The purpose of this article is to examine the concept of ummu'l-bâb and its philosophy in Arabic grammar. The study consists of titles such as conceptual framework, ummu'l-bâb in Arabic grammar and its philosophy, words considered ummu’l-bâb and their properties. Although the concept of Ummu'l-bâb is one of the noteworthy concepts in Arabic grammar, it is a concept that has not been studied much, it is a concept that is mostly used in classical works. This concept refers to the words (...) that meet at a common denominator with their peers under the same roof and mold at some basic points and differ from them with some specific features. Especially, the main characteristics of them are that they are widely used in Arabic and that their usage areas are wider and more inclusive than similar ones. Have some features that are not found in words similar to them, and that they have the most important element and central position in their own mold constitute the logic of their being called ummu'l-bâb. (shrink)

The encounter of different non-Arab nations and cultures with Arabs due to conquest and translation activities contributed to the development of Arabic language rules and caused erroneous readings in recitation and expression problems in hadiths and the deterioration of the Arabic language from different perspectives. Against this, some precautions were taken for the preservation of classical Arabic, such as the development of writing, the determination of grammar rules, the support of poets and lexicon studies. One of the measures taken is (...) to set standards for classical language and to draw attention to the uses that do not comply with these standards. Since the middle of the II/VII century, many works have been written in different content and style on language mistakes made in speeches and written texts, with subject headings such as "Laḥnü'l-ʻâmme, Mâ telḥanu fîhiʼl-ʻâmme, laḥnü'l-ʻavâm, laḥnü'l-havâṣ". These works not only contribute to the preservation of the language, but also provide the opportunity to monitor the changes in the words and expressions used in the period they were written. In this context, one of the written works is Ebü'l-Abbâs Sa'leb's language book called Kitâbü'l-Faṣîḥ. Although the work in question has many merits, the most important aspect is the determination of the language spoken among the people in the work and the presentation of the most eloquent one to the reader. The work has gained an important place in the field of laḥn and taṣḥîḥ literature with its rich vocabulary, rich and useful materials for dictionary and dictionary studies, and being a source for many works in the field. The work, which attracted great attention by scholars, has been handled with studies such as şerḥ, ḥâşiye, naḳd, zeyl, iḫtisâr and nazm at different times and in different scientific environments, and is accepted as one of the important works in the field. (shrink)

The search for the “furniture of the mind” has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali (...) Khalidi presents a naturalistic account of “real kinds” to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories. (shrink)

Turkah, Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb Allāh, active 14th century. Qawāʻid al-tawḥīd. - Criticism and interpretation ; Turkah Iṣfahānī, ʻAlī ibn Muḥammad, 1368 or 1369-1431 or 143; Tamhīd al-qawāʻid - Criticism and interpretation ; Sufism - Early works to.

Miqdādī Iṣfahānī, ʻAlī - Correspondence ; Islamic ethics ; Sufi poetry, Persian.

We studied the impact of teachers’ ethical leadership on students’ moral identity and academic citizenship behaviors. Data from 256 student–teacher matching dyads were collected from one of the top 5 Pakistani business schools. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to ensure factorial validity of the measures that were employed, and the hypothesized relationships were tested using structural regression models that utilized structural equation modeling in AMOS with 5,000 bootstrap samples. Based on social learning theory, the results supported the hypothesis that teachers’ (...) ethical leadership had significant direct and indirect positive effects on the students’ academic citizenship behaviors that were directed toward other students and the school. This study contributes to existing literature on ethical leadership and organizational citizenship behavior by highlighting useful implications of these organization-based constructs in an academic context. (shrink)

The vast majority of extant empirical research examining the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance selects samples of only those firms which are observed engaging in CSP. In this study, the authors assert that firms’ efforts to pursue CSP and subsequently their appearance in social-choice investment advisory firms’ ranking databases are non-random. Studying the CSP–FP link using selected samples of only those firms whose social performance is ranked by SIA firms introduces a sample-selection bias which limits generalization of (...) results to a population of all firms, and at worst provides alternate explanations for observed relationships. The authors test these assertions on a large sample of public corporations in the United States over 6 years and find a sample-selection bias. Upon correction of this bias, this study confirms the positive impact of CSP on FP. (shrink)

