Violence has always accompanied human societies, and appeared in various forms of artworks such as movie, painting, and even cave art, but Persian painting by showing the utopian calm images surprisingly kept itself away from representing the violence, even in the scenes of war and slaughter. This paper aims to study the Persian painting –with focus on the early Safavid dynasty as the age of glory of Iranian art- on the basis of Žižek’s theory, to show that invisible violence floated (...) in Persian painting regardless of its extreme calm beauty and its different context from contemporary philosophy. Žižek categorizes the violence into three modes: visible subjective, and two modes of objective violence -Symbolic and Systematic - which are invisible and flow in latter layers. By going to deeper level of creation and content of Persian images which were illustrated in the court and on the command of rulers of the time, it is concluded that some elements of invisible violence such as strict law, visual symbols like “Qizilbash Hat”, the issue of the language, neighbor, fear of error, repetition of historical characters, extremism and nonviolent situation can be analyzed in the content or illustration of Persian Painting. (shrink)

The topic of disease mechanisms is of clinical importance, as our understanding of such mechanisms plays an important role in how we approach devising treatments for disease. In this paper, I critique an argument made by Mauro Nervi, in which he asserts that pathology is often better viewed in the context of distinct theoretical mechanisms. I use this critique as a starting point to argue that viewing pathology as a broken-normal, malfunctioning mechanism is more therapeutically practical and more relevant to (...) clinical drug design, than creating a theoretical separation of pathology from physiology. (shrink)

Retraction Note to: Topoi 26:221–229 DOI 10.1007/s11245-007-9015-yThe author has retracted this article published in Topoi Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 221-229, DOI: 10.1007/s11245-007-9015-y because it contains passages from the previously published manuscript by Mikel Dufrenne The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience , without acknowledging the source. The author apologizes to the Journal and readers as well as the author of the original work.

Application of technologies has an important role in agricultural development. Identifying and assessing the impacts of agricultural technologies is necessary. This study aimed at assessing the impacts of laser levelling economically, socially, environmentally, and technically in the viewpoint of the agricultural experts and identifying factors determining their perception of the impacts. The study samples (151 experts) were selected using multi-stage random sampling in Fars Province, Iran. The results revealed that experts considered uniform distribution of water, using conservation tillage, facilitating agricultural (...) activities, decreased water consumption and decrease of water wasting as the most important technical impacts of laser levelling technology. The most environmentally important impacts were the decrease of soil erosion and retention of crop residues. Experts stated the most significant social impacts as improvement in villages living conditions and sense of belonging to rural areas. Besides, an increase of income and reduction of inputs costs were among the economic impacts of laser levelling technology. According to the results, attitude towards water and soil resources conservation and environmental beliefs had the highest direct effect on individual perception toward impacts. Practical recommendations have been presented based on the results of the study. (shrink)

The conventional production model based on extensive use of chemical inputs such as pesticides is increasingly challenged. Organic agriculture is considered as one of the most important alternative agricultural systems to produce healthy food without any chemicals. Current models are not suitable for prediction of environmental behaviors. The current study aims to analyze the diffusion of organic agriculture to produce healthy food with the environmental sociology approach among farmers. The study was conducted using the survey research and multi-stage random sampling (...) in Fars province, in the south of Iran. The samples included 215 farmers. The reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed by conducting a pilot study out of the main sample. The results showed that the farmers have strong attitude to the environment and are for the most part, highly intentioned to perform organic activities. Based on the results, the farmers’ intention toward adoption of organic agriculture, environmental identity, and responsibility of pro-environmental behavior, and their moral norms play an important role to accept organic agricultural activities. There are also some effective factors in implementation of organic agriculture including farmers` increasing awareness about the principles of organic farming, controllability of environmental behaviors as well as their accessibility to the resources and facilities for organic farming. The study emphasized that the attitude and enhancing the knowledge do not lead to pro-environmental behaviors and organic activities directly. Using the models and environmental sociology theories is more efficient to explain pro-environmental behaviors. To this aim, some suggestions were presented to increase the adoption of organic activities and persuade the Iranian farmers to select this kind of cultivation. (shrink)

