will respond likewise.
God bless you, brother.
I salute you.
Toyin
On Fri, Nov 20, 2020, 14:23 OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--Toyin Adepoju.
The whole paragraph starting with Cosmographic models is meaningless. It is flight of fancy. No one does scholarship this way and hopes to be taken seriously. These are independent systems that cannot be fused in anyway by the unification you seek.
For instance " Opa Osanyin.....is understood in terms of tree as cosmos of the Norse Yggdrasil and Jewish origin Kabbala" is nonsensical! No Yoruba views these in correlation as you suggest; no Norse does; no Jew does. So understood by whom?
Why are you so stuck with the word "initiation"? What ceremony is involved in an ordinary essay?
Why do you need to legitimate Yoruba system by other systems? Can it not exist in its own right?
I know whose last chapter essay you are trying to model this on but you are doing a very bad job of it. He was doing a comparative analysis of two different systems but you are trying to fuse several disparate systems across cultural divides into one.
It is an anathema.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 19/11/2020 11:42 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Adepoju System of InitiationintoAfrican, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities :UnprecedentedImaginative and Intellectual Force in Engaging With these LivingSystems of Thought
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thanks OAA.
They are correlative, though not identical, as all human activity is grounded in unifying fundamentalities.
Through these fundamentalities, I explore these systems in their uniqueness and unifications.
Hence, I reference an ''Adepoju system'' while describing this system as a ''series of methods.''
Cosmographic models such as the pole of the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology deity Osanyin on which birds converge is understood in terms of tree as cosmos of the Norse Yggdrasil and Jewish origin Kabbalah.
Cosmos as tree is translated in terms of the verticality of the human form in kabbalah and the human/cosmos/nature complex expressed in terms of the geometric structure of Hindu Sri Yantra and Orisa opon ifa.
These symbolizations are further projected through stories of the human journey from various perspectives, represented by Yoruba origin ese ifa, Zen and Sufi narratives, among others.
This forest of being and becoming is further navigated through the visual stylisations of Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi and the permutations of Ghanaian Akan and Gyaman Adinkra, as the human person reflects on the oscillation between self and cosmos in the spirit of German philosopher Immanuel Kant's observation that ''two things fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.''
The Adepoju System of Initiation into African, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities is an integration of my varied exploration of questions of ultimate meaning as I have journeyed through diverse philosophical, spiritual and artistic cultures, a library of texts published and unpublished, which I am now publishing in terms of the synthesis they represent.
thanks
toyin
--On Thu, 19 Nov 2020 at 00:56, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
Are African , Asian and Western thought the same?
Why the systemic initiatory homogenisation?
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 18/11/2020 22:48 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, wolesoyinkasociety@yahoogroups.com, Bring Your Baseball Bat <naijaobserver@yahoogroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Adepoju System of Initiation intoAfrican, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities : UnprecedentedImaginative and Intellectual Force in Engaging With these Living Systems of Thought
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The Adepoju System of Initiation into African, Asian and Western Philosophies and Spiritualities is a series of methods developed by myself for engaging with a number of African, Asian and Western philosophies and spiritualities in a manner that demonstrates their inspirational power as never before.--
These methods operate at the intersection of the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality.
Senses, intellect and imagination converge as you journey from the constellation of birds on a pole evoking the cosmos as a tree in Yoruba origin opa osanyin symbolism, a tree on which are perched sixteen birds, the mysterious mothers, cosmic entities you call upon as you enter into the knowledge jungle of Ifa, where texts are alive, numbers and words aglow with intelligence, powers you call upon as you move into the forest where dwells the naked and majestic female, Onile of Ogboni, under whose guidance you explore the mysteries of the forest, transforming your knowledge into the compelling symbols of Nsibidi, guided by Victor Ekpuk in the remaking of those ancient rhythms in the image of your own creativity, issuing from this remaking of your world into further constructing your symbol universe in terms of Adinkra, guided by Owusu Ankomah, thus journeying from Yoruba, to Cross River, to Akan and Gyaman thought, eventually entering into the great waters of Olokun, her igha-ede symbols of Great Benin your guide as you integrate the various universes within which you journey, even as you walk with the Anthill of Totality, the embodiment of the community of all, the leopard of the jungle, Okuapolopolo, Omonoba N' Edo of Great Benin, in the great walk from the outskirts of cosmos to it's core, from Benin outskirts to it's centre, from Uselu to the Oba's palace, the progression that is the coronation walk undertaken by every Oba in order to ascend the throne, an initiatory progression akin to the mapping of the cosmos through the patterns formed by the coats of cattle in the journey across various domains of space and time in Fulani inititation as you seek for guidance the ragged, ancient one who is yet a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, the ultimate, your journeying culminating in the navigation of the matrix of totality, in which each vertex is a cosmic entity and an aspect of self, the magnificent Sri Yantra of Tripura, she who is the most beautiful embodiment of the cosmos, her navel akin in it's beauty to the translucent blue of the sky, the hair of her head snaking into this space as the waters of the blue Yamuna, beauties from ancient India, yet ever new, a journey consummated in wonder at the two things that fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more steadily and the more often they are reflected upon, the starry🌟 heavens above you and the moral law within you, as put by Immanuel Kant, the German thinker who roamed across space and time into infinity from within his native Konigsberg.
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