In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and (...) theology. He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these developments. (...) In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. (shrink)

Morele perceptie is het vermogen om de bijzonderheid van een morele ontmoeting en de implicaties daarvan voor te stellen en te interpreteren. Met behulp van de ecologische benadering van perceptie die is ontwikkeld door de psychologen James Gibson en Ulric Neisser wordt in dit artikel beargumenteerd dat de ervaring van dansers een ecologisch model biedt om morele situaties en de handelingsopties daarin waar te nemen en te verbeelden. Dit model biedt een visie op morele actoren als zelfbewuste, belichaamde actoren die (...) hun handelingen als onderdeel van sociale praktijken waarnemen. Ook kan dit ecologische begrip van het zelf dat door dans tot leven wordt gewekt helpen om het vermogen tot morele waarneming en verbeelding verder te ontwikkelen. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

We agree with Lynch et al. that patients with chronic diseases and Band-Aid treatments are unlikely to benefit from a version of Operation Warp Speed or by deprioritizing standards of scientific ev...

I defend an account of God’s ineffability that depends on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental truths. I argue that although there are fundamentally true propositions about God, no creature can have them as the object of a propositional attitude, and no sentence can perfectly carve out their structures. Why? Because these propositions have non-enumerable structures. In principle, no creature can fully grasp God’s intrinsic nature, nor can they develop a language that fully describes it. On this account, the ineffability (...) of God is explained in terms of the inability of our language and mental capacities to grasp God as he really is. I will motivate my account by distinguishing it from a rival proposal. According to this rival, there are no fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature. I argue that this rival proposal faces problems that my account does not face. And unlike this rival and other accounts of ineffability, my account provides a fitting explanation of why God is ineffable. God is ineffable because the structure of his intrinsic nature is infinite. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating, and cannot be rationally accepted. I distinguish between two different ways of understanding this argument, which I call the "probabilistic inference conception", and the "process characteristic conception". I argue that the former is what critics of the argument usually presuppose, whereas most critical responses fail when one assumes the latter conception. To illustrate this, I examine three standard objections to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism: the Perspiration Objection, the Tu Quoque (...) Objection, and the "Why Can't the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?" Objection. I show that Plantinga's own responses to these objections fail, and propose counterexamples to his first two principles of defeat. I then go on to construct more adequate responses to these objections, using the distinctions I develop in the first part of the paper. (shrink)

Muslim physicians and Islamic jurists analyze the moral dimensions of biomedicine using different tools and processes. While the deliberations of these two classes of experts involve judgments about the deliverables of the other's respective fields, Islamic jurists and Muslim physicians rarely engage in discussions about the constructs and epistemic frameworks that motivate their analyses. The lack of dialogue creates gaps in knowledge and leads to imprecise guidance. In order to address these discursive and conceptual gaps we describe the sources of (...) knowledge and reasoning employed by Islamic jurists and clinicians to resolve the question of when a patient must seek healthcare. As we examine both the scriptural evidence and legal reasoning of jurists and the types of medical evidence used by clinicians to address the same question, we draw attention to the epistemic frameworks and constructs at play and identify how constructs from one field may sharpen the deliberative exercises of the other. Hence our work advances discourses at the intersection of Islam and medicine and offers building blocks for a comprehensive Islamic framework that fully integrates the deliverables of medical science within the deliberations of Islamic jurists. (shrink)

The Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological sub-traditions have each made characteristic assumptions about the human person, including an incorporation of substance dualism in distinctive manners. Advances in the brain sciences of the last half century, which include a widespread acceptance of death as the end of essential brain function, require the abandonment of dualistic notions of the human person that assert an immaterial and incorporeal soul separate from a body. In this article, I trace classical Islamic notions of death and (...) the soul, the modern definition of death as "brain death," and some contemporary Islamic responses to this definition. I argue that a completely naturalistic account of human personhood in the Islamic tradition is the best and most viable alternative for the future. This corporeal monistic account of Muslim personhood as embodied consciousness incorporates the insights of pre-modern Muslim thinkers yet rehabilitates their characteristic mistakes and thus has the advantages of neuroscientific validity and modern relevance in trans-cultural ethical discourse; it also helps to alleviate organ shortages in countries with majority Muslim populations, a serious ethical impasse of recent years. (shrink)

