I think … we ought to distinguish two sense of “deconstruction.” In one sense the word refers to the philosophical projects of Jacques Derrida. Taken this way, breaking down the distinction between philosophy and literature is essential to deconstruction. Derrida’s initiative in philosophy continues along a line laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. He rejects, however, Heidegger’s distinctions between “thinkers” and “poets” and between the few thinkers and the many scribblers. So Derrida rejects the sort of philosophical professionalism (...) which Nietzsche despised and which Heidegger recovered. This does indeed lead Derrida in the direction of “a general, undifferentiated textuality.” In his work, the philosophy-literature distinction is, at most, part of a ladder which we can let go of once we have climbed up it.In a second sense of “deconstruction,” however, the term refers to a method of reading texts. Neither this method, nor any other, should be attributed to Derrida—who shares Heidegger’s contempt for the very idea of method.2 But the method exists, and the passage I have quoted from Culler describes one of its essential features. Culler is quite right to say that deconstruction, in the second sense, needs a clear distinction between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which has come to be called “deconstructionist” requires two different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when she learns that her work has been supported by philosophical oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their whimpers lend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again, deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse irresolution. Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

My colleague E. D. Hirsch has skillfully developed the consequences for literary interpretation of a “realistic” epistemological position which he formulates as follows: “If we could not distinguish a content of consciousness from its contexts, we could not know any object at all in the world.” Given that premise, it is easy for Hirsch to infer that “without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no knowledge in interpretation.”1 A lot of people disagree with Hirsch on the latter point, (...) and they look to philosophy for replies to the premise from which it was inferred. But it is not clear where in philosophy they should look: To epistemology? Ethics?2 Philosophy of language? What Jacques Derrida calls “a new logic, … a graphematics of iterability”?3 Where do we find first principles from which to deduce an anti-Hirsch argument?I want to argue that there is no clear or straight answer to this question and that there need be none. I shall begin by criticizing the strategy used against Hirsch and others by my fellow pragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. They think that one can start with philosophy of language and straighten things out by adopting a correct account of meaning. I share their desire to refute Hirsch, their admiration for Stanley Fish, and their view that “theory”—when defined as “an attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general”—has got to go . But they want to defend this position by exposing a mistake which they think common to all theory so defined: an error about the relation between meaning and intention. They assert that “what is intended and what is meant are identical” and that one will look for an “account of interpretation in general” only if one fails to recognize this identity . Such failure leads to an attempt to connect meaning and intention or to disconnect them . But such attempts must fail, for they presuppose a break “between language and speech acts” which does not exist . 1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation , pp. 3, 1.2. See ibid., where Hirsch offers a “fundamental ethical maxim for interpretation” which, he says, “claims no privileged sanction from metaphysics or analysis” . Here and elsewhere Hirsch suggests that it may be ethics rather than epistemology which provides the principles that govern interpretation. There remain other passages, however, in which he retains the view, conspicuous in his earlier writings, that an analysis of the idea of knowledge is the ultimate justification for his approach.3. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc abc … , ” Glyph 2 : 219. Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism , among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” appeared in the September 1984 issue. (shrink)

The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side, the side of dissimilarity. “The female is as it were a deformed male,” added Aristotle . As she belongs to the category of the different, the female can only contribute more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for future generations. Aristotle’s seminal work on the generation of (...) monsters posited a rigorously physical definition that was not necessarily linked to deformities: “Monstrosities,” he wrote, “come under the class of offspring which is unlike its parents” . Further, while a “monstrosity, of course, belongs to the class of ‘things contrary to Nature,’ … it is contrary not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality of cases” .The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different species: “People say that the offspring which is formed has the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures, that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only” . The monster is thus a double imposture. Its strange appearance—a misleading likeness to another species, for example—belies the otherwise rigorous law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a false resemblance to an object external to its conception. Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793-1797 and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology. (shrink)

Bishop was both fully at home in, and fully estranged from, Nova Scotia and Brazil. In Nova Scotia, after Bishop’s father had died, her mother went insane; Bishop lived there with her grandparents from the age of three to the age of six. She then left to be raised by an aunt in Massachusetts, but spent summers in Nova Scotia till she was thirteen. Subsequent adult visits north produced poems like “Cape Breton,” “At the Fishhouses,” and “The Moose”; and Bishop (...) responded eagerly to other poets, like John Brinnin and Mark Strand, who knew that landscape. Nova Scotia represented a harsh pastoral to which, though she was rooted in it, she could not return. Brazil, on the other hand, was a place of adult choice, where she bought and restored a beautiful eighteenth-century house in Ouro Prêto. It was yet another pastoral, harsh in a different, tropical way—a pastoral exotic enough to interest her noticing eye but one barred to her by language and culture . Foreign abroad, foreign at home, Bishop appointed herself a poet of foreignness, which is, far more than “travel,” her subject. Three of her books have geographical names—“North and South,” “Questions of Travel,” and “Geography III”—and she feels a geographer’s compulsions precisely because she is a foreigner, not a native. Her early metaphor for a poem is a map, and she scrutinized that metaphor, we may imagine, because even as a child she had had to become acquainted through maps with the different territories she lived in and traveled back and forth between. In the poem “Crusoe in England,” Bishop’s Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his island, has nightmares of having to explore more and more new islands and of being required to be their geographer: I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from min, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, ………………………………………… knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.This recurrent anxiety marks the end of one of Bishop’s earlier dreams—that one could go home, or find a place that felt like home. In “A Cold Spring,” a book recording chiefly some unhappy years preceding her move to Brazil, there had yet survived the dream of going home, in a poem using the Prodigal Son as surrogate. He deludes himself, by drinking, that he can be happy away, but finally his evening horrors in exile determine him to return: Carrying a bucket along a slimy board, he felt the bats’ uncertain staggering flight, his shuddering insights, beyond his control, touching him. But it took him a long time finally to make his mind up to go home. [“The Prodigal Son”] Helen Vendler is Kenan Professor of English at Harvard University. She has written books on Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, and Keats, and is now working on a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets. She has recently edited the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. (shrink)

Staten gets my intentions right when he suggests that I may simply have been saying that “the dream of philosophy is a rare but serious malady, now less common than it used to be, but currently threatening a new outbreak in the disguised form of deconstruction” . I had thought I was urging that the appropriation of Derrida in the Anglo-Saxon “Now let’s deconstruct literature” mode was a mistake and that there were some things in Derrida which had encouraged this (...) mistake—notably the Heideggerian suggestion that the “text of philosophy” was at the heart of our culture. State, however, finds me more cunning and ungenerous, harsher toward Derrida, than I had imagined myself to be. He may have a point, but is hard for me to tell. No author is much good at following “the rhetorical contours” of his own writing, since his beliefs about what he wanted to say keep leveling off the contours of what he actually wrote .The best I can do by way of reply to the charge that I was attempting to “ ‘encapsulate and circumvent’ ” Derrida is to take up a central ambiguity which Staten detects . He says that I flit back and forth between “two characterizations of the history of philosophy”: “a constantly changing, self-deconstructing enterprise which is therefore not characterizable in terms of any single system of metaphors,” and “a ‘metaphysical tradition’ which has dreamed the dream of a closed, total, and transparent vocabulary which would tell the whole truth and thing but the truth” . Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism , among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Deconstruction and Circumvention” and “Philosophy without Principles”. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:7 Franciscan Studies 62 (2004) THE FRANCISCAN INSTITUTE HONORS GIOVANNI MICCOLI On July 16, 2004 Professor Giovanni Miccoli, a respected scholar of medieval, Church and Franciscan history, received the Franciscan Institute Medal from St. Bonaventure University during its celebration of the Feast of St. Bonaventure. University president Sr. Margaret Carney, O.S.F., and Fr. Michael Cusato, O.F.M., director of The Franciscan Institute and dean of the School of Franciscan (...) Studies, presented the medal during an Academic Convocation at 7 p.m. in The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. A reception followed in the Dresser-Rand Atrium. During the Convocation, Giovanni Miccoli gave a presentation, “A Reading of the Christian Proposal of Francis According to His First Biographers,” continuing a longtime focus on the study of Francis of Assisi and his contributions to the Church. Professor Miccoli, who was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1933, studied in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Università, in Munich at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and London at the Warburg Institute. He has taught in Pisa, Venice and his native Trieste, where he is now a professor emeritus at the Università di Trieste. A historian of the Middle Ages and of the Roman Catholic Church, he has combined those loves to specialize first in the Gregorian Reformation, reforms undertaken within the Church under Pope Gregory VII at the end of the 11th century. Turning his eyes to more modern times, he is also an expert on the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fascism in Italy, including the questions related to Pius XII’s pontificate during World War II. His study of the Church in Italy during the Middle Ages led to a focus on Francis of Assisi and his impact on the Church, which led to his becoming one of foremost Franciscan scholars of modern times. Miccoli is particularly known for his contribution to 1974’s “La Storia Religiosa” (Religious History of Italy), which is the second volume of “Storia d’Italia” (History of Italy). In “La Storia Religiosa” he examined how Francis and his movement influenced the history and development of the Church in Italy. 8 GIOVANNI MICCOLI Since that time, he has published several major articles on Franciscan issues, largely drawing from early Franciscan documents and sources, which have been translated from Italian to English and published in Greyfriars Review, a publication of the Franciscan Institute. One essay, “Francis of Assisi’s Christian Proposal,” was published in Italian in 1983 and in Greyfriars Review in 1989; another, “A Christian Experience Between Gospel and Institution,” appeared in Italian in 1992 and in Greyfriars Review in 1997; while a third, “The Writings of Francis,” was published in Italian in 1997 and in Greyfriars Review in 2001. The Franciscan Institute established the medal in 1987 to honor scholars who have made outstanding contributions to Franciscan studies in the areas of philosophy, theology, history and spirituality. Giovanni Miccoli was the 16th recipient of the medal. Recent honorees have included Fr. Clément Schmitt, O.F.M., Sr. Ingrid Peterson, O.S.F., Fr. Kenan Osborne, O.F.M., and Fr. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. THE FRANCISCAN PROPOSAL OF GIOVANNI MICCOLI Giovanni Miccoli was born a little more than seventy years ago in the city of Trieste in northern Italy. He studied at the Scuola normale superiore of Pisa, the most prestigious school in Italy, where he was taught by renowned professors, particularly Arsenio Frugoni. He also received scholarships to study in Munich, Germany, and in London, England. Although he was offered a wide variety of important research and teaching positions in the major cities of Italy, he chose scholarly authority over academic power, and decided to return to his home town and join the university of Trieste, where he taught until his recent appointment as professor emeritus. Trieste is a city at the crossroads of the Latin, Germanic and Slavic worlds. Although largely ignored nowadays, in the past it was the harbor of Austria and, more recently during the Cold War, the last city of Western Europe facing the communist world. It is an enigmatic, fascinating city. This evening we honor Giovanni Miccoli as one of the greatest... (shrink)

Nothing I wrote in Is There a Text in This Class? has provoked more opposition or consternation than my claim that the argument of the book has no consequences for the practice of literary criticism.1 To many it seemed counterintuitive to maintain that an argument in theory could leave untouched the practice it considers: After all, isn’t the very point of theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice? In answer to this question, I want to say, first, (...) that this claim is unsupportable. Here, I am in agreement with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, who are almost alone in agreeing with me and who fault me not for making the “no consequences” argument but for occasionally falling away from it. Those dislike Is There a Text in This Class? tend to dislike “Against Theory” even more, and it is part of my purpose here to account for the hostility to both pieces. But since the issues at stake are fundamental, it is incumbent to begin at the beginning with a discussion of what theory is and is not. 1. See my Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities , p. 370. For a response to the “no consequences” claim, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: on Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism,” Boundary 2 11 : 222. Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies” and “Fear of Fish:”A Reply to Walter Davis” . The present essay is the concluding chapter of Change. (shrink)

It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding “form” work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but they did not, I believe, stray from the foundations I have tried to indicate for them. Let us consider the example of Wilhelm Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss ornament rather than images because ornament is a purer expression of form and therefore provides a less encumbered view (...) into form’s spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of the first millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is “impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines”; it is “the decisive formula for the whole medieval North.” The “need for empathy of this inharmonious people” requires the “uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic”; the “inner disharmony and unclarity of these peoples … could have borne no clearer fruit.”4 Here forms—mostly lines and edges and their relations—are compared to a natural outgrowth, a fruit, and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the characterization of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms were made and used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive with the range of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations, and epochs.It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many authors have done so and many more have done so less systematically. The important thing for my purposes is the pattern of inference from form to historical statements and conclusion. 4. Wilhelm Worringer,ion and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock , p. 77. David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo and the Language of Art and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics , he is currently writing a book to be titled The Defect of Distance: Toward a University History of Art. (shrink)

It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis’ assertion that in my view of the critical process “different interpretive strategies create completely different texts with no point of comparison” ; but the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now see a God who is more dramatically effective than Pope’s “school divine,” they still see a God who exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing (...) Byronic antihero who was for so long a “given” in the interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change did not exist in isolation either. In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan ; and it follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur without a corresponding—that is, related—reversal in the other. Any increase in the literary “cash value” of Milton’s God will be registered at the expense of his Satan.In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made piecemeal, the process of challenging and changing them is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not “contradictory,” as Davis asserts, “to talk about recalcitrant features of a text” in the context of a thesis that makes the text’s features a function of interpretation . The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I stress “elaborated” because the interpretation is not a single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points constitute a reservoir from which objections and “counterchallenges” can emerge. Thus, when someone offers a revisionist account of Milton’s God, a skeptical or unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or to extend his new reading in such a way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand as refutations of the revisionist’s reading. He will then be working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of another. Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism” and “Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies”. (shrink)

Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a perfect example of what Jakobson calls "speech within speech"1 and divorces the various characters from their own discourse. In addition to the real author's speech to the real reader, crystallized in that of the implied author to the implied reader, the whole story is the speech of an (...) extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who, in the footnote, calls himself "editor" and who sums up Liddell Hart's account and juxtaposes it with Yu Tsun's dictated statement. Just as the editor quotes Tsun, so Tsun, an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, quotes Albert who in turn quotes Ts'ui Pên, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the crucial letter, sometimes by conjecture, as in the instance of Pên's supposed declarations about the book and the maze. Quotation, then, is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a person is to a large extent constituted by one person of his discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute autonomy of the self. · 1. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin , pp. 296-322. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is a senior lecturer in the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, she is currently writing on the poetics of repetition and, in collaboration with Moshe Ron, on contemporary narrative theory. (shrink)

In this work, Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer's Greece to Mao's China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the stories of the great philosophers, and breathes life into their ideas, while also challenging many of our most cherished moral beliefs.

Located in the northwest of the Lake Van basin, the city of Malazgirt was an important area of the kingdom of Urartu from its earliest period due to its stra- tegic location. Inscriptions of king Minua (810–785/80 BCE) mention important construction projects, including fortresses, temples, and irrigation canals, in and around Malazgirt. This article deals with the Urartian presence in Malazgirt, presents new Urartian inscriptions, and considers their significance for historical geography. Particularly important is the Leter stele, which informs us (...) of the correct reading of the name of the irrigation canal built by King Minua—Mezaiani, the antecedent form of Malazgirt. Another stele documents the agricultural activities of King Argišti (780–756 BCE). (shrink)

The economic mentality, which is a subfield of economic history studies, has been a little worked area on itself since Sabri F. Ülgener, except names such as Ahmet Tabakoğlu and Ahmet G. Sayar in economic history and history of economic thought area. This area, referred to as the Ottoman or Turkish economic mentality, was tried to be explained more by religion with M. Weber, W. Sombart and R.H. Tawney's influence. The explanation to be made here is based on social culture. (...) Social culture refers to language as Turkish, holistic and particularist culture. It is moved from Hüseyin R. Göktaş's Turkish as language and Murat Önderman's views on collectivist and particularist culture and social control while it is presented economic mentality of the "work" in Turkish and its projection on language. In the context of culture, the subject has been finalized with a proposal for a history period and a naming for Turks. (shrink)

The paper analyses the concept of rationality as developed in the philosophical considerations of Robert Brandom. It is the analysis of Brandom's pragmatically-oriented discourse concerning the issue of rationality from the perspective of human being's linguistic practices, where only upon meeting the other members of specific linguistic community the aspects of human nature we may characterise by the term rationality are manifested. The central part of this paper treats Brandom's normative idiom that he postulates as explanatorily most suitable for understanding (...) the linguistic practices and the idea of rationality based upon them. (shrink)

Globalization; economic aspects; economic conditions; foreign economic relations; Turkey.

This paper connects the debate regarding perceptual representation of high-level properties and the debate regarding non-conceptual perceptual representation. I present and defend a distinction between representationally-complex properties and properties that are simpler to represent and offer ways of assessing whether a property is representationally complex. I address conditions under which such a property might be non-conceptually represented and conclude that most representationally-complex properties are simply too complex to be non-conceptually represented. Thus, most mental states that represent representationally-complex properties must be (...) conceptual. This conclusion is relevant for a variety of philosophical theories (perception, ethics, emotions, pain) and is especially dramatic with respect to accounts according to which a mental state can non-conceptually represent such properties. As a test case for applying my argument I consider a group of such accounts: non-conceptual perceptual views of emotions, which my argument entails are false. I end by considering the implications my argument has for different theories. -/- . (shrink)

Bu çalışmada, Türkiye’de 1963 ile 2012 yılları arasında din psikolojisi alanında yapılan ve hala devam eden yüksek lisans ve doktora tezlerine ilişkin analizler yer almaktadır. Bunun yanında din psikolojisinin Türkiye’de akademide yer alışına dair kısa bir tarihçe vardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, din psikolojisi doktora tezlerine ilişkin bir bibliyografya oluşturarak, araştırmacılara ve lisansüstü öğrencilerine bir katalog sunmaktır. Ayrıca, tezlere ait verilerin analizleriyle, yapılacak yeni çalışmalara yol göstermek amaçlanmıştır. Yöntem olarak literatür taraması yapılmış, farklı kurumların katalogları taranmış ve alandaki akademisyenlerle görüşülmüştür. Elde (...) edilen bilgiler doğrultusunda tezler, yüksek lisans ve doktora tezleri olarak tasnif edilmiş ve yazar referans alınarak alfabetik sıraya göre dizilmiştir. Tez başlıklarının içerdikleri konular tespit edilmiş ve bu veriler analiz edilmiştir. (shrink)

This paper concerns Aristotle and Galen’s scientific method and the place of philosophy in their natural scientific endeavors as manifested in their discussions on the role of the heart in the formation of the embryo. I will begin first by discussing Aristotle’s conception of natural sciences and his discussion on the role of the heart in the body and embryo. Following this is Galen’s critique of the role of the heart in the formation of the embryo. Galen had considerably more (...) knowledge about anatomy and the construction of the embryo, yet his scientific method is not radically different from Aristotle’s as he also utilizes both logical arguments and observational data. Nevertheless, he attempts to banish philosophers from discussing anatomical issues, thus opening the path to specialization. (shrink)

The theme of this essay centers on the ways in which the theology of St. Bonaventure, who lived in the thirteenth century, can truly enhance the theological thinking of the twenty-first century. Bonaventure’s theological approach is fundamentally inter-relational, and inter-relational ways of thinking dominate the cultures of today’s world. Are these two forms of inter-relational perception compatible with one another? In this lecture, I attempt to show that the Franciscan world-view, especially as formulated by Bonaventure, offers a major format that (...) unites our current world with a current and deeply respected religious way of thinking. The basis for this inter-connection can be stated in a succinct way: in.. (shrink)

Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in (...) moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I examine several commentaries and glosses on the prolegomenon of Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s (d. 675/1276–77) Shamsiyya that relate to debates on the Aristotelian and Ibn Sīnān theory of science in the postclassical period. Chief among the commentaries of the Shamsiyya is Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 766/1365) Taḥrīr al-qawāʿid al-manṭiqiyya. This commentary, rather than the base text of the Shamsiyya, set the stage for later interpretations by Mirak al-Bukhārī (fl. 733/1332), Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Qāshānī (d. 755/1354), Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (...) (d. 792/1390), al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413), Dāwūd al-Khwāfī (fl. 839/1465) and ʿIṣām al-Dīn Isfarāyinī (d. 945/1538). I focus on three issues that were raised in these interpreta­tions of the Shamsiyya’s prolegomenon: (1) the place of the elements of sciences in logical corpus, (2) the notion of the prolegomenon and its content, and (3) the real essence of a science. I attend to the particular debates and contentions on these issues to reveal the general idea of science at that time. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is not only disrupting industries and businesses, particularly the ones have fallen behind the adoption, but also significantly impacting public life as well. This calls for government authorities pay attention to public opinions and sentiments towards AI. Nonetheless, there is limited knowledge on what the drivers behind the public perception of AI are. Bridging this gap is the rationale of this paper. As the methodological approach, the study conducts an online public perception survey with the residents of Sydney, (...) Melbourne, and Brisbane, and explores the collected survey data through statistical analysis. The analysis reveals that: the public is concerned of AI invading their privacy, but not much concerned of AI becoming more intelligent than humans; the public trusts AI in their lifestyle, but the trust is lower for companies and government deploying AI; the public appreciates the benefits of AI in urban services and disaster management; depending on the local context, public perceptions vary; and the drivers behind the public perception include gender, age, AI knowledge, and AI experience. The findings inform authorities in developing policies to minimise public concerns and maximise AI awareness. (shrink)

This article contributes to the study of the globalization of science through an analysis of Ahmed Cevdet's nineteenth-century translation of the sixth chapter of Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) Muqaddimah, which deals with the nature and history of science. Cevdet's translation and Ottomanization of that text demonstrate that science did not simply originate in Europe to be subsequently distributed to the rest of the world. Instead, knowledge transmitted from Europe was actively engaged with and appropriated by scholars, who sought to put (...) that material within their own cultural context in a manner that could serve their own intellectual and practical needs. Cevdet's case is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that (1) Islamic conceptions of human nature, the soul and the nature of knowledge provided particularly fertile soil in which empiricist and positivist traditions could take root, and (2) aspects of modern science – specifically its ostensive separation from metaphysical debates – made it more attractive to Islamic theologians than was, for example, the work of Aristotelian philosophers. Through an exploration of Cevdet's career and a close analysis of his historiographical treatment of Ibn Khaldun's account of sciences, this article foregrounds the agency of non-Europeans in the late nineteenth-century circulation of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Post-classical period witnessed intense debates on aspects of the Avicennan theory of science. Among them one set of discussions concerned the issue of subject matter (mabāhith al-mawdūʿ) in a science. They were raised by Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa (d. 747/1346) in the introduction of his al-Tawḍīh, a commentary on his legal theory text al-Tanqīḥ. Therein, he raised three questions: (1) whether the subject matter of a science can be multiple, (2) what restricting subject matter of a science means, and (3) whether one (...) thing can be the subject matter of multiple sciences. Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), a proponent of the Avicennan theory, objected to Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s positions in his al-Talwīḥ, the most well-known supercommentary on al-Tawḍīh. The paper analyzes this debate on the issue of subject matter in sciences, and thus sheds light on the reception of an important aspect of the Avicennan theory of science in the postclassical period. (shrink)

Bu makale Aristotelesçi bilim teorisinin ve filozofların ilmî eserlere belirli konularla giriş yapma geleneğinin İslamî ilimlerin tasavvur edilmesi ve sunulmasında etkili olduğunu fıkıh usulü el kitaplarından Muhtasarü’l-Müntehâ’nın girişi üzerine yapılan tartışmalara binaen göstermektedir. Aristotelesçi bilim teorisi her ilmin konu, ilke ve meselelerden oluştuğunu ileri sürmekte, felsefî mukaddime yazma geleneği ise bir eserin konusunu, amacını ve sair belli başlı meselelerini ele alarak giriş yapma tarzını sunmaktaydı. Makale felsefî bilim teorisiyle ilmî eserlere mukaddime yazma geleneğinin, İbnü’l-Hâcib’in (ö. 646/1249) Muhtasarü’l-Müntehâ’sının girişi üzerine yapılan (...) şerh ve haşiyelerde kesiştiklerini göstermektedir. Bu metne onlarca şerh ve haşiye yazılmıştır, fakat makalede bunlar içerisinden on üç ve on dördüncü yüzyıllarda Kâdî el-Beyzâvî (ö. 691/1291-92), Ziyâüddin et-Tûsî (ö. 706/1306-7), Kutbüddin eş-Şîrâzî (ö. 710/1311), Cemâleddin el-Hillî (ö. 726/1325), Bedreddin et-Tüsterî (ö. 732/1332), Adudüddin el-Îcî (ö. 756/1355), Sa‘deddin et-Teftâzânî (ö. 792/1390) ve Seyyid Şerif el-Cürcânî (ö. 816/1413) tarafından yazılanlar incelenmektedir. İbnü’l-Hâcib’in giriş mahiyetindeki iki cümlesi üzerine yapılan yorumlar mebâdî kelimesinin ilkeler ve başlangıçlar şeklindeki -ilki bilim teorisi ikincisi ise bilimlere giriş yazma geleneğiyle ilişkili olan- iki anlamı arasındaki gerilimi göstermektedir. Makale İbnü’l-Hâcib’in Muhtasar’ı üzerine yapılan şerh ve haşiyelerdeki tartışmalar üzerinden hem fıkıh usulünün tasavvur ve sunumunun felsefî bilim teorisi ve bilimlere giriş yazma geleneği doğrultusunda olduğunu hem de bu metnin mebâdî kavramının lügavî ve ıstılahî anlamlarını kapsayacak şekilde yeniden tasavvur edilmesini tetiklediğini ortaya koymaktadır. En nihayetinde, mebâdî üzerine yapılan tartışmaların bir bilimin birlik yönünü bilmeyi temellendiren etkili bir argümanı doğurduğu, ayrıca o dönemdeki yaygın bilim teorisine karşı ilimlerin esasında üç değil tek bir öğeden oluştuğu şeklinde bir eleştiriye yol açtığı gösterilmektedir. (shrink)

The death anxiety is one of the leading existential problems. Religiosity, on other hand, plays an important role in coping with death anxiety. However, studies on the relationship between death anxiety and religiosity have revealed conflicting results. The primary purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between religiosity and death anxiety and to identify possible causes of conflicting results. The study used a systematic review method to examine both correlational and experimental studies. The studies reviewed draw attention to (...) two important results. First, although there are generally inconsistent relationships between religiosity and death anxiety, especially intrinsic religious orientation is negatively associated with death anxiety. Second, mortality salience increases the religious beliefs of the religious while producing inconsistent results for the nonreligious. On the other hand, these studies have some critical limitations. One of these limitations, the measures of religiosity and death anxiety used in studies wide variety, and their reliability and cross-cultural validity can be problematic. Implicitly measuring religiosity and death anxiety can help solve this problem. Another limitation is that the experimental studies were very few and those that did were mostly done with participants from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Therefore, there is a need to conduct studies (especially experimental) from different religious and cultural traditions to overcome this limitation. The current review is essential to have better understanding the relationship between religiosity and fear of death and guiding future studies. (shrink)

Yūsuf al-Ardabīlī is one of the Shāfiʿī jurists who lived in Azerbaijan in the 8th century of Hijri. This scholar, whose birth date we couldn’t find any information about, even though it has been searched in both local and foreign literature, died in Ardabīl in the year 799/1397 as bibliographical scholars agreed on. Ardabīlī is a person known by his work al-Anwār li-aʿmāl al-abrār, which he dedicated to Shāfiʿī jurisprudence, and someone with jurisprudential knowledge whom Shāfiʿī jurists benefit from. In (...) his work on jurisprudence (furūʿ al-fiqh), al-Anwār, he discussed the issues without delving deeply into evidences and partially mentioned uṣūl al-fiqh. Yūsuf al-Ardabīlī addressed the topics in his work by classifying them as acts of worship (ʿibādāt), transactions (muʿāmalāt), inheritance (farāʾiḍ), marriage and divorce (munākaḥāt-mufāraqāt), punishments (ʿuqūbāt), the conduct of judges (adab al-qāḍī), and freeing slaves (ʿitq). Moreover, in his work, he provides explanations that shed light on recent studies by addressing the subject of fatwā in detail. By addressing the fatwā institutions, Ardabīlī includes information on topics like the etiquette of istiftāʾ, fatwā with sharīʿah tricks (ḥiyal sharʿiyyah), and exceptions in divorce (ṭalāq). Because no academic studies have been done on his explanations in this field, the subject requires further attention. Additionally, presenting his explanations on the fatwā institution to the scholarly community is greatly important for shedding light on future studies. Islamic jurists recognize fatwā activities as a duty that requires responsibility in terms of religion and worldly life. Therefore, they do not favor the participation of those who lack knowledge and the capability of deducing religious rulings from sharīʿah evidences in fatwā activities.This study aims to contribute to the Islamic jurisprudence literature by addressing the principles of fatwā procedure through Ardabīlī’s perspective in his work, al-Anwār. (shrink)

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal–democratic values, when in fact they are (...) compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal–democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought.” Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal–democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal–democratic settings. (shrink)