Islamic Bioethics presents a wide variety of perspectives and debates on how Islamic societies deal with the ethical dilemmas raised by biomedicine and new technologies. The book is a "constructive dialogue" between contributors selected from a multidisciplinary group of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars from different Islamic countries. The 11 chapters illuminate the diversity and complexity of the issues discussed in Islamic bioethics and pave the way to a better understanding of Islamic bioethics and dialogue in the global bioethics community. The (...) chapters take both theoretical and practical approaches to the topic, and each covers an emerging issue in Islamic bioethics. This book will be useful for academics and professional institutions in both Islamic and non-Islamic countries, and will be instrumental in providing researchers, scholars, students, policymakers and medical professionals with access to the latest issues and debates related to Islamic bioethics. Contributors include: Tariq Ramadan, Abdallah Daar, Ali Albar, Mohsin Ebrahim, Baharouddin Azizan Alastair Campbel, Bagher Larijani, Carol Taylor, Gamal Serour, James Rusthoven, Ilhan Ilkilic, Ingrid Mattson, Hassan Chamsi-Pasha, Jonathan Crane, Hakan Ertin, Mehunisha Suleman. (shrink)

This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via his sceptical argument, argues that there is no fact about which rule a speaker is following in using a linguistic expression. Now, if one urges that meaning something by a word is essentially a matter of following one rule rather than another, the sceptical argument leads to the radical sceptical conclusion that (...) there is no such thing as meaning anything by any word. According to the solution Kripke’s Wittgenstein proposes, we must instead concentrate on the ordinary practice of meaning-attribution, that is, on the conditions under which we can justifiably ascribe meaning to each other and the utility such a practice has in our life. Davidson has also argued that following rules is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. According to his alternative view of meaning, a speaker’s success in this practice is fundamentally a matter of his utterance being successfully interpreted by an interpreter in the way the speaker intended. On the basis of these remarks, Davidson raises objections to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and solution. In this thesis, I will argue that Davidson has failed to fully grasp the essentially sceptical nature of the argument and solution proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein. I will argue that as a result of this Davidson’s objections and his alternative solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument are mistaken. These criticisms are pursued via an investigation of Davidson’s problematic reading of Quine’s sceptical arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Having criticized Davidson’s actual response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein, I will claim that Davidson’s best option for resisting the sceptical problem is to adopt a form of non-reductionism about meaning. Claudine Verheggen’s recent claim that Davidson’s use of the notion of triangulation will help to establish non-reductionism will be argued to be a failure. I will urge that the main obstacle in defending a non-reductionist view is the problem of accounting for the nature of self-knowledge of meaning and understanding. After discussing Davidson’s account of self-knowledge and Crispin Wright’s objection to this account, I will argue that, although Wright’s objection is ultimately unsuccessful, Davidson’s account fails for other reasons. Finally, I tentatively suggest that the resources for an alternative response to the sceptical problem can possibly be extracted from Davidson’s account of intending, which has some features suggestive of a judgement-dependent account of meaning and intention. (shrink)

