The introduction of computer-based information systems to be used by farmers, as in many other fields, is preceded mostly by great expectations. Some persons even tend to think that eventually the computer might take over farm management. This article tries to make an assessment of the validity of such expectations. Based upon a study among Swedish farmers, it examines the nature of farmers' decision-making. The latter is based upon an adaptive rationality, as opposed to the normative models (...) of formal rationality used by scientists. Essential to this rationality are coordination skills: the ability of farmers to arrange the many interacting factors important to the totality of a farm in a satisfactory way. What the farmer needs in this complex situation is personal communication and tacit knowledge, knowledge that cannot be reduced to facts and rules. Consequently computer-based information systems can be useful tools only in some aspects of farm management, but they will never replace farmer's decision-making. To understand the possibilities of the computer as a tool in farm management, a distinction between interpretation skills and application skills is necessary. (shrink)

The nature of mathematical knowledge can be understood only by locating the knowing mathematician in an epistemic community. This claim is defended by extending Kripke's version of the Private Language Argument to include informal rules and using Godelian results to argue that such rules rules necessary in mathematics. A committed formalist might evade Kripke's original argument by positing internal mechanisms that determine rule -governed behavior. However, in the presence of informal rules, the formalist position collapses into (...) the extreme skepticism that the Private Language Argument works against. The existence of a community of rule followers provides the only viable alternative to such skepticism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Laws Conclusion Bibliography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 87-94 [Access article in PDF] Talk and the Nature of Delusions:Defending Sociocultural Perspectives on Mental Illness Eugenie Georgaca Keywords discourse, social constructionism, delusions, psychosis, mental illness, context It is very pleasing to see writers from philosophy, psychiatry and psychology, the three disciplines represented by this journal, debating the issue of delusions. The majority of the papers in this volume set out to (...) determine the underlying mechanisms responsible for delusions. As such, they offer themselves as discussions of the etiological factors of the formation and maintenance of delusions. My paper analyzes the interactional presentation and negotiation of statements that would be considered as delusional. This led some commentators (Ghaemi 2004; Sass 2004) to argue that the analysis of talk about delusions is useful, but cannot be extended to claims about the nature of delusions. In the following section, I discuss the ways in which analyzing interactions can be useful in clinical research and practice. Subsequently, I identify and critically discuss the assumptions about the nature of delusions that underlie these criticisms and the majority of the papers in this volume. The Usefulness of the Study of Interaction My paper can be seen as part of a growing body of studies that attempt to elucidate the role of interactional and discursive processes in the identification and management of disorders (Barrett 1988; Coulter 1975; Hak 1989; Pollner 1975; Smith 1978; Soyland 1994). Microsociological and ethnographic studies look at the properties of client-professional interaction with the aim of clarifying the tacit skills and knowledges used in such encounters. Palmer (2000), for example, argues that the recognition of disorder is a social and interactional issue both in the sense that the judgment of disorder is based on social criteria and in the sense that diagnosis is an interpersonal process with its own inherent social order. The aim, therefore, of analyzing professional-client interactions would be to articulate the properties of this implicit social order. Other researchers argue that diagnosis is not a process of identification or recognition of disorder, but rather a process of active construction of disorder and of transforming the person to a mental patient. Barrett's (1988) analysis of the transformation of a [End Page 87] person to a "person suffering from schizophrenia" and subsequently a "schizophrenic" through interviewing and report writing is an excellent example of this kind of work.The application of this approach to the field of delusions would attempt to address the issue of how delusions are diagnosed and managed through the interactions between the delusional patient and the clinician. In this paper and in previous work (Georgaca 1996, 2000) I showed that statements that have been diagnosed as delusional are presented and argued through using appropriate conversational strategies, drawing on socially meaningful systems of knowledge and applying appropriate rules of evidence. Moreover, I argued that there was no way in which these disagreements over competing versions of reality could be definitely settled conversationally, and that instances of breakdown in communication were due not to the delusional version being proven wrong, but to lack of explanatory frameworks within which the competing versions could be negotiated. At least in the exchanges analyzed, the criteria of