Emphasizing the embodied, physical aspect of María Lugones's decolonial feminism, this article elucidates ways in which the oppressed appears to colonizing gazes and beyond them in order to explore possibilities of resistance. It proposes “stillness” as a sentient physicality that can transgress the hold of racist/colonizing gazes and sense a multiplicity of worlds from a limen. In order to do this, it focuses on the temporality of “stillness” and on modes of appearing of resistant praxis.

While previous literature provides evidence of the positive relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction, the possible mechanisms of this relationship are still underexplored. This study aims to enhance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the ethical climate–job satisfaction relationship by identifying and testing two of the possible mechanisms. More specifically, this study fills an existing research gap by examining social and interpersonal mechanisms, referred to in this study as workplace isolation of colleagues and salesperson’s teamwork, of the ethical climate–job satisfaction (...) relationship. This is vital for the selling profession because job satisfaction is known to drive higher levels of salespeople’s performance. The arguments for such mechanisms are built on the foundations of social/psychological contract theory and ethical climate literature. Empirical testing using a large sample of salespeople shows higher levels of ethical climate to decrease workplace isolation and increase teamwork. Findings support hypothesized model where ethical climate positively relates to job satisfaction as partially mediated by workplace isolation and teamwork. Ethical climate is negatively related to workplace isolation and positively to teamwork. Further, findings indicate negative effect of workplace isolation on teamwork and sales performance. Job satisfaction is found to be key factor in driving performance of salespeople. (shrink)

The step between identifying the Research Object that we want to observe and the development of a reference frame to guide the investigation, in our opinion, has not received adequate attention as we help train researchers. Our bibliographical searches give us suggestions as to which aspects are mor..

Comparing Carol Gould’s Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights to other recent discussions of global justice, Dahbour argues that her work offers two important theoretical departures: It grounds global rights and democracy along foundationalist rather than constructivist lines; and it rejects the notion that just global institutions require the equal input of all those affected by their activities, defending instead that only those engaged in the “common activity” of institutions should participate in the decision-making. On the basis of this common activity (...) guideline, Dahbour argues against Gould that we should not move toward “globalizing democracy” (or political cosmopolitanism) because globalization has been mostly a project of U.S. Empire. Instead, furthering democracy andhuman rights requires the strengthening of local democracy and support of the global justice movement as an antiglobalization movement. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]. (shrink)

Notions of probability and uncertainty have been increasingly prominant in modern economics. This book considers the philosophical and practical difficulties inherent in integrating these concepts into realistic economic situations. It outlines and evaluates the major developments, indicating where further work is needed. This book addresses: * probability, utility and rationality within current economic thought and practice * concepts of ignorance and indeterminancy * experimental economics * econometrics, with particular reference inference and estimation.

One of the open questions in Educational robots is the role a robot should take in the classroom. The current focus in this area is on employing robots as a tool or in an assistive capacity such as the invigilator of an exam. With robots becoming commonplace in the classroom, inquiries will be raised regarding not only their suitability but also their ability to influence and control the morality and behaviour of the students via their presence. Therefore, as a means (...) to test this cross-section of Educational robots with the underlying issue of morality and ethics we conducted an empirical study where the Nao robot invigilated an exam for a group of students. A between-subjects design compared whether Nao was able to deter students from cheating and maintaining their discipline in comparison to a human invigilator or when there was no invigilator present. Our results showed that while explicit cheating rarely took place across all conditions, the students were significantly more talkative when they were invigilated by Nao. In conclusion, we discuss and speculate upon some of the ensuing implications towards not only the application of robots in education but also consequently the wider issue of the preservation of morality and ethics in a classroom in the presence of an agent. (shrink)