Bu çalışmanın amacı İbn Kesîr’in (öl. 774/1373) el-Bidâye ve’n-nihâye isimli tarih çalışmasının siyer bölümünde Sahîhayn hadislerini muhteva açısından tenkidinin araştırılması ve tahlilidir. Çalışmamızın konusu ise İbn Kesîr’in mezkûr eserinde yirmi Sahihayn hadisini Kur’ân-ı Kerîm (3 hadis), akıl (1 hadis), icmâ (1 hadis), sahih hadisler (7 hadis) ve sağlam târihî bilgilere (8 hadis) uygunluk/aykırılık kıstaslarını kullanarak tenkidi ve on dört hadiste izah getiremediği yanlışların birer hata olduğunu kaydetmesidir. İbn Kesîr’in incelenen hadislerin muhteva tenkidine müsait bir hâle gelmesine yol açan râvi tasarruflarına (...) dair verdiği bilgiler ayrıca kıymetlidir. Bu çalışmanın kapsamını oluşturan hadislerden yedi tanesi hem Sahîh-i Buhârî hem Sahîh-i Müslim, altı tanesi sadece Sahîh-i Buhârî, yedi tanesi de sadece Sahîh-i Müslim’de yer almaktadır. Hem Sahîh-i Buhârî hem Sahîh-i Müslim’de yer alan hadisler Hayber’de müt‘a nikahının yasaklanışı, Rasulullah’ın (s.a.v.) umre ve hacca niyeti, Hz. Peygamber’in gümüş yüzüğü atması, kıblenin değişimi haberinin Kubâ’ya ertesi sabah ulaşması, namazda konuşma yasağının zamanı, ye’cûc ve me’cûc’un seddinin delinmesi ve Hz. Peygamber’in (s.a.v.) miras bırakmaması konulu hadislerdir. Sadece Sahîh-i Buhârî’de geçen hadisler isranın vahiy gelmesinden önce vukuu, Hamrâülesed seferine katılanların sayısı, Sa‘d b. Ebî Vakkas’ın İslam’a girişi, Hz. Ali’nin Hz. Ebû Bekir’e biatı, Recî‘ vak‘asıyla ilgili bazı bilgiler ve mirac hadisinde Beyt-i Makdis’e yolculuğun zikredilmemesi konulu hadislerdir. Son olarak, sadece Sahîh-i Müslim’de yer alan hadisler ise Huneyn savaşında müslümanların sayısı ve Taif kuşatmasının müddeti, yeryüzünün yedi günde yaratılışı, Amr b. Abese’nin İslam’a girişi, Bedir için Sa‘d b. Ubâde ile istişâre, sahâbînin sıcak kumlardan şikâyeti, Ümmü Habîbe ile evlilik ve kurban bayramında öğle namazının yeri konulu hadislerdir. Araştırmamızın yöntemi kaynak taraması ve sonuçların diğer şarihlerinkiyle mukayeseli tahlilidir. Araştırmamızın sonucunda eleştirilen hadislerin büyük bir kısmında İbn Kesîr’in değerlendirmelerinin İbn Hacer ve Nevevî gibi muhaddislerinkinden farklı olduğu görülmüştür. Çalışmamızın önemi İbn Kesîr’in tenkitlerinin muhaddislerin senedin sıhhatinin metnin sıhhatini temin etmeyeceğine dair tespitlerinin uygulamadaki somut delillerini oluşturmasıdır. Kısaca İbn Kesîr’in, eserine güçlü tenkit zihniyetini, özgün görüşlerini ve geniş ilmî birikimini başarıyla yansıttığı görülmektedir. (shrink)

Basṭāmī, ʻAlī ibn Ṭayfūr, active 16th century-17th century. Akhlāq-i ḥusnaʹ ; Islamic ethics- Early works to 1800.

Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm, -1641. Asfār al-arbaʻah fī al-ḥikmah. ; Islamic philosophy -- Iran.

Government is a rational necessity for mankind because a society without government leads to chaos. Government regulates the affairs of the individual and the community, implements the limits, and ensures the dignity and independence of the human society. Thinking in the main goals of the divine prophets, it is clear that achieving great goals such as liberating people from the domination and captivity of foreigners, comprehensive human education, reviving human values, establishing justice, bringing people to excellence and growth, etc., requires (...) formation. In this context, transparency is a key attribute, which can bring much power to the expected level as an effective mechanism for protecting citizens’ political, economic, social and cultural rights. This concept is thus a valuable solution in the fight against sinister phenomena, such as political and economic corruptions, which are ranked as the biggest challenges facing any society. Even though transparency is nowadays deemed an emerging concept, its roots can be traced back to Islamic teachings, mainly during the short reign of Imam Ali, (peace be upon him [PBUH]). As a central figure, Imam Ali considered transparency as essential, and shared his views on governance and practical methods with the people and all audiences based on complete honesty and openness. As per Alavi thoughts, some criteria and indicators, both structural and behavioural, are involved in order to ensure the public good and meet the interests of all by providing the prerequisites for the realisation of transparency, at odds with the predominant ideas that transparency in governance, like many concepts in the political and governance-related spheres, has a western origin. Contribution: The concept of transparency, with a proven history in global experiences, accordingly holds a special place in the literature of Islamic governments. Given the importance of this topic, the present study with an emphasis on transparency aims to examine Islamic teachings on governance in Islamic societies, and reflect on governance transparency components in such societies, relying on expert opinions. (shrink)