implausibility, conviction, and incorrigibility were shown not to apply.Clinicians do not customarily investigate the truth of patient claims against empirical data (Maher 1992), which means that they have to judge claims on the basis of the patient's presentation in the diagnostic interview. Because there are no technical guidelines for the assessment of truth and falsity, plausibility and implausibility, rationality and irrationality, clinicians have to rely on personal judgment. The question then is on what grounds the clinician's personal judgment is granted the status of determining the truth of someone else's claim and in what capacity clinicians are called to make such decisions. I will not pursue this argument any further here. The point I want to make is that the analysis of professional-client interactions foregrounds the active role of professionals in clinical decisions and questions the criteria upon which decisions are... (shrink)

What is the appropriate role for the political philosopher in a democratic society? One possible answer to this question is that she should use her expertise to provide normative guidance for her community. My aim in this article is to cast significant doubt on this view. I begin by endorsing a ‘qualitative continuity’ thesis about the nature of political philosophy, which posits an essential crossover between the activities of professional philosophers and ordinary citizens. I then offer a contextual (...) account of scholarly expertise, which views it as a status that is dependent on institutional recognition – rather than knowledge – and involves relational role obligations. I move on to argue that the authority implied by scholarly expertise cannot properly be extended to the normative political domain of a community. I then reject some potential grounds upon which such an extension might be defended, before briefly considering what a rejection of normative expertise might mean for the professional political theorist in a democratic community. (shrink)

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last several months reading Don Quixote—and that you’re all but fifty pages away from finishing. Unfortunately for you, the book was due back before you could finish, and so begrudgingly, you turn it back in, having not known what happens in the end. Riddled with curiosity, you make your best guess about Quixote’s eventual fate and suppose it is the most likely scenario. Entirely unbeknownst to you, it turns out that you were right; (...) Quixote’s ultimate destiny was just what you had supposed it would be! What luck! Quite naturally, we would say that, when all is said and done, knowing what happens to Don Quixote in the end is surely better than merely believing truly what happens in the end—the predicament you find yourself in having not actually finished the book. After all, it was just by dumb luck that you guessed the ending right—a point you could deny only on the pain of some embarrassing claim of clairvoyance. We might put the idea more generally by saying that from a purely cognitive standpoint, it is better to know the truth than to stumble upon it by luck. This general idea betrays two distinct insights about knowledge. The first is the insight that while true belief is valuable, knowledge is distinctively so—knowing the truth is valuable in a way that merely having a true belief is not. The second insight here is that you lack knowledge if it’s just by dumb luck that the belief you have is true. Call these the value insight and the anti-luck insight: Value insight: Knowledge is distinctively valuable. Luck insight: Knowledge excludes luck. In contemporary epistemology, and especially over the past five years, separate projects have arisen in correspondence with these distinct intuitions: value-driven epistemology is concerned with issues surrounding the first insight, and projects under the description of anti-luck epistemology have arisen out of the second. Now we might reasonably suppose that whatever it is that makes knowledge relevantly un-lucky would be something we could cite in accounting for what makes knowledge distinctively valuable. This natural idea reflects the thought that the insights about value and luck should not be entirely disconnected. There is a problematic tension though between this reasonable expectation and the resources epistemologists have provided for us to accommodate it. What explains the tension is the fact that value-driven and anti-luck projects in epistemology have by and large been developed apart from each other, each focused on one of our two guiding insights at the expense of the other. Consequently, value-driven epistemology’s focus on the normative but not modal properties of knowledge leaves these two aspects of knowledge disconnected much in the way that anti-luck epistemology’s focus on the modal but not the normative properties of knowledge leaves these same aspects disconnected. The lacuna here between what value driven epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge valuable and what the anti-luck epistemologists tell us about what makes knowledge exclude luck is troubling. We may resist that there should be such a disconnect if we avoid the common flaw shared by each of these projects pursued in isolation from the other. The flaw here is essentially one of naivety: that of supposing that we can give an account of knowledge exclusively in terms of conditions that would accommodate one of the two insights, while still managing to account for the other insight—which itself we did not appeal to directly in our theory of what knowledge is—e.g. in the analysis provided of it. This is the flaw behind the value-driven approaches that think about knowledge in terms of valuable properties they can’t explain to ensure modal robustness and the anti-luck projects that think of knowledge in terms of modal properties into which we can’t well smuggle the normativity needed to explain its value. To avoid this flaw, then, we should let both of these insights dictate the conditions our analysis offers as essential to knowing. The project with which I’ll be engaging here develops substantially on this widely overlooked and promising idea. (shrink)

