There is an abiding scepticism in normative theory that individual responsibility for global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. Despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, this scepticism holds that human beings cannot properly internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against their experience of agency in the world. Against this view, this article argues that individual responsibility for the realisation of global justice (...) is supported by a pervasive, and socio-politically influenced, feature of the phenomenology of agency: moral imagination. Moral imagination connects actions which are within the domain of an ordinary life to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of those projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility in the real world. I call this a dynamic phenomenology of agency. (shrink)

Despite significant progress in real-world (nonideal) political philosophy focused on overcoming injustice and inequality, there has not been concomitant attention paid to _who_ will take up these projects. Agents tend to be treated in this literature, if at all, as epiphenomenal to substantive normative theorising on social change. To rectify this, Ben Laurence has made perhaps the most systematic case so far for philosophers to identify agents of change as an integral part of their work, with sensitivity to levels of (...) motivation and feasibility. However, his account risks mirroring the status quo biases of an unjust world. Normative theory must retain a commitment to the possibilities for _generating_ potential agents of change in the face of injustice. In response, I propose an approach that is at once universal and pluralistic, grounded in the complexity of agents as they are and yet morally ambitious about what they can become. This incorporates three neglected aspects of change-making agency. First, the ordinary person as a citizen. Second, the ‘black box’ of group agents and how individual agency operates inside structures such as states, firms, or civil society. Third, the indiscernible contributions in the build-up to rapid, visible change. I call these neglected forms of change-making agency, respectively, ‘agency from below’, ‘agency inside agents’, and ‘concealed agency’. Together, they comprise the building blocks for a new theory of agency. (shrink)

There is no unique way to generalize the mass operator 0 2 −p · p to curved spacetimes. The possible generalizations using either an analytic or an algebraic (group-theoretic) approach are discussed. We investigate in detail three possibilities: (i) the generalized D'Alembertian $$- \tilde \square = - (1/\sqrt { - g} )(\partial /\partial x^v )(\sqrt { - g} g^{\mu v} {\text{ }}\partial /\partial x^\mu$$ (ii) the operator ( $- (\tilde \square + \tfrac{1}{6}{\text{R)}}$ , which is conformally invariant in the massless (...) case, and (iii) an operator suggested by Meggs for Robertson-Walker spacetimes. A criterion for choosing among the different possibilities is proposed. It is used to eliminate the Meggs operator, but is not stringent enough to decide between the other two. (shrink)

Cette étude remet en cause les dualismes et divisions actuels qui se reflètent dans le dialogue socio-politique et interculturel. Le projet vise à établir un lien entre le discours philosophique de la Maison de la Sagesse du IXesiècle et les conceptions modernes de l’islam en étendant la rhétorique dialogique dudit discours. Le projet en question a également pour but de réexaminer la Maison de la Sagesse. Ce processus consiste d’abord à invoquer une tradition islamique inclusive et interculturelle qui contrecarre la (...) vision limitée d’un islam radical. Puis, il consiste à réintroduire les arts libéraux comme outils pédagogiques au cœur de la tradition islamique de la sagesse, et finalement, à explorer les principes du Aql et de la Fitrah ainsi que la façon dont ils prescrivent la Hikmah. (shrink)

This study examines the Foucauldian notion of “parrhesia” within the context of curricular practices through a renewal of scholarly interest in Islamic metaphysics as represented by the Avicennean modalities of reality: necessity, contingency, and possibility. It explores the role of contingency in advancing educational practices that generate inclusive dissemination of knowledge that captures the language of Tajdeed (legitimate renovation) in Islamic education. This article argues that contingency, as a causality-oriented modality, determines whether meaning is relative or absolute, while necessity, as (...) an acknowledgment of universal truth, slips into demagoguery that can be used to canonize strict textualism and absolutism. Contingency is defined here as a practice that stimulates synthesis and dialogical understanding of knowledge. Accordingly, the study asks the following questions: How does infusing the Avicennean concept of contingency into curriculum practices offer opportunities for inclusivity and free speech? How can revisiting Islamic cosmological modalities help Muslim educators and curriculum writers move into the broader path of inclusive pedagogies? From an educational position, the article introduces a curriculum of metaphysics that advocates the implementation of contingency, which is considered essential to parrhesia and democracy. It also draws attention to an anti-metaphysical attitude that is generally present in curriculum theorizing. Accordingly, Metaphysics is invoked to challenge a state of flux or hegemonized assumptions; hence, metaphysics validates parrhesia. (shrink)

