Source — School of Philosophy, "Ubuntu" (philosophy blog)
- Title: Ubuntu
- Publication: School of Philosophy, philosophy blog (schoolofphilosophy.org)
- URL: https://schoolofphilosophy.org/blogs/philosophy-blog/ubuntu
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: secondary (popular-philosophy blog quoting primary figures); sympathetic/credulous stance toward the concept, not critical.
Extract
Quotes Desmond Tutu directly, attributed to his book No Future Without Forgiveness:
"A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."
Also quotes Tutu from a separate, later source ("Ubuntu I in You and You in Me," per Michael Battle 2009):
"We don't come fully formed into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human, from other human beings."
The blog's own gloss: "A person is a person through persons" — interdependence and inter-relationship, not individuality, make us who we are.
Gaps
- No page number given for either Tutu quotation, in either the primary book or the Battle 2009 secondary work — this project has not independently read No Future Without Forgiveness (1999) itself and cannot confirm the quotation against the primary text. Filed with the same "quoted via a secondary source, not independently verified" status this project gives other unread-primary quotations (compare the saudade page's Pessoa/Costa caveat).
- The blog gives no author byline or publication date for its own post.