The _Statesman _is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In _A Stranger's Knowledge_ Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the _Republic_, that the philosopher, _qua_ philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as _different _from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality (...) of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city’s stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city. Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the _Statesman_. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a “philosophical” attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drama on the Run:A Prelude to Mapping the Practice of Process DramaPamela Bowell (bio) and Brian Heap (bio)In the current educational climate prevailing in a number of countries, increased emphasis is being placed on the concept of "the artist in schools." Funding is being channeled to support a range of initiatives and schemes that are designed to bring arts professionals from all the art forms into the classroom where (...) they place their artistic talents, knowledge, and insights alongside the pedagogic skills of the teacher.We see exciting projects in which artists work with children in school—visual artists to create murals, musicians to compose and perform operas, dancers to choreograph new ballets, and actors and directors to devise plays. Many of the outcomes are of high quality, and the children who have been fortunate enough to be involved have enjoyed the experiences and have gained a great deal from them. This would seem to be a state of affairs to be applauded unreservedly, as such projects surely enrich the lives of the pupils and schools in which they take place. In one sense, of course, this is undeniably true, and we have no intention of suggesting otherwise. However, in reality, this is a much more complex situation. It raises a number of key issues for us as educational practitioners who work in the field of applied theatre, sharing with others, as Judith Ackroyd describes, "a belief in the power of the theatre form to address something beyond the form itself."1The most critical issue is the perceived separation of the artist from the teacher that can sometimes be encouraged by artists in schools projects. We sense a dangerous precedent here. It becomes all too easy for two erroneous assumptions to be made, namely that teachers cannot be considered to be artists in their own right, while artists on the other hand can be accorded [End Page 58] the status of teacher. In our own experience too, the nature of educational funding can be extremely volatile, subject to all kinds of shifts in the prevailing political and economic climate, as well as adjustments to the ways in which funding is applied according to the social and educational priorities of the time. Too frequently, education falls victim to what might be described as "the-flavor-of-the-month syndrome."Those who are involved with teacher education, both pre- and in-service, make superhuman efforts to respond with alacrity to the new demands as courses are reviewed and reorganized accordingly. The trainees of the next generation find themselves with a new "party line" to toe as their courses conform to the new priority. This is all well and good—until the priority changes and gaps suddenly appear in the knowledge or skills or understanding of teachers. What was received wisdom becomes a deficit model as focus changes, and the circle is now expected to be squared.Under these circumstances, it would seem a more prudent policy to train teacher-artists who would have the ability to meld their pedagogical understanding and skill with an aesthetic craft and sensibility than to rely on visiting artists as the "natural" or "normal" providers of arts education. This would ensure not only that teachers would make better, more informed use of visiting artists but also that children's expertly guided engagement with the arts would be a permanent and enduring aspect of their regular schooling rather than a "special" event subject to the vagaries of arts funding or policy. This might seem an easy statement to make for people such as ourselves, who have spent whole careers working as teacher-artists within the field of drama in education. But it might seem an altogether more daunting prospect for teachers, or intending teachers, who are not specialists in the arts.Having spent a great deal of our respective careers working in teacher education, we are very conscious of this possibility. To this end, our research collaboration has been centered on exploring and coming to understand more fully, clearly, and precisely how the teacher functions as an artist within the particular genre of applied theatre known as process drama. Embedded within the increase of our... (shrink)

