On the life and works of Rayacandabhai Ravajibhai Maheta, 1868-1901, Jaina philosopher, on Jaina philosophy and self-realization in Jainism.

Official documents, such as the Word Anti-Doping Code (WADC), argue that sport can be deemed a homogenous and unitary concept. Even where different sports have varying characteristics, the homogenous view of a given sport (‘a sport’ or ‘the sport’) persists. The WADC, international and national sport associations aim to protect the spirit of (the) sport. In this picture, the intersection of sporting integrity and legal processes occupies a vital place. The article will posit that, from a legal perspective sport is (...) heterogeneous due to its governance, regulation, adjudication, and enforcement structures. International and national associations, such as sport federations and leagues, have separate normative orders. These normative orders lead to differences in ensuring sporting integrity. A plural normative environment is inherent in sport; thus, we need to deal with it. The article will conclude that although harmonising norms and interpretations related to sporting integrity through national and global institutions may be acceptable, these must be achieved by promoting good governance and human rights. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation (...) of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life. (shrink)

Ibn Rushd presents different methods of reasoning. Each method differs in terms of its construction, level of assent, and the cognitive state it ultimately produces. Despite these technical variations, notable authors suggest that they are all equally valid and sound. I analyse this claim, and argue that although demonstrative and dialectical arguments are both valid and sound, there is a theoretical discrepancy between the two. Subsequently, I explore how underscoring this issue would motivate a non-classical/many-valued logic and a plurality of (...) truth in being able to make sense of the theoretical discrepancy. (shrink)

Volume 45, Issue 3, August 2024, Page 278-301.

For any putative excuse, why not recast it as a justification rendering one’s wrongful conduct ultimately permissible? This paper confronts the worry that many, perhaps all, excuses might collapse into justifications – either in morality or criminal law. It is an especially pressing problem for normative expectations views, on which excuses speak to a lower standard than justifications. I argue that the prospects for decisively blocking collapse within morality look bleak – at least if we adhere to an important constraint (...) of the present project. I want to see if we can block collapse without appealing to a substantive theory of moral wrongness or taking on robust theoretical commitments about interpersonal morality. This is especially important for criminal law purposes, though I concede that blocking collapse in morality likely requires substantive commitments. Accordingly, I develop a more ecumenical way to block collapse within the criminal law, although not morality. The key is to attend to differences in how the legislature can legitimately assign weight to reasons in determining which actions it deems to be wrong vs. how individuals can fairly be expected to assign weight to reasons, which is key to assessing culpability. Institutional considerations impact the former but not the latter. (shrink)

AbstractṢadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī (d. 1498) has proposed a solution to the liar paradox according to which the liar sentence is a self-referential sentence in which the predicate ‘false’ is iterated. Discussing the conditions for the truth-aptness of the sentences with nested and iterated instances of the predicates ‘true’ and/or ‘false’, Dashtakī argued that the liar sentence is not truth-apt at all. In the tradition of Arabic logic, the central elements of Dashtakī's solution—the self-referentiality of the liar sentence and the implicit (...) iteration of the predicate ‘false’—were initially highlighted in two earlier solutions proposed by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274) and Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 1322), respectively. Here I investigate all three solutions and show that Dashtakī's solution can be taken as a synthesis of the other two. None of these solutions seems to be convincing at the end of the day. Nevertheless, all of them include significant logical and philosophical insights. In particular, although Dashtakī's solution is not itself compelling, it is only a few steps away from a promising solution. The appendix to this paper includes translations of the relevant passages. (shrink)

Following Aristotle, classical Islamic philosophers distinguished between two types of knowledge: conception and assent. This paper argues that the discussions elicited by this distinction are an essential feature of postclassical Islamic philosophy (ca. 1200–1800). The early postclassical philosophers made the distinction central to logic and thereby to epistemology and scientific inquiry at large. As the distinction came to be perceived as problematic, it sparked philosophical arguments about a range of issues in logic and epistemology. One particularly pertinent problem was the (...) nature of the distinction itself: it was understood as an exclusive disjunction, but it seemed impossible to define one notion without recourse to the other. In the fourteenth century this led to the emergence of a new genre of philosophical writings exclusively dedicated to discussing the precise nature of the distinction. This paper discusses some of the central arguments of these writings, showing how philosophers grappling with that problem devised new theories of judgement and new forms of the proposition as they were continuously developing their theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Islamic theological contradictions are metaphysical contradictions as opposed to logical and semantic ones. I shall demonstrate that if these theological contradictions are tolerable on the theoretical account of metaphysical dialetheism, then logical space, despite being the space of all possibilities, does not accommodate them in virtue of Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’. To resolve this issue, I offer a recalibration of the modal concept of possibility. Doing so would redraw a demarcation between what is possible and what is not. Consequently, we (...) can expand logical space, so it is properly inclusive of all possibilities, including metaphysical dialetheism. Expanding logical space in this way would repudiate Chalmers’s ‘deep epistemic possibility’ and make room for Islamic theological contradictions. (shrink)

During his Jena period, Fichte endorses a curious dictum: ‘the kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is’. How can Fichte’s dictum support a vindication of German idealism over Spinozism, which he also calls ‘dogmatism’? I will show that the answer to this seemingly straightforward question reveals a rather complex series of metametaphysical objections that shape the development of the entire German idealist tradition. Ultimately, as I will suggest, the series of metametaphysical questions that shape (...) the German idealist tradition must culminate in the question of how to understand the relation between philosophy and its presuppositions. I will conclude by briefly considering a hermeneutical response to this question. (shrink)