This article presents an empirical investigation into the construction of obedience in letters of applications mailed to National Socialist authorities for the position of executioner between the years 1933 and 1945. To this end, a corpus of 178 letters of application was compiled, annotated, and analyzed using the corpus analysis toolkits Antconc and Lancsbox. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus was conducted. The findings were related to and interpreted from the perspectives of applied legal linguistics, stylistics, and legal (...) history. The project aims to explore the construction of a shared discourse of obedience and how this discourse is operative in the letters of application. Drawing on an explorative interdisciplinary framework, this project seeks to answer the following research questions: Is obedience a construct in applicants’ letters of motivation? Which linguistic devices and discursive strategies are used by the executioners to express submission to officials of the National Socialist state? Are there variants of the construction of submission by applicants? (shrink)

The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great, enduring religions all attest; namely that nature is sacred. Nasr traces the (...) historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view which sees humans as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by humans. His goal is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth. (shrink)

This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked essay “Hegel à Iéna.” The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. A contribution to the philosophy of time, this essay had a profound but generally unrecognized influence on Alexander Kojève, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida.

This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir (migrants), and Bangladeshi Deobandi Islamists, who re-enact the role of the ansar (helpers), as they explore godforsakenness during two waves of migration in 2016 and 2017. Bringing together theological aphasia and references to contemporary jihad, this ethnographic meditation calls into question the assumptive logics of secular historicism and liberal humanitarianism as it confronts the deathworld of the War on Terror through Islam’s founding texts and traditions. Drawing (...) from Talal Asad’s reading of the secular as “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism” and a formation that contains “a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities,” it highlights and unearths the secular core of liberal concepts of humanitarianism, historicity, spatiality, and geography, to specify their uses within the discourse of the War on Terror. The ulama in the border region point to the secular and identify it as a structuring coordinate within the discourse of liberal civil society. At the level of sensibility, the interactions between the scholars and Islamists in the border region reveal a domain consisting of moods, anxieties, and perceptive qualities that runs counter to the affective life immanent to secularity. (shrink)

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of (...) users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. This paper presents a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that have been formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre. (shrink)

"The most comprehensive and intelligent treatment of [religious ecology]....Nasr is one of the major intellects of our day."--Huston Smith, University of California, Berkeley.

Accession Number: ATLA0001712108; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 71-86.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 86.; Rev from an article in The Islamic quarterly.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Background: Job satisfaction is largely associated with organizational aspects, including improved working environments, worker’s well-being and more effective performance. There are many definitions regarding job satisfaction in the existing scholarly literature: it can be expressed as a positive emotional state, a positive impact of job-related experiences on individuals, and employees’ perceptions regarding their jobs. Aims: No reliable scales in Arabic language to assess job satisfaction in the sports and physical education field exist.This study aimed to trans-culturally adapt and validate the (...) Pepe’s “Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale” 9 items (TJSS-9), creating the “Teacher of Physical Education Job Satisfaction Inventory” (TPEJSI) in Arabic language. This scale was administered to a Tunisian population of sports and physical education teachers and analyzed according to the Pepe’s theoretical model.. More in detail, this investigation systematically tested its factor structure, in terms of internal consistency/reliability, predictive validity, sensitivity and convergent validity. Methods: A total of 417 Tunisian teachers of sports and physical education participated voluntarily in this study. The sample comprised of 258 males and of 159 females. More in detail, 189 were teachers teaching in primary schools of physical education, 105 teaching in secondary schools, and 123 were university teachers. Both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses were performed on random-split halves of the sample. Results: The three-dimensional alpha coefficients of the TPEJSI were all greater than 0.80: for satisfaction with colleagues, alpha was 0.865; for satisfaction with parents, alpha was 0.856 and for satisfaction with students alpha was 0.860. The CFA fit indices were satisfactory. Conclusions: Given the good EFA factor loadings, the CFA fit indices, the correlation matrix, the sensitivity analysis, the convergent validity and the excellent internal consistency, it can be concluded that the TPEJSI is a good psychometric tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the job satisfaction level among teachers of sports and physical education in the Arabic-speaking world. (shrink)

The world of nature is being desecrated and destroyed in an unprecedented manner globally by both those who have secularized the world about them and developed a science and technology capable of destroying nature on an unimaginable scale and by those who still live within a religious universe, even if the mode of destruction of the order of nature by the two groups is both quantitatively and qualitatively different. This book challenges the totalitarian claims of modern science and opens up (...) a space for the assertion of the religious view of the order of nature that various traditions developed over the centuries in their cosmologies and sacred sciences. It examines the relation of religion to the order of the nature and brings into focus the religious and spiritual dimensions of the environmental crisis. It also emphasizes the significance of the gulf between knowledge and the sacred in precipitating the chaos and upheavals of a spiritual and intellectual order of which the pollution and destruction of the natural order is a most visible consequence. (shrink)

Study of the visual, material, and textual sources of elements shaping images of women in the Latin East provides a context for investigating how communicative strategies applied in the representation of women articulate and interact across artistic, social, historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. To what extent do these phenomena conform to gender norms? The case studies underlying this analysis come from present-day Lebanon as they relate to preserved twelfth- and thirteenth-century female depictions found in wall paintings from Mar Sharbel the (...) Elder in Maad, Saydet el-Rih in Enfeh, and the National Museum of Beirut. These depictions situate these women dynamically in the region’s cultural and artistic landscape, as well as in the social fabric of their time. (shrink)

This volume gathers together the numerous essays by the Iranian metaphysician and ontologist, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, on Islamic philosophers and the intricate ...