al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273) was a scholar of tafsīr, ḥadīth and fiqh. He experienced both Western and Eastern civilizations in the geography of Andalusia and Egypt, respectively. In his famous Tafsīr called al-Jâmi li-Aḥkâm al-Qur’ān, al-Qurṭubī comparatively explained and interpreted all legal verses. Also, in addition to exploring the spesific legal rulings denoted in the Qur’ān and the Sunnah, al-Qurṭubī has largely interpreted the legal norms regarding the issues of jurisprudence. By doing this, al-Qurṭubī contributed to the formation and development of (...) a civil codification activity under a kazuistic format. The casuistic structure of the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān is anlaysed in terms of the form and content in the sample of al-Jâmi. Therefore, neither the similarity or similarity of the schools of the legal exegesis of Qur’ān and of the legal schools nor the disciplines of positive law, but their kazuistic structures, which systems they built and which interpretation methods and techniques they operated on this basis, were evaluated in terms of their original structure. In this direction, the article emphasizes that the casuistic structure of the legal exegesis of Qur’ān is established on and by the Prophet’s sayings and practices. Although, it has been observed that it is a unique tradition, both as form and content, and that the interpretation means are identified with its own unique structure, it has been concluded that the casuistic method is not one of the fundamental elements of both this tradition and Islamic legal thought. This means that the casuistic method is always a tool that can be changed and transformed according to the conditions of time and space.Summary: As it is stated in al-Isrāʾ 17/106: “And (it is) a Qur’ān which we have separated (by intervals) that you might recite it to the people over a prolonged period. And we have sent it down progressive.”, the Qur’ān is revelaed in about twenty-three years by taking into consideration the sociocultural positions of its interlocutors. The Prophet Muḥammad explained the Qur’ān by the virtue of the ayah: “(We sent them) with clear proofs and written ordinances. And We revealed to you the message (i.e. that you may make clear to the people what was sent down to them and that they might give thought.” (an-Naḥl 16/44). Of course, there is no subject integrity in this Qurānic chronology-which also reflects life. As a matter of fact, the issues related to individual and society have been independently analyzed by a casuistic/case-based method and ruled in accordance with the intention of Allāh. It can be seen that the ayahs “They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, ‘In them is great sin and (yet, some) benefit for people. But their sin is greater than their benefit.’ And they ask you what they should spend. Say, ‘The excess (beyond needs).’ Thus Allāh makes clear to you the verses (of revelation) that you might give thought.” (al-Baqara 2/219) and other ayahs such as (al-Baqara 2/186; al-Nisāʾ 4/176; al-Anfāl 8/1) reflect the casuistic method in terms of form and content. This can also be exemplified by the Sunna. For example, when the question “Is it permissible to perform ablutions with sea water?” was posed to Messenger of Allāh. He said that “It’s water is clean and his dead (fish) are lawful “(Abū Dāwūd, “Ṭaḥāra”, 41). By this answer, the Prophet Muḥammad indeed ruled and established a general rule.It can be said that this early example table formed the basis of the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān in terms of origin, source and application, and that its shape and content are often immanent in the examples it contains. In this article, based on the prophetic period, the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān and casuistic structure has been studied with an analytical and critical approach. Again, because the casuistic method is one of the universal concepts of east-west science and cultural life, an interdisciplinary approach was exhibited in this study. The roots of the casuistic method date back to 5000 BC and the legal systems of the society and states of antiquity are examined from this method. This method is chosen and used in the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān. However, this study does not analyse the sameness or the similarity of the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān and the legal schools nor the positive law disciplines, but the casuistic structures used by these, the systems they have built on this basis and the interpretation methods and techniques they have been used and analyzed in terms of their originality.In effect, the article embodies the Qur’ānic exegesis called al-Jâmi li-Aḥkâm al-Qur’ān by al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), a scholar of tafsīr, ḥadīth and fiqh. In addition to the works of the aḥkām al-Qur’āns, which deal with the interpretation of the ayahs related to the subjects of ʿibādāt, muʿāmalāt ve ʿuḳūbāt, many other works have been used in parallel with the development of the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān. al-Qurṭubī, who comparingly explained the legal verses in his tafsīr, investigated the aspects of the Qur’ān and Sunna that indicate the aḥkām, generally interpreted the existing legal norms within the framework of evidence and introduced his own opinions and etasblished his ijtihād. Thus, he benefited from the tafsīr accumulation and