L'expérience de théorisation d'Edgar Morin a été, pour nous sociologues, bien plus qu'un témoignage exemplaire. Elle a aidé à entamer un parcours épistémologique ; la discipline sociologique peut, en effet, apparaître comme une partition à plusieurs voix au travers d'une discussion non seulement sociologique, mais aussi, anthropologique et philosophique, et ce, en trois temps : la rupture, la construction et la constatation. Ce livre est, ainsi, conçu comme un "aide à penser", d'une part, la genèse de la sociologie, en revisitant (...) les auteurs canoniques (Marx, Durkheim, Weber) et les théories sociologiques contemporaines, et, d'autre part, la complexité des défis culturels, sociaux et politiques, dans nos sociétés. L'expérience d'une pensée aussi rigoureuse que la complexité ne peut se faire par procuration. Il fallait contribuer à l'initiation à la sociologie et beaucoup d'attention pour oser penser par soi-même. L'ouvrage porte sur des problèmes de "théorie", mais tous s'appuient sur des données ethnographiques (enquêtes de terrain). Enfin, l'ouvrage d'Ali Aït Abdelmalek s'inscrit dans son projet de création, à l'Université de Rennes 2, d'un Groupement d'intérêt scientifique "Institut de la complexité : Territoire, Identité, Patrimoine et Politique", en collaboration avec la Fondation Edgar Morin."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Source: Author: Mohammad Sabahi Bidgoli, Ali Kebriaei, Sayed Gholamabas Moosavi Background and Aim: Patients' viewpoints are commonly used to assess quality of care in diverse healthcare organizations. This permits managerial decisions to be made based on knowledge rather than conjecture. The purpose of the current study is to investigate quality gap of family health care through measuring differences between clients’ perceptions and expectations at Kashan city health centers in Iran.Methodology: A cross-sectional design was applied in 2013. The study sample was (...) composed of 384 women clients of family health services randomly selected from Kashan city health centers. The SERVQUAL questionnaire was used for data collection. Service quality gap was measured by computing the difference between the rating respondents assign to expectations and perceptions statements. For pair wise comparison of the expectations and perceptions the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test was used. Internal consistency of the scale was confirmed with Cronbach's Alpha coefficients.Findings: In all dimensions of the services a significant (P ]]>. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy and Sufism evolved as distinct yet interpenetrating strands of Islamic thought and practice. Despite differences, they have shared a concern with the perfection of the soul through the development of character. In The Polished Mirror, Cyrus Ali Zargar studies the ways in which, through teaching and storytelling, pre-modern Muslims lived, negotiated, and cultivated virtues. Examining the writings of philosophers, ascetics, poets, and saints, he locates virtue ethics within a dynamic moral tradition."--Amazon.com.

According to many philosophers, the notion of belief is constitutively normative ; Shah ; Shah and Velleman (); Gibbard (); Wedgwood ). In a series of widely discussed papers, Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons have developed an ingenious ‘Moral Twin Earth’ argument against ‘Cornell Realist’ metaethical views which hold that moral terms have synthetic natural definitions in the manner of natural kind terms. In this paper we shall suggest that an adaptation of the Moral Twin Earth argument to the doxastic (...) case – Doxastic Twin Earth – provides new evidence for the normativity of belief. (shrink)

The majority of studies on compliment response have investigated CR patterns and norms among different cultural groups and communities. The present study investigated the shifting of CR patterns across generations within the same speech community. To this end, 272 Persian speakers were chosen from among high school students and teachers. A discourse completion task with four complimenting situations was administered. The findings revealed that the new generation of Persian speakers, regardless of their gender, had shifted their CR patterns and overwhelmingly (...) accepted compliments. This change is attributed to the changing interpretations and conceptions of politeness and to the influx of English culture, through exposure to English media, internet, TV series, films, etc., among the new generation of Persian speakers. (shrink)