In this paper, using the tenets of Situation-Bound Utterances and referring to Pragmatic Act Theory, the verb mordan, and its different realisations are analysed among Persian speakers. Through the analysis of authentic talk in interaction, this study aims to ponder nonstandard meanings of the term mordan and its different SBUs. The primary focus of the study is on strings of linguistic events as well as the “conventions of usage” or cultural understanding that may lead to standard and nonstandard meanings considering (...) mordan and its different SBUs. The findings suggest that the SBUs regarding mordan, a neglected sociolinguistic context, not only is affected by its actual situational characteristics but also by prior context encoded in utterances used, which manifests culture-specific ways of thinking. Overall, 19 SBUs and 7 generic categories were identified with regard to the verb mordan in Persian. This paper exhibits that mordan is a versatile verb, which, when combined with situational/contextual factors, conveys different nonstandard functions that fulfil social needs. This study will also refer to linguistic features underlying SBUs that are influential in assigning various distinct meanings to the verb mordan in Persian. (shrink)

Jamais avant ces quelques dernieres annees on n'avait autant publie de livres, d'articles, d'enquetes sur l'Islam et les societes qui s'en reclament. Peu de veritables specialistes ont participe a cette agitation febrile, representee pour l'essentiel par une foule d'ideologues et de gens des medias. Une bonne part de ces ecrits de circonstance s'alimente, on le sait, aux evenements tragiques qu'ont connus, et connaissent encore, les pays islamiques et leurs prolongements de par le monde. Une avalanche d'essais, car c'est bien le (...) terme, masquant, aux yeux du lecteur presse, les trop rares etudes de qualite, c'est-a-dire proposees par des auteurs authentiquement informes de l'Islam d'hier et d'aujourd'hui. Le livre de Mohammad Khatami n'est pas seulement l'oeuvre du President de la Republique Islamique d'Iran, mais aussi de celui qui fut Professeur de Philosophie Islamique avant d'etre investi de la charge presidentielle. Aussi, a l'experience theorique du philosophe qu'il n'a cesse d'etre, joint-il celle, politique, de l'exercice du pouvoir. Ce livre constitue donc tout d'abord le temoignage interne d'un veritable connaisseur de l'Islam et de l'une des societes islamiques contemporaines. Mais il s'agit egalement de la tentative d'un specialiste de la philosophie politique, et notamment du philosophe du Xe siecle al-Farabi, pour rendre accessible un domaine historique fort complexe, non seulement a ses pairs academiques, mais aussi au grand public cultive, d'Orient et d'Occident. (shrink)

Exploring illusions of control in a wide variety of domains, the authors posit a practical way to minimize negative consequences.

Imagination has always been a mysterious issue for modern philosophy and psychology. In this paper, however, I will not deal with modern theories of imagination; instead, I will suggest an alternative notion of imaginal power by stepping back toward Persian illuminative thought within which we may glimpse a hint of a transcendent concept of imagination as the source of human subjectivity and its power to create the object and the world. My objective here is to extend some noetic aspects of (...) this concept and extract further conclusions theoretically. To this end, I will first introduce a brief account of the noetic characteristic of the Illuminationist perspective of the imagination, then I outline aspects of its efficiency which may shed some light on the modern debate on the subject and its relation to the object. (shrink)

Amidst the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and the reshaping of political systems in the region, the Iranian people remain mired in difficulties on their path to democratization. Much of this can be blamed on the gradual decline in activity within Iranian civil society and the stagnation of political imagination. If Iran is to have a future built on the solid foundation of a viable and legitimate political authority, Iranian civic actors must reimagine and revisit the notion of constitution-making (...) through sustained dissent and deliberation. Hannah Arendt's ideas are extremely helpful in this regard. The main purpose of this essay will be to explore how some of her most useful concepts may be applicable in the Iranian context. Briefly tracing the history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution, the paper then turns to a deeper examination of Arendt’s ideas to determine how they can foster resistance, civic engagement and eventual legitimate authority. The focus in the end will be on what Iranians can do to begin anew, to build foundations for the future, and to tell themselves a new story about their identity. (shrink)

This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalization and violent extremism. Its overall aim is to move beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ associated with this area of scholarly research best represented by its many slogans, metaphors and other thought-terminating clichés. By providing (...) conceptual lenses on issues previously compartmentalized primarily [or even exclusively] in security and intelligence studies or at the fringes of scholarly interest, radicalization and violent extremism turn out to be much more complex than ‘radicalization studies’ has been eager to acknowledge. (shrink)

Whitehouse adapts insights from evolutionary anthropology to interpret extreme self-sacrifice through the concept of identity fusion. The model neglects the role of normative systems in shaping behaviors, especially in relation to violent extremism. In peaceful groups, increasing fusion will actually decrease extremism. Groups collectively appraise threats and opportunities, actively debate action options, and rarely choose violence toward self or others.