contributed to the formation and development of a civil legalization activity with casuistic format. As a matter of fact, the casuistic/case-based method has been used as a codification/tadwīn technique by Western and Eastern legal disciplines and systems. The casuistic method covers both concrete event and abstract ruling methods. In the casuistic method, which is fact-based event, the laws are organized according to all possible events that can be experienced. On the other hand, the abstract method, which is defined as the abstract ruling method, aims to organize the laws in a general and abstract framework. In the article, it is stated that the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān contains both concrete and abstract dimensions in its own way. It has been emphasized that the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān is based on divine revelation (waḥy) and that it is separated from human law as its origin and source, and that this feature is its most faithful characteristic. On this basis, the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān is a separate scholarly tradition and has its own definition, subject and purpose. Its original structure and function have been noted. As a matter of fact, the subject and purpose of the legal exegesis of the Qur’ān always require the tafsīr and taʾwīl of the legal verses having regard to the Qur’ān and Sunna. It is also necessary for the purpose of investigating the ways in which nuṣūṣ (an explicit statement upon which a ruling is based) can refer to the provisions and to resolve the issues related to individuals and society. As a matter of fact, the legal verses function as a guide for humanity until the day of judgment as the inspiration for religious-legal matters; they contain the content and provisions that offer happiness in the two worlds. (shrink)

Aristotle presents his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics as an ordered pair comprising political science (hê politikê epistêmê), suggesting an axiomatic structure of theorems that are demonstratively deduced from first principles. He holds that this systematic knowledge of ethical and legislative matters provides the ‘universals’ essential to phronesis or practical wisdom, and that its acquisition begins in sound habituation. Aristotle thereby assigns habituation an epistemic role that must be understood in light of his account of the nature of a science. (...) This paper argues that what would be inductively established by, or on the basis of, sound habituation is the supposition that the natural kind of activity constitutive of living well exists; it establishes the supposition on which Aristotle’s definition of a eudaimon life rests. Having addressed this central interpretive issue, the paper sketches a psychologically grounded position on the substantive philosophical questions at stake. Are there natural signs of flourishing and failure to flourish present to us in our experience of attempts to live well? If such signs exist but are not sufficient to qualify ethical beliefs as knowledge in their own right, might they play a role in a science of what is good and bad for human beings? (shrink)

Buridan holds that the proper subject of psychology (i.e., the science undertaken in Aristotle’s De Anima) is the soul, its powers, and characteristic functions. But, on his view, the science of psychology should not be understood as including the body nor even the soul-body composite as its proper subject. Rather its subject is just “the soul in itself and its powers and functions insofar as they stand on the side of the soul". Buridan takes it as obvious that, even thus (...) narrowly construed, such a science is possible. To the extent that this science includes the human or intellective soul, however, Buridan’s claim regarding its possibility is far from obvious. After all, like most of his contemporaries, Buridan takes the human soul to be immaterial. Thus, he readily admits that “the intellect cannot be sensed” and its operations are likewise inaccessible to the senses. Yet, on Buridan's broadly empiricist theory of knowledge, all (human) knowledge, including knowledge of the intellect or intellective soul, takes its start in the senses. How, then, is a science of the human soul possible? What is the nature or source of our knowledge of the intellect? In this paper, I reconstruct Buridan's answer to these questions. -/- My discussion divides roughly into two parts. In the first, I set out the main elements of Buridan’s account of how we come to cognize the intellect, focusing on what he says about the genesis of our concept of the intellect. I then consider his account of our cognition of our own intellective states. As the discussion in part one make clear, Buridan holds that our concepts of intellect and of intellective states are both derived (inferentially) from subjective “experience” of our own states and rational activities. In part two, therefore, I try to elucidate Buridan’s notion of experience. Ultimately, I argue that it is a non-conceptual, non-discursive mode of self-awareness. I suggest, moreover, that it might best be understood in terms of our own notion of phenomenal consciousness. On the interpretation I advance, then, it turns out that, for Buridan, our concept of the intellect itself and, hence, the science of (human) psychology in general, is ultimately grounded in phenomenal experience of our own intellective states. (shrink)