This essay looks at two young English-speaking Iraqi bloggers whose internationally recognized writings describe the chaos in post-Saddam Iraq. It examines sarcasm as a mode of resistance as employed by Salam Pax, characterized by BBC Radio in 2003 as “the most famous diarist in the world,” and Riverbend, whose blog was published as a book and translated into several languages. By subjecting the colonial discourse to ridicule, they not only successfully convey the angst their people suffer, but also mock a (...) stereotypical rhetoric that haunts the Western mentality regarding the Middle East. This essay negotiates their use of sarcasm as a means of non-violent resistance. It demonstrates how, for instance, they shift from the sarcastic to the absurd to unravel the banality of the colonial mind and the conceited position of its liberating enterprises. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to shed light on the emergence of a digitalized group of subalterns who write back to the center in the wake of the American intervention to topple the Baath regime in Iraq. Pax and Riverbend distinctively succeed in subverting the colonial and hegemonic gaze by unravelling the encroaching uncertainties of war through the deployment of sarcasm to signify resistance, and by transforming the coalition forces’ theatre of war into a theatre of the absurd. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the relationship between language and ethnic culture. It analyzes Bashkir toponyms associated with the cult of fire. The Bashkirs, like many nations, including the Turkic and Mongolian, have thought that fire symbolized home and was the protector of the family. The Bashkirs worshiped fire as cleansing and healing power, while at the same time the fire represented formidable and dangerous force. Fire in the Bashkir mythology is closely related to its opposite (...) element - Water, with the gods of the upper world - the Sun and the Moon and the deity of Earth, geographical names of Bashkortostan testify this. On the material of Bashkir toponymy and related beliefs it was attempted to do a semantic etimological-onomasiological reconstruction of the Bashkir deity of fire Otukan, which dates back to the old Turkic deity Yduk Otuken//Otukan. In Mongolian mythology, it corresponds to the deity Etugen//Otuken, associated with the cult of the mother goddess, earth and fire, and in Japanese mythology - with the god, the owner of the land, - Ootukonu-si-no kami. According to the author, the formation of names connected with ‘fire‘ in the Bashkir toponymy was promoted by the worship of the deity of fire, the tribal fire, the tribal habitat and the family by Tatar-Mongols. Interesting is the fact, that the base ‘ut‘, which is connected with the ancient Turkic beliefs, also builds a theonym, a toponymic term, a geographic name, an ethnonym and anthroponym, i.e. it permeates the entire onomastic and appellative vocabulary. However, at the appellative level, this lexical item has no religious significance. For example, Otukan, TÓ©kÓ©n, Ò®tәgәn, Ò®tәk, otaq in Turkic languages have the meanings of ‘home‘, ‘yurt‘, ‘mountain valley‘, ‘flat place in the mountains on the hillside‘, ‘southern winter quarters‘. This relationship is explained by the fact that, initially, perhaps, yet there was the worship of a female deity Otukan that embodied fire and was associated with the earth, with the habitat and the ancestral hearth, where the original base morpheme was ‘fire‘, then it was associated with the deification of family and tribal territory, and later with the deification of the person of the ruler, this lexic item has spread throughout the onomastic vocabulary and in the appellative lexicon within the meaning of the place of residence. (shrink)

The topic of our discussion is extremely complex by virtue of the diversity of problems it covers, their contradictions, and their many layers. An objective analysis is complicated by the fact that we are "by origin from there," that we were all drawn into the process, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to distance ourselves from this fact. Being involved in what happened is, on the one hand, a positive factor: it gives access to occurring events (...) through a knowledge of facts and details that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain for an investigator of the events many years later. But such involvement not only discloses the truth, it also creates the illusion that one possesses the truth, because a participant in events often makes his personal beliefs about them the basis of theoretical generalizations. A participant and a witness are very different categories in terms of their objective relation to actual facts. (shrink)

Goals, purposefulness, and appropriateness are philosophical categories that are rather widely employed in cybernetics. However, the needed exactness in the use of these concepts and, above all, of the concept "goal," is lacking. As a rule, writers employing that concept do not explain what precisely they designate as the "goal" in the functioning of a given cybernetic system. Does the system itself set the goal toward which the system "consciously" strives? Or does man set the goal for the automatic machine? (...) Or is movement toward a goal a process differing from the conscious striving of man but having something in common with the latter? (shrink)

razdel I. Istoriko-filosofskie issledovanii︠a︡ -- razdel II. Filosofskie i sot︠s︡ialʹno-politicheskie problemy -- razdel III. Istorii︠a︡ v lit︠s︡akh.

"There are things that are more important than peace," Alexander Haig declared during his tenure as Secretary of State of the United States. It cannot be said that this is the most trenchant of the bellicose statements with which Reagan and his colleagues have shocked world public opinion. Nevertheless, this remark by Haig evoked a real storm of indignation. It is cited more frequently than others as a model of extreme irresponsibility and cynical belittling of the most pressing right of (...) the individual and humanity—the right to life. (shrink)

Any attempt to find one's way in the intricacies of contemporary international life, particularly in such a complex problem as that of war and peace, requires, above all, deciphering the basic notions by means of which the essence of the dominant processes in the world arena is more or less adequately expressed. Today these are, above all, peaceful coexistence, the "cold war," and relaxation of international tensions [detente - Translator].