Tan and Moghaddam’s ‘reflexive positioning’ expansion of Harré’s positioning theory provokes consideration of psychological factors underlying the discursive production of selves. However, it understates the issue, why do people appropriate particular positions, hearable in utterances, as applicable to themselves. Some of the theoretical ambiguities dissipate when positioning is approached from a personal-constructs perspective , which draws attention to personal construction of selves, as distinct from social construction, and describes the dynamics of individual continuity, though understating the concrete contextuality of (...) personal becoming. The present essay considers the compatibility of the personal constructs approach with Harré’s positioning theory. (shrink)

- A recent debate has touched upon the question of whether diseases can be understood as dysfunctional mechanisms or whether there are "pathological" mechanisms that deserve to be investigated and explained independently (Nervi 2010; Moghaddam Taaheri 2011). Here I suggest that both views tell us something important about disease but that in many instances only a systemic view can shed light on the relationship between physiology and pathology. I provide examples from the literature in systems biology in support of (...) my position. As a result of my analysis, I conclude that a perspective narrowly focusing on mechanisms is insufficient if the goal is to get a comprehensive picture of disease. (shrink)

The FactsIt has recently come to light that an article published on this journal in 2007, “On the illuminationist approach to imaginal power: outline of a perspective”, by Mahmoud Khatami, Topoi, 26, 221–229, extensively plagiarized parts of Mikel Dufrenne’s book The phenomenology of aesthetic experience . Entire passages from Sect. 4 of Khatami’s article turned out to be copied from chapter 11 of Dufrenne’s monograph, which was not even included in the list of references. This case of plagiarism (...) first surfaced in early November 2014 on a widely read philosophy blog, Daily Nous, in a thread of comments to a post denouncing similar alleged academic misconducts by the same author . I was first alerted of the matter a few days later, on November 15, 2014, by a fellow scholar who drew my .. (shrink)

Throughout Iran’s modern history, control of the public sphere has remained in the hands of the state. With virtually no trace of a civil society, public opinion has played only a minimal role in influencing state affairs. The 1979 Islamic revolution could be viewed as a break in this historical trend, but public opinion retreated into the background once the clerics solidified their power -- and then kept it by invoking religious orthodoxy to deflect any challenges. Thus, it should have (...) been no surprise that the press revolution, which began in the late 1990s as Mohammad Khatami came to power, collapsed a few years later. While an array of newspapers and journals are still published in Iran today, the persecution of leading editors and publishers with pro-reform sympathies has successfully cleared the field of any real threat to the status quo.The early theorists of the reform movement that came to be identified with President Khatami saw a free and independent press as a vital part of an Islamic Repub lic. For centuries, they argued, the state had used its control over the media -- first the publication of books, then newspapers and finally radio and television -- to push society toward the rulers’ desired ends. In contrast, the reformers saw a free press as the best way to foster open debate and political and social pluralism, unleashing forces that would allow society at large to determine its own fate. In other words, there could be no pre-determined end, shaped by fiat. Their chosen weapon in the battle for a civil society was the newspaper, a medium with a rich history in Iran of social and political activism. Persian newspapers, particularly those published abroad and smuggled into Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had been responsible for remarkable changes in the political landscape. They introduced liberal social and political ideas from Europe and provided readers with a new, simplified language in which to debate such notions. Most important of all, the early press helped create the very idea of society as a political actor in its own right. Within months of Khatami’s move to the Presidential Palace, his new appointees in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance unleashed a “press revolution.” They quickly streamlined the issuing of publication licenses; countered Iran’s traditional centralism by encouraging the rise of local and provincial newspapers; eased the financial hardships of independent publishers; and sought protection under the existing Press Law for controversial editors and commentators facing the hostility of the ruling clerics. The result was a wave of entrepreneurial and journalistic creativity unmatched since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911.By the spring of 2000, the hard-line clerics had had enough. They used their almost complete control of the public space to shut the door on the “press revolution” and to drive their critics, including many learned clerics, back into private dissent. Dozens of newspapers were closed and prominent journalists were prosecuted, most for violating so-called Islamic norms; anything like public discourse was forced back into the shadows. The ease with which the clerical establishment crushed the free press reflected the basic weaknesses and miscalculations of the reform movement. The senior theologians had established themselves as far back as the Constitutional Revolution as the final arbiters of freedom of expression under Islam. Without a wholesale re-evaluation of the role of the clergy and the very concept of freedom in a religious system of government, this power was destined to go unchecked. The reformers had also put too much emphasis on a free press, in the absence of any other real building blocks of civil society. Newspapers were expected to play the roles of political parties, of independent think tanks and, in the case of Jameah and Tous, of exemplars of social, political and economic independence. It was a burden the Iranian press was simply unable to carry. (shrink)