One of the most important issues in Islamic law is that either partially or completely, or temporary or permanently, a rule can be changed for a particular group of people or everyone. Since the concept of necessity can lead to a change of an important rule like ḥarām/prohibition, this concept should be examined meticulously both in theory and in practice. The thşs study aims to analyze how and why necessities make some ḥarāms permissible and to reveal the ultimate (...) cause for this ibāḥa (permission) from the point of view of Islamic legal theory and philosophy. To achieve this aim, first, the nature of the relationship between the prohibition and the act is examined. To understand how and why necessity gives permission to some ḥarāms, it is necessary to determine the changing and unchanging elements in the case at issue. In the case of necessity, there is no change in the nature of the act and the evil, which is considered as the reason of banning. Indeed, there is a change in the conditions surrounding the act and in the state of the obligated person. However, the main factor that enables the change in ḥarām is the change in the addressing of Shāri‘, who takes into account the changes mentioned. It is seen that the changes stemming from necessity do not lead to the same results as in all permitted ḥarāms. This observation requires a thourgh examination and elaboration on what the scholars of legal theory mean by abolition of prohibition and turning it into permissible. As a result, it has been observed that permitted ḥarāms do not equally function in terms of turning into permissible and that they do not have an equal effect on other acts in the field of mubāḥ. In that case, it is possible to evaluate the permitted ḥarām acts as al-maʻfuw ʻanh/forgiven acts. Although the act could be considered part of the category of mubāḥ, it would be more correct to place them close to the line of makrūh. From the point of view of the servant, the reason why necessity makes a ḥarām act permissible is the priority of avoiding greater evil. However, to reveal His sincere servants, Allah's command to them to avoid all ḥarāms even if they die, does not contradict with His wisdom. For this reason, the ultimate cause why Allah considers the case of necessity in passing judgment is His endless mercy. All these points helped reaching some broader conclusions about legal theory, as well as some conclusions specific to the case of necessity. It turns out that to understand how necessity makes some ḥarāms permissible, one needs to comprehend the relation between the act, the obligated person, the conditions surrounding them and the Shari‘ correctly. Understanding this relationship well is also extremely important to understand the theory of ruling and the Islamic legal theory. This research has substantiated once again that the issues addressed by the Islamic legal theory and practice are linked to the theological doctrines, more than, it is commonly perceived or considered. It turns out that it is important to know the deep or subtle differences between the terms such as ḥarām-ḥalāl, maḥẓūr-ḥarām, mubāḥ-ḥalāl, fundamental mubāḥ-ma‘fuw ‘anh, etc. as well as grasping each of the rule categories. Comprehending all these concepts constitutes an important step in acquiring a true understanding of religion and the maqāṣid al-sharī‘a. In this research, it has been proven once again that each category of the rule includes different levels of ruling in itself. The reason why the acts are categorized in different levels even if they are in the same rule category is the concepts of worldly and otherworldly; evil or good arising from the the ḥarām act. This study also confirmed that the obligated person is at the center of the law. This fact reveals how difficult it is to argue that the rules of Allah are based on divine will that is independent of and disregards the act, obligated person, and conditions. On the contrary, it is understood that the interests of the servant are considered both in the rules of necessity and in the whole of the divine legislation (and even the genesis). On the other hand, this indicates a legal system that is not inflexible and dull, but rather dynamic and parallel to life. Both the fact that the real and absolute source of the rule is Shāri‘ Almighty,and that a very large area of legislative was left to the mujtahid should be considered together. This truth has been observed once again in the matter of making prohibitions permissible on the basis of necessity, and the task of determining which evil is greater was often left to the mujtahid’s consideration. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

The contemporary consensus in analytic philosophy concerning cultural relativism is: it is impossible to formulate relativism coherently, diversity does not provide good reason for accepting relativist conclusions anyway, and if relativism is false, or incoherent, then cross-cultural disagreement, however intractable, raises no important epistemological challenge. I challenge every aspect of this consensus in the light of contemporary theories of reference and knowledge, focussing on various traditional cultures' supernatural explanations of illness. ;I defend the coherence of relativism against standard objections, arguing (...) that: it is possible to make sense of the claim that a sentence has different truth-conditions in different frameworks, while, in significant respects, retaining the same meaning; cultural relativism does not rule out the possibility of rational discussion between distinct