We examine the effects of leader–member exchange differentiation on team members’ outcomes by using team moral disengagement as a psychological mechanism mediating this relationship and LMX differentiation bases moderating the relationship. Analysis of multilevel data collected from 289 frontline employees organized into 76 finance-related customer service teams shows that LMX differentiation significantly reduced team moral disengagement only when the performance basis was high, and that the negative relationship between LMX differentiation and team moral disengagement was significant only when the personal (...) liking basis was low. Furthermore, we found that the LMX bases moderated the indirect effect of LMX differentiation on team members’ outcomes through team moral disengagement. The findings advance team moral disengagement as a novel mechanism for cross-level relationship between LMX differentiation and team members’ outcomes at the individual level, and project differentiation bases as a condition under which LMX differentiation unpacks the reasons for team members’ favorable or unfavorable responses. They reveal LMX differentiation as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, whose essence can only be understood if examined from multiple levels. We also contribute to the literature by revealing the cognitive pathway through which LMX differentiation may be associated with team members outcomes. (shrink)

More general form of -neutrosophic ideal is introduced, and their properties are investigated. Relations between -neutrosophic ideal and )-neutrosophic ideal are discussed. Characterizations of )-neutrosophic ideal are discussed, and conditions for a neutrosophic set to be an )-neutrosophic ideal are displayed.

Hermeneutics; philosophical aspects; knowledge, theory of; philosophy, modern; 20th century.

The "How to Live as a Muslim" series is an essential guide for anyone who seeks to acquire an accurate knowledge of Islam, as it elucidates all the facets of Islam with precise brevity in three volumes: An Introduction to Islamic Faith and Thought, Living in the Shade of Islam, and Living the Ethics and Morality of Islam, respectively. The first volume of the series delves into the heart of the matter, presenting clearly the fundamentals and different aspects of Islamic (...) faith. It makes an effort to peel away the layers of what we think we know about Islam to reveal what Islam says about itself, and to explain the pillars of the Islamic faith. It discusses Islam's worldview, how we fit into it, and what God expects of us. It explains why Prophets were sent to guide us to the truth, why the Qur'an is the best guide for this journey, and how and why God equipped us to make this journey. Also examined in detail are the Resurrection and the Afterlife, Divine Destiny, eschatology, death and the spirit after death, and the invisible realm of existence. (shrink)

Syed Abul Aʻla Maudoodi, 1903-1979, founder of Jamaat-e Islami, religio-political party of Pakistan and Abulḥasan 'Alī, Nadvī, b. 1913-1999, Islamic scholar.

ʿAlī fils d’Abū Ṭālib, gendre et cousin du prophète Muḥammad, premier imam (chef, guide, leader) des Shi’ites et quatrième calife, est sans doute une des figures les plus centrales de différents types de spiritualité en islam. Cependant c’est surtout dans la spiritualité shi’ite, fondée principalement sur la figure de l’imam, qu’il constitue le véritable pivot autour duquel gravitent les doctrines religieuses les plus importantes. L’article envisage ce rôle à travers une problématique précise, celle des rapports qui lient la figure de (...) ʿAlī au Coran. Ainsi, sont examinés respectivement les rôles de ʿAlī d’abord comme acteur et sujet de l’exégèse de la Révélation, ensuite comme contenu et objet ultime de celle-ci. Cette dimension duelle semble s’appuyer sur la double nature, humaine et divine, de ʿAlī. C’est la raison pour laquelle l’article se termine par l’hypothèse de l’identification possible, par certain proto-Shi’ites, entre leur premier imam et le Christ. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine different views of the structure of justification, including foundationalism, infinitism, and coherentism. We investigate how well or poorly they seem to do in responding to the regress problem, accommodating a robust connection between justification and truth, and getting the contours of justification right—i.e., making justification neither too easy nor too hard to get. We end by briefly discussing some challenges to finding a single sense of “foundational belief” defining the debate.

Recently there is an increasing technological development in intelligent tutoring systems. This field has become interesting to many researchers. In this paper, we present an intelligent tutoring system for teaching information security. This intelligent tutoring systems target the students enrolled in Advanced Topics in Information Security in the faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. Through which the student will be able to study the course and solve related problems. An evaluation of the intelligent tutoring systems (...) was carried out and the results were promising. (shrink)

A natural starting point for theories of perceptual states is ordinary perception, in which a subject is successfully related to her mind-independent surroundings. Correspondingly, the simplest theory of perceptual states models all such states on perception. Typically, this simple, common-factor relational view of perceptual states has received a perfunctory dismissal on the grounds that hallucinations are nonperceptual. But I argue that the nonperceptual view of hallucinations has been accepted too quickly. I consider three observations thought to support the view, and (...) argue that all three are dealt with equally well by an alternative view, illusionism, on which hallucinations do involve perception. Since this is so, adopting a common-factor relational view of all perceptual states remains a tenable option. (shrink)