A cornerstone of physics, Maxwell‘s theory of electromagnetism, apparently contains a fatal flaw. The standard expressions for the electromagnetic field energy and the self-mass of an electron of finite extension do not obey Einstein‘s famous equation, \, but instead fulfill this relation with a factor 4/3 on the left-hand side. Furthermore, the energy and momentum of the electromagnetic field associated with the charge fail to transform as a four-vector. Many famous physicists have contributed to the debate of this so-called 4/3-problem (...) without arriving at a complete solution. It has generally been assumed that, as originally suggested by Poincaré, the problems are connected to the question of stability of the charge distribution, and that relativistic equivalence between energy and self-mass can only be restored by inclusion of stabilizing forces. Alternative solutions to the problems have also been proposed. Nearly a century ago Fermi suggested a covariant definition of the electromagnetic energy and momentum, and sixty years later Kalckar et al. argued that the 4/3 problem is caused by omission of a relativistic correction in the standard evaluation of the self-force from Coulomb self-interaction. However, the relation between these suggestions has not been clear. We show that the relativistic correction implies that the mechanical momentum of an accelerated rigid body must be defined as the sum of the momenta of its parts for fixed time in the momentary rest frame of the body. For the total momentum of particles and field to be conserved, the total energy–momentum tensor must be divergence free, and this then requires that the momentum of the associated electromagnetic field be defined in the same way, consistent with the suggestion by Fermi. This comprehensive solution of the 4/3-problem demonstrates that there is no conflict of Maxwell‘s theory with special relativity and the questions of equivalence of electromagnetic energy and self-mass and of stability of a classical charge distribution are independent. In appendices we discuss the relations of our treatment with Fermi‘s seminal paper and with a classic paper by Dirac where he evaluated the damping self-force on a point electron from transport of energy and momentum in the electromagnetic field. (shrink)

Drawing on fiqh al-aqalliyyat, this article introduces a Muslim minorities curriculum and negotiates the notion of diasporicity as a process that signifies a community’s readiness to respond to its own cultural, religious and literacy practices. More specifically, first, I propose a Muslim minorities curriculum that is informed by diasporicity and fiqh al-aqalliyyat. Second, the article makes a distinction between diaspora and diasporicity. In what ways can diasporicity itself be conceptualized to advance Muslim education and what are the pedagogical implications? Third, (...) it identifies what I call dialectical constructs within fiqh al-aqalliyyat that are conducive to diasporicity, namely, qiyas, ijtihad, istihsan, and taysir. Additionally, this article explores contingency as an overlooked philosophical and pedagogical dimension, which advances intercultural and critical thinking skills. It conceptualizes a Muslim education that is attuned to the “curriculum-as-lived”; hence it develops an educational theory that validates diasporicity. (shrink)

Rationality - as opposed to 'ad-hoc' - and asymptotics - to emphasize the fact that perturbative methods are at the core of the theory - are the two main concepts associated with the Rational Asymptotic Modeling (RAM) approach in fluid dynamics when the goal is to specifically provide useful models accessible to numerical simulation via high-speed computing. This approach has contributed to a fresh understanding of Newtonian fluid flow problems and has opened up new avenues for tackling real fluid flow (...) phenomena, which are known to lead to very difficult mathematical and numerical problems irrespective of turbulence. With the present scientific autobiography the author guides the reader through his somewhat non-traditional career; first discovering fluid mechanics, and then devoting more than fifty years to intense work in the field. Using both personal and general historical contexts, this account will be of benefit to anyone interested in the early and contemporary developments of an important branch of theoretical and computational fluid mechanics. (shrink)

Within the framework of the Kershaw approach and of a hypothesis on spatial stochasticity, the relativistic equations of Lehr and Park, Guerra and Ruggiero, and Vigier for stochastic Nelson mechanics are obtained. In our model there is another set of equations of the hydrodynamical type for the drift velocityv i(x j,t) and stochastic velocityu i(x j,t) of a particle. Taking into account quadratic terms in l, the universal length, we obtain from these equations the Sivashinsky equations forv i(x j,t) in (...) the caseu i →0. In the limit l →0, these equations acquire the Newtonian form. (shrink)