cultural traditions; even self-referential relativist theses are neither self-refuting nor self-undermining. I suggest a distinctive way of arguing from cross-cultural differences to relativism, which is plausible, though inconclusive. ;I then argue that the alternative to relativism about rationally irresolvable cross-cultural disagreement is skepticism. Far from undermining the anthropological challenge to the objective justification of our beliefs--as might be thought--naturalistic epistemology and semantics themselves provide reasons to appreciate the force of this challenge, though they require us to rethink its nature. Reliability of belief production or regulation is not sufficient to provide knowledge, or even justification, in cases in which rival methods of belief assessment pose salient alternatives and there is no "neutral" reason for supposing one method to be more reliable. If, as I argue, neutral reasons for rejecting traditional methods of witchcraft detection are not available, then we do not know that witches do not exist. The resulting skepticism, however, would be a fairly circumscribed one. Most scientific beliefs we ordinarily take to be well confirmed--including beliefs about unobservable entities--remain so on the standards I defend. What proves less epistemically secure are the deeper metaphysical commitment to materialism and naturalism associated with Western science, commitments underlying our rejection of supernatural explanations of illness. (shrink)

At the end of the verses 44th, 45th, and 47th of the Surat al-Māʾida, it is seen that those who do not judge by what Allah has revealed are described as unbelievers, oppressors, and fāsiqs with the general expression. Especially in verse 44th of the surah, the fact that those who do not judge by Allah's revelations are characterized as misbelievers has been a subject of debate since the early period. Many different opinions have been expressed by the mufassirs (...) about who are included in this scope, who are the addressees of the verse, whether the” kufr” here is blasphemy in the form of denying Allah and leaving the religion, or is it a different type of “kufr”. As it is understood from the information in the sources regarding the asbāb al-nuzūl of these verses were revealed as the Jews destroyed the provisions set by Allah in the Torah, changed them with various ways, and discriminated between people in various ways and applied them. With the relevant verses in Sūrah al-Māʾida, all these injustices, lawlessness, and unfairness were made away and the Jews who committed them were strongly criticized. In this regard, it is seen that some commentators have devoted themselves to the reason for the verdict of the relevant verses and interpreted the characterizations in the verse as infidels, cruel, and fāsiqs as covering only the Jews who committed these acts. However, even if the information about the contents of the relevant verses shows that these verses are about the Jews, this does not mean that the scope of the verse should be limited to them. Because both the universality of the messages of the Qur'an in general and the fact that the address in the verses came in a public way do not allow these provisions to be allocated only to a certain group. In addition, according to the rules of istinbat, the fact that the reason for making a religious provision is specific does not prevent the generalization of it. When considered within the framework of the principles we have explained, it becomes clear that narrowing down the provisions of the verses by allocating them only to a certain group is not a correct approach. In this article, it is aimed to draw attention to the richness of meaning that emerges when the relevant verses are evaluated in terms of the types of indications in the fiqh method. When the verses within our subject are evaluated in terms of the types of indications, it is seen that these verses indicate that the implementation of a provision in force cannot be avoided. In the relevant verses, it's concluded that important principles and rules of law such as the realization of justice, the rule of law, equality before the law, no one's being privileged in the sight of the law, the powers of the head of state are limited, that there is no place for ijtihad where Allah's clear judgment exists. (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.3 (2003) 248-263 [Access article in PDF] The Incommensurability Thesis and the Status of Knowledge Maurice Charland The view that inquiry can be understood in terms of rhetorical theory can be traced to Thomas Kuhn's influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn is often cited by scholars concerned with the discursive strategies by which the natural and social or human sciences justify themselves and (...) their specific claims. Kuhn's legacy is well captured by Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey in the opening essay of The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (1987) where they link him to Stephen Toulmin and Chaïm Perelman as instigators of the study of the Rhetoric of Inquiry. In their words, Kuhn's landmark classic "challenges philosophy to account for the actual operation of scientific communities—their professional devices of communication and socialization, their political structures, their reliance on aesthetics, and their rhetorical dependence on persuasion" (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey 1987, 12). Despite this reaction, however, Kuhn's