Luck (2009) argues that gamers face a dilemma when it comes to performing certain virtual acts. Most gamers regularly commit acts of virtual murder, and take these acts to be morally permissible. They are permissible because unlike real murder, no one is harmed in performing them; their only victims are computer-controlled characters, and such characters are not moral patients. What Luck points out is that this justification equally applies to virtual pedophelia, but gamers intuitively think that such acts are not (...) morally permissible. The result is a dilemma: either gamers must reject the intuition that virtual pedophelic acts are impermissible and so accept partaking in such acts, or they must reject the intuition that virtual murder acts are permissible, and so abstain from many (if not most) extant games. While the prevailing solution to this dilemma has been to try and find a morally relevant feature to distinguish the two cases, I argue that a different route should be pursued. It is neither the case that all acts of virtual murder are morally permissible, nor are all acts of virtual pedophelia impermissible. Our intuitions falter and produce this dilemma because they are not sensitive to the different contexts in which games present virtual acts. (shrink)

The gamer’s dilemma offers three plausible but jointly inconsistent premises: (1) Virtual murder in video games is morally permissible. (2) Virtual paedophelia in video games is not morally permissible. (3) There is no morally relevant difference between virtual murder and virtual paedophelia in video games. In this paper I argue that the gamer’s dilemma can be understood as one of three distinct dilemmas, depending on how we understand two key ideas in Morgan Luck’s (2009) original formulation. The two ideas are (...) those of (1) occurring in a video game and (2) being a virtual instance of murder or paedophelia. Depending on the weight placed on the gaming context, the dilemma is either about in-game acts or virtual acts. And depending on the type of virtual acts we have in mind, the dilemma is either about virtual representations or virtual partial reproductions of murder and paedophelia. This gives us three dilemmas worth resolving: a gaming dilemma, a representation dilemma, and a simulation dilemma. I argue that these dilemmas are about different issues, apply to different cases, and are susceptible to different solutions. I also consider how different participants in the debate have interpreted the dilemma in one or more of these three ways. (shrink)

How do we assign values to virtual items, which include virtual objects, properties, events, subjects, worlds, environments, and experiences? In this article, I offer a framework for answering this question. After considering different value theses in the literature, I argue that whether we think these theses mutually exclusive or not turns on our view about the number of value-salient kinds virtual items belong to. Virtual monism is the view that virtual Xs belong to only one value-salient kind in relation to (...) X. Virtual pluralism is the view that they belong to more than one value-salient kind. I argue for two claims. First, virtual monism is mistaken. Minimally some virtual Xs are Xs, while others are not. Second, dualistic virtual pluralism is also mistaken because it is too coarse grained. Instead, I argue for fourfold pluralism: virtual items either represent an original's properties or reproduce essential properties and do so to lesser or greater extents. This gives us four value-salient kinds of virtual X: virtual reproductions, simulations, representations, and simulacra of X. I apply this view to various debates in the literature and conclude with a discussion of less basic hybrid kinds. (shrink)

There are two dominant approaches towards understanding medieval Muslim philosophy: Greek ancestry approach and religiopolitical context approach. In the Greek ancestry approach, medieval Muslim philosophy is interpreted in terms of its relation to classical Greek philosophy, particularly to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The religiopolitical context approach, however, views a thorough understanding of the religious and political situation of that time as the key to the proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy. Notwithstanding the immense significance of the two approaches (...) for understanding medieval Muslim philosophy, the question on the reason behind medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in political philosophy is not accurately answered. This preference is usually attributed either to the availability or unavailability of the text or to the suitability or unsuitability of the text for Islamic theological views. However, this article shows that neither the availability or unavailability of text nor its suitability or unsuitability for Islamic religious and theological views can appropriately explain medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in their political thought. This article proposes that the key to understand this preference lies in understanding the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim philosophers. Contribution: This study highlights the significance of the thorough understanding of the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim world as one of the important approaches towards proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy, particularly medieval Muslim political philosophy. (shrink)