Οι δύο από τις τρεις πινακίδες με γραμμική γραφή Β που βρέθηκαν το 1990 στα Χανιά (χρονολογημένες με βεβαιότητα από τους ανασκαφείς στο τέλος της ΤΜ ΙΙΙΒ1 = ±1250 π.Χ.) δεν εγράφησαν — τουλάχιστον με τρόπο που μπορεί να αποδειχτεί — από ένα γραφέα, ήδη γνωστό στην Κνωσό (η δραστηριότητα του οποίου, σύμφωνα με την επικρατούσα άποψη, τοποθετείται στην αρχή της ΥΜ ΙΙΙΑ2 = ±1370 π.Χ.). Το άρθρο μου στο BCH 1 17 (1993), σ. 19-33, με τίτλο « ΚΝ 1 (...) 15 = ΚΗ 1 15. Un même scribe à Knossos et à la Canée au MR. MB : du soupçon à la certitude » [« KN 115 = KH 1 15. Ο ίδιος γραφέας στην Κνωσό και τα Χανιά κατά την ΤΜ ΙΠΒ φάση : από την υποψία στη βεβαιότητα »], θα πρέπει πλέον να χρησιμοποιείται στο εξής με εξαιρετικά μεγάλη προσοχή, όσον αφορά στη χρονολογική και ιστορική συζήτηση γύρω από την (ή τις) καταστροφή (— φές) του μυκηναϊκού ανακτόρου της Κνωσού. (shrink)

The number of writings devoted to the philosophical and sociopolitical views of Paul Lafargue is not small. However, his literary heritage has not been published in full to this day. Nor is there a complete biography shedding light systematically on Lafargue's activity as one of the leaders of the socialist workers' movement in France, as a journalist, philosopher, and scientist. In this connection the book by Kh. N. Momdzhian is indubitably of interest. It is the most comprehensive work on Lafargue (...) in the Soviet literature. (shrink)

For a sufficiently large class of formal systems a duality theorem is proved. We consider such formal set theories $\widetilde{\scr{T}}$ [2] which, at least, satisfy the following conditions: 1. The theory $\widetilde{\scr{T}}$ contains its own (either bounded or introduced by a definition) substantive constant U, for which $\vdash \forall x[x\in U]$ or $\vdash \forall x[x\subset U]$ . 2. The operation of "complement", denoted by C, is defined with respect to U. 3. For any formula (resp. a term), A ⊦ A (...) ↔ ⅂⅂ A (resp. ⊦ CCA = A), and some basic conclusions follow. (shrink)

Islamic civilization; philosophical thought; schools of Arab philosophy; a historical critical treatise.

Juzʼ 1. al-Muqaddimāt. ʻIlm al-kalām. al-Falsafah al-Islāmīyah. al-Murājiʻ wa-al-maṣādir (p. 483-489). --.

Juzʼ 1. al-Falsafah al-Yūnānīyah minṬālīs ilá Aflāṭūn al-Ṭabʻah 2. 1965 -- juzʼ 2. Arisṭū. 1966 -- juzʼ 6. al-Falsafah al-ḥadīthah. al-Ṭabʻah 1. 1969 --.

Artykuł dotyczy treści oraz perspektyw rozwoju filozofii języka, zawierającej metodologiczne zasady badań nad językiem. Autorka przedstawia przegląd formacji lingwistyczno-filozoficznych w historii filozofii, jak również w dziejach językoznawstwa, wskazuje źródła współczesnych teorii lingwistyczno-filozoficznych. Analizuje ponadto właściwości języka jako systemu postrzegania świata, co znajduje wyraz przede wszystkim w jego funkcji kultywującej. System gramatyczny i leksykalny akumuluje bowiem zdobyte w procesie rozwoju kulturowo – historycznego doświadczenia określonej wspólnoty etniczno-kulturowej. Możliwość badania języka w z punktu widzenia filozofii jest uwarunkowana tym, że język ma istotę (...) znakową, służy jako narzędzie działalności poznawczej człowieka, a jednocześnie jako narzędzie komunikacji. Autorka wyraża przekonanie, że struktura, treść i funkcje języka w społeczeństwie są uwarunkowane jego rozwojem historycznym zgodnie z prawami dialektyki, obowiązującymi także w świecie rzeczy materialnych. W zastosowaniu tych. (shrink)

Kniga 1. Intonat︠s︡ionnai︠a︡ teorii︠a︡ Asafʹeva: na puti postizhenii︠a︡ khorovogo ispolnitelʹstva -- Kniga 2. Materialʹnai︠a︡ i dukhovnai︠a︡ substant︠s︡ii muzykalʹno-ispolnitelʹskogo iskusstva.

Tom 1. Lekt︠s︡ii. Vospominanii︠a︡ -- t. 2. Filosofskai︠a︡ ontologii︠a︡ -- t. 3. Filosofskai︠a︡ ontologii︠a︡ segodni︠a︡; Nauchnye statʹi.

The present book contains a number of articles dipicting religion in the present age, a re-telling of Bīzhan ʻAbd al-Karīmī's account of religion, Iran.

В сборнике представлены статьи, посвященные проблеме построения социальной онтологии общества различия. Для студентов, аспирантов, преподавателей философии и всех интересующихся проблемами современной философии.

A monograph about natural law and supernatural law, with emphasis on the philosophy of natural law.