This paper argues for continuity in purpose and specific results between some hand drawn nebulae, especially those ‘descriptive maps’ by John F. W. Herschel and E. P. Mason in the late 1830s, and the first photographs made of the nebulae in the 1880s. Using H. H. Turners’ explication in 1904 of the three great advantages of astrophotography, the paper concludes that to some extent Herschel’s and Mason’s hand-drawings of the nebulae were meant to achieve the same kinds of results. This (...) is surprising not only because such drawings were conceived and achieved over forty-years earlier, but also because the procedures used in the production of these pictorially and metrically rich images were those directly inspired by cartography, geodesy, and land-surveying. Such drawings provided the standard for what was depicted, expected and aimed at by way of successful representations of the nebulae; standards that seemed to have been used to judge the success of nebular photographs. Being conditions of expectation and possibility for later photography, these drawings were themselves made possible by such techniques of representation and measurement as isolines and triangulation, so fundamental to Imperial and ‘Humboltian science.’Keywords: Ebenezer Porter Mason; Cartography; Draughtsmanship; Observation; Scientific Representation; Philosophy of Scientific Practice. (shrink)

This article is an interpretation of Alejandro Vallega’s “decolonial aesthetics,” focusing on his book Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority. This interpretation situates decolonial aesthetics in relation to figures in the history of Latin American Philosophy, and the work of Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Gloria Anzaldúa. It also explores the determination of decolonial aesthetics as an aesthetics of liberation.

Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111 c.e .) is well known, among other things, for his account, in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (Deliverance from error), of a struggle with philosophical skepticism that bears a striking resemblance to that described by Descartes in the Meditations . This essay aims to give a close comparative analysis of these respective accounts, and will concentrate solely on the processes of invoking or entertaining doubt that al-Ghazālī and Descartes describe, respectively. In the process some subtle differences between them (...) in this regard will be brought to light that are relevant to the comparative issue of the respective solutions at which they arrive. The latter issue will not be touched upon here, although the present discussion is intended as a prelude to a future treatment of that topic. (shrink)

Introduction -- Stout's proto-new-realism -- Situating G.F. Stout -- Stout's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities -- Stout and the Brentano School -- Representative function of presentations -- Sensible space and real space -- Cook Wilson's geometrical counter-example -- Stout's central question -- Ideal constructions -- Ideal constructions in psychology and epistemology -- British new realism : the language of madness -- Stout's criticisms of Alexander -- Alexander's response -- The nature of sensations, images, and other presentations -- What is (...) the metaphysical problem? -- "How can the interpretation which is supplied by the mind be a constituent of the [physical] object?" -- Some general remarks -- British new realism : the language of common-sense -- T.P. Nunn and the new realism -- Nunn and things -- Nunn's postulate -- Russell and Stout on sensible objects -- Russell, sense-data and sensibilia -- The methods of construction -- Russell's constructions and Nunn's postulate -- Constructions, psychology, and the essence of philosophy -- The methods of logical construction -- A mathematical development -- The principle of abstraction. (shrink)

How do groups—be they religious or ethnic—achieve sovereignty in a postnationalist world? In Self-Determination without Nationalism, noted philosopher Omar Dahbour insists that the existing ethics of international relations, dominated by the rival notions of liberal nationalism and political cosmopolitanism, no longer suffice. Dahbour notes that political communities are an ethically desirable and historically inevitable feature of collective life. The ethical principles that govern them, however—especially self-determination and sovereignty—require reformulation in light of globalization and the economic and environmental challenges of (...) the twenty-first century. Arguing that nation-states violate the principle of self-determination, Dahbour then develops a detailed new theory of self-determination that he calls "ecosovereignty.” Ecosovereignty defines political community in a way that can protect and further the rights of indigenous peoples as well as the needs of ecological regions for a sustainable form of development and security from environmental destruction. In the series Global Ethics and Politics, edited by Carol Gould. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions (such as those of Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan) that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions (such as those of Thomas Pogge and Iris Young) that argue for a (...) notion of redress or solidarity across borders. (shrink)