The Islamic Republic of Iran is no doubt an autocratic regime, where the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamanie, has taken it upon himself to micromanage the suppression of the opposition for many years. In this respect and in the eyes of most Iranians, the resignation and submission of the Iranian reformists, including the former president Mohammad Khatami, is puzzling if not downright treacherous. By appropriating the insight of an Italian Renaissance writer, Baldassare Castiglione, in his book, Il Libro del Cortegiano (...) or The Book of the Courtier, I hope to offer an alternative interpretation of the confounding position of the Iranian reformists. Contrary to its prevalent reading in its scholarship, which takes Il Libro del Cortegiano as an apolitical book, its more recent scholarship has discovered a political program, according to which in the absence of freedom aims to ameliorate the conduct of the tyrant through the actions of the courtier, who provides an example of honourable conduct and public service. I propose to adopt the ideal of cortegiano as a heuristic device that, when applied to the Iranian situation, can explain Mr. Khatami and his fellow reformists’ acquiescence that as a stratagem of resistance that, in the absence of a better alternative, works as the politics of the second best to make their “master” a better leader by offering an example of a more virtuous leader. (shrink)

By proposing the Microcosm and Macrocosm analogy for dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology, the authors of this volume are reviving the perennial positioning of the human condition in the play of forces within and without the human being. This theme has run from Plato through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modernity, and has been ignored by contemporaries. It now acquires a new pertinence and striking significance due to the scientific discoveries into the "infinitely small" in life, on the (...) one hand, and the prodigious technological discoveries of the "infinitely great" on the other. Both open up undreamt-of prospects for the continuing conquest of cosmic forces. The human person – thrown into turmoil by the new approaches to life and needing to acquire new habits of mind, having lost security of all beliefs – desperately seeks a new clarification of the Human Condition within the unity of everything-there-is, of cosmic forces, and of his destiny. The dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and phenomenology of life can show the way. Papers by: Gholam-Reza A'awani, Mehdi Aminrazavi, Roza Davari Ardakani, Mohammad Azadpur, Gary Backhaus, Marina Banchetti-Robino, William Chittick, Seyed Mostafa Muhaghghegh Damad, Golamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Nader El-Bizri, Kathleen Haney, Salahaddin Khalilov, Sayyid Mohammad Khamenei, Mahmoud Khatami, Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Nikolay Milkov, Sachiko Murata, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Daniela Verducci. (shrink)

During the last quarter of a century, Iran has undergone fundamental changes. The revolution was supported by a heterogeneous coalition of social forces, but it led to a war with Iraq and the stabilization of an Islamic regime. Since the end of the 1980s, four different types of new social actors have emerged in Iran: post-Islamist intellectuals; feminists; students as a nonrevolutionary, reformist and democratically minded group; and ethnic movements. These actors mostly (with the exception of some intellectuals) belong to (...) a generation which did not take part in the revolution; their aspirations and demands are totally different from those most characteristic of the revolutionary phase. The election of President Khatami in 1997 was a result of these changes. Since then, a stalemate has prevailed: the society is post-Islamist, whereas the decisive power centres are controlled by Islamist conservatives. (shrink)

This paper makes use of a new development in social psychology, Positioning Theory, the study of the way rights and duties are ascribed, attributed and justified to and by individuals in local social groups. It links this theory with a generally Vygotsky inspired approach to understanding the means by which people are brought into terrorist networks. Focusing on the use of the Internet as a device to bring mentor and novice together, the unique role of chat rooms and personal conversations (...) made possible by the Internet in this psychological process is revealed. Examining Vygotsky's ideas about the influence of a collective identity on the development of individual identities by psychological symbiosis in the Zone of Proximal Development sheds new light on the positioning of terrorist recruits. Incorporating Wittgenstein's concept of hinges into understanding the groundings of individual positions explains how the jihadist form of life turns on the unexamined grounding of beliefs about the non-believers. (shrink)