The meaning of a science rooted in the sacred, its contrast to modern science and its pertinence to us today.

The mitochondrion is known as the “powerhouse” of eukaryotic cells since it is the main site of adenosine 5′‐triphosphate (ATP) production. Using a temperature‐sensitive fluorescent probe, it has recently been suggested that the stray free energy, not captured into ATP, is potentially sufficient to sustain mitochondrial temperatures higher than the cellular environment, possibly reaching up to 50 °C. By 50 °C, some DNA and mitochondrial proteins may reach their melting temperatures; how then do these biomolecules maintain their structure and function? (...) Further, the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) accelerates with temperature, implying higher oxidative stresses in the mitochondrion than generally appreciated. Herein, it is proposed that mitochondrial heat shock proteins (particularly Hsp70), in addition to their roles in protein transport and folding, protect mitochondrial proteins and DNA from thermal and ROS damage. Other thermoprotectant mechanisms are also discussed. (shrink)

Le dualisme métaphysique de Descartes a des conséquences importantes pour la physique qu’il a développée. Descartes cherchait à établir une connaissance quantitative et certaine du monde physique, et son dualisme en a retiré toute forme d’esprit ou de force. Néanmoins, « les forces» ne semblent pas totalement absentes de sa philosophie naturelle. Quelques auteurs contemporains estiment que Descartes, dans certains passages du Monde, et des Principes de la Philosophie, s’exprime comme si les forces décrites étaient des propriétés « réelles» des (...) corps. Par conséquent, dans cet article, je vais donner des arguments en faveur de la cohérence du dualisme cartésien, en utilisant une notion peu connue de « force» proposée par Descartes. (shrink)

In such civilizations the cosmological sciences integrate the diverse phenomena of Nature into conceptual schemes all of which reflect the revealed ...

Para exponer lo que Descartes dijo acerca de la razón y de las pasiones, hay que comprender sus razones para dar a la mente el lugar privilegiado que le otorga en su filosofía. Por una parte, Descartes defendió su dualismo, sin hacer concesiones acerca de la naturaleza incorpórea de la mente, debido a las exigencias de su proyecto científico-filosófico. Por otra parte, en la obra cartesiana aparece la concepción de la unión del cuerpo y la mente de los seres humanos, (...) así como de su entremezcla. La presencia del dualismo y la unión en la obra de Descartes ha generado interpretaciones diversas. Para una mejor comprensión de la concepción cartesiana al respecto, los reconsidero bajo una perspectiva opuesta a quienes consideran contradictoria la propuesta de Descartes. Esta perspectiva permite reconocer los aspectos antropológicos (morales, psicológicos, sociales) del pensamiento cartesiano y ver que también fue un pensador acerca de las pasiones. (shrink)

The author gives a clear explanation of the philosophy of Sard al-Din Shirazi.

Mulla Sadra (ca. 1572-1640) is one of the most prominent figures of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy and among the most important philosophers of Safavid Persia. He was a prolific writer whose work advanced the fields of intellectual and religious science in Islamic philosophy, but arguably his most important contribution to Islamic philosophy is in the study of existence (wujud) and its application to such areas as cosmology, epistemology, psychology, and eschatology. Sadra represents a paradigm shift from the Aristotelian metaphysics of fixed (...) substances, which had dominated Islamic philosophy, to an analysis of existence as the ultimate ground and dynamic source of things. He posits that all beings derive their reality and truth from their wujud and that a proper philosophical analysis must therefore start and eventually end with it. The present work's focus on Sadra's gradational ontology provides a strong foundation for the reader to understand Sadra's other works and later texts by other philosophers working in the same field. This edition contains parallel English-Arabic texts and a new translation by preeminent scholar of Islamic philosophy Seyyed Hossein Nasr. (shrink)

The issue of Islam and modern science, along with its progeny, modern technology, continues today as one of the most crucial faced by the Islamic community. It has been, and continues to be, addressed by numerous scholars and thinkers, covering nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum of Islamic intellectual activity since the last century. This article analyses modern science and subjects it to an in-depth criticism from the Islamic point of view, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition. It holds (...) that any science that could legitimately be called Islamic science, and not be disruptive of the whole Islamic order, must be one that remains aware of the ‘vertical cause’ of all things, along with the horizontal, a science that issues from and returns to the Real, who is the cause of all things. (shrink)

After several centuries of an ever-increasing eclipse of the religious significance of nature in the West and neglect of the order of nature by mainstream Christian religious thought, many Christian theologians have in the past two or three decades become interested once again in nature and in addressing the environmental crisis. Diverse paths have been chosen to face this challenge, some seeking to go back to the traditional roots of Christianity, others to turn East to Indian and Far Eastern religions, (...) and yet others to search for the wisdom of the Native Shamanic religions, especially those of the Americas. This chapter casts a critical glance on at least some of the Christian voices seeking to create what some now call “eco-theology” before turning to other religions. Today, there is much written by philosophers and scientists concerned with ecology that deals with environmental ethics and that have in fact a religious impact and in some cases a directly religious dimension. (shrink)

Knowledge and its desacralization --What is tradition? -- The rediscovery of the sacred : the revival of tradition -- Scientia sacra -- Man, pontifical and Promethean -- The cosmos as theophany -- Eternity and the temporal order -- Traditional art as fountain of knowledge and grace -- Principal knowledge and the multiplicity of sacred forms -- Knowledge of the sacred as deliverance.