project was in many ways modest. He was not seeking to develop a sociology of science or a rhetoric of inquiry. He sought only to account for the form of modern science's history, which is not marked by linear progress, but by a succession of dominant frameworks, or what he termed paradigms.As I will argue in this essay, Kuhn's conception of paradigms is incompatible with rhetoric, except during scientific revolutions or under conditions of incommensurability. Incommensurability is a problematic category, however, for the opening it affords rhetoric ultimately undermines the very idea of paradigms. Consequently, locating rhetoric within normal science either undermines the very category distinctions that provide science with its specificity, or reduces rhetoric from a particular genre of discourse directed toward human agency to "rhetoricality," an aspect of all discourse. As we shall see, such blurring of genre distinctions is itself fundamentally [End Page 248] problematic, for science and rhetoric as discursive genres and practices are themselves incommensurable, even if not in Kuhn's terms. Rhetoric and revolution Kuhn observed that modern science is characterized by the bracketing of major disagreements regarding basic assumptions except during periods of "crisis." While pre-modern inquiry saw the contemporaneous co-existence of fundamentally incompatible frameworks, each competing for adherents, modern science normally excludes such divisions. Instead, modern science is characterized by a succession of frameworks. Only at periods of transition that are temporally bounded, for which Kuhn coined the term "scientific revolutions," does more than one framework have currency within a given sub-specialty (1962, 10-22).Kuhn accounts for this curious historical phenomenon by arguing that modern science is precisely constituted through an enforced bracketing of debates over first principles. The first principles, or paradigm, of any field are more than a set of epistemological or ontological assumptions. They are the set of rules constitutive of science as an activity. They orient scientists in their work, providing background assumptions, methodological principles, criteria of validity, a research agenda, and so on. The hegemony of a paradigm frees scientists from having to justify their work philosophically, socially, or politically. As Kuhn observes, normally science has the form of puzzle solving (35-42). He even likens it to a game, and like any game the participants need not concern themselves with the extrinsic validity of its rules or of the game itself. As Kuhn notes: Though many scientists talk easily and well about particular individual hypotheses that underlie a concrete piece of current research, they are little better than laymen at characterizing the established bases of their field, its legitimate problems and methods. If they have learned such abstractions at all, they show it mainly through their ability to do research. That ability can, however, be understood without recourse to hypothetical rules of the game. (47) Paradigms render modern science possible by producing practitioners and practices rather than by providing explicit knowledge of the principles such practices instantiate. In Foucault's language, we could say that practices are discursive formations (see Foucault 1972, 31-39). They are productive: [End Page 249] they give to knowledge... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 137-139 [Access article in PDF] Gareth B. Matthews. Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 137. Cloth, $29.95 Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith. The Philosophy of Socrates. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Pp. x + 290. Paper $22.00. Matthews' little book tracks the course of Socrates' perplexity, which, Matthews contends, starts (...) out as an obstacle to successful inquiry, but becomes, eventually, itself the target of inquiry. Matthews regards as quite genuine the perplexity that Socrates professes in certain of the early dialogues—Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro—largely, however, because Matthews himself finds Socrates' questions so stubbornly persistent. Yet, couldn't Socrates, at least with respect to some of his questions, experience no state of confusion, no perplexity, but, nevertheless, profess perplexity? Perhaps Socrates' confessions of perplexity signal only his awareness that he lacks knowledge of virtue; perhaps they are but rhetorical devices for encouraging Socrates' interlocutors to admit to their own ignorance.As the book continues, Matthews, following a line fairly standard by now, thinks that, in the "transitional" Meno, Socrates discovers two ways out of the perplexity: recollection, and the method of hypothesis; and that, in the "middle" dialogues—the Republic and Phaedo—the Theory of Forms comes to his rescue. In the Parmenides and, perhaps later, Matthews maintains, the Theory of Forms becomes itself the object of inquiry, as Socrates recognizes the perplexities with which it is fraught. Matthews mentions, but takes no stand on, the controversies surrounding the late dialogues, moving on at last to Aristotle and the different kind of perplexity one encounters there.For the briefest moment it looks as if Matthews might resist the standard line, when, in discussing the Meno, he notices not only that the geometrical problem of the Meno's slave-boy passage causes no perplexity comparable to that caused by Socrates' philosophical problems, but