Como se sabe, el ensayo se ha convertido en una de las mejores formas de interpretar las realidades del mundo y de la vida. Su característica más significativa consiste en ofrecer un ejercicio de comprensión que va más allá de las explicaciones que suelen encontrarse en los textos atados a una disciplina. Valga señalar que es en el campo de las ciencias sociales y las humanidades donde se aprecian claramente sus privilegios. La versatilidad no afecta al rigor, la diversidad de (...) miradas se articula con la densidad de la argumentación, la historicidad aparece en sintonía con el presente, la intuición no es ajena a las formas conceptuales, la poesía se anuda con el ejercicio de interpretación. De esta forma, curiosamente, el ensayo logra dar cuenta con notable solidez, a través de diversas formas discursivas, de lo que varias disciplinas muestran o demuestran de manera aislada. (shrink)

In this work the author attempts two, rather different, tasks in rethinking the nature of Kant's contributions to political philosophy. First, she argues that Kant's political writings depart methodologically from his critical writings on epistemology and morality. This is the significance of her use of the term 'nonideal theory' to designate the distinctive methodology that is supposedly operative in later Kantian texts such as part 1 of the Metaphysics of Morals, and especially the essays on enlightenment, world history, and war (...) and peace. Second, she maintains that Kant's distinctive contributions to political philosophy derive not from entailments of his moral philosophy, but from specific theses he advocates... (shrink)

The publication of Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account in 2009 and of Richard Miller's Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power in 2010 have created an important occasion for reassessing the discourse about global justice that has arisen in the last decade. Above all, these books have moved the debate about what constitutes global justice in an exciting new direction by introducing important considerations previously lacking. But most essentially, these books give us an opportunity to assess whether (...) the concept of global justice is amenable, not only to exercises in liberal moral thinking, but also to radical social theorizing about deprivation and powerlessness on the international scale. Is there a new paradigm of radical global justice?While I will argue that, ultimately, neither author makes a definitive break with the liberal paradigm, this is not so much a result of faintheartedness or failure of imagination as a deficiency with the concept of global justice itself. I think it may turn out, once these exciting new works have been fully digested, that they are actually pointing the way beyond concern for global justice, in any sense of the term currently extant. What may lie "beyond" global justice will be the object of some brief speculations at the end of this essay. (shrink)

Chromosomal rearrangements frequently occur at specific places (“hot spots”) in the genome. These recombination hot spots are usually separated by 50–100 kb regions of DNA that are rarely involved in rearrangements. It is quite likely that there is a correlation between the above‐mentioned distances and the average size of DNA loops fixed at the nuclear matrix. Recent studies have demonstrated that DNA loop anchorage regions can be fairly long and can harbor DNA recombination hot spots. We previously proposed that chromosomal (...) DNA loops may constitute the basic units of genome organization in higher eukaryotes. In this review, we consider recombination between DNA loop anchorage regions as a possible source of genome evolution. (shrink)

Interest in postmodernity has stagnated over the past decade and has come to be partially replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these models into recent debates on globalization. Globalization theory has become the provenance of British (...) and American theorists because of a contiguity that extends back to a propitious model employed to understand postmodernism. Globalization theory in France and Germany are largely non-existent or tangential for similar reasons that find opposite tendencies. The spatial and temporal aspect inherent to both the modern and postmodern indicates that both already present a stance on globalization. Among the key factors predicting the fortunes of heuristic models is the continuation of classical theoretical concerns in the present situation of globalization. Post-classical tendencies in heuristic models indicate that more cloistered postmodern concerns do not transfer well to globalization. Those heuristic models that conceive of a postmodernist break are those whose application to present instantiations of globalization is subsequently limited. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be "neo-baroque"--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a "sign of the times" in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the "new science" to television series, video games, and "zapping" with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with (...) a refusal to distinguish between "Donald Duck and Dante." Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between "highbrow" and "lowbrow." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets.Applied to the special case of (...) differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

What Russell regarded to be the ‘chief outcome’ of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ‘classificatory problem’ that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a spatial (...) one, with such motifs as ‘standpoints’, ‘place’ and ‘perspectives’ in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell’s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem. (shrink)

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...) reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the "real" physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that (...) in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. (shrink)

In this book Omar Dahbour examines all of the arguments that have been given for national self-determination, whether by international lawyers, moral philosophers, democratic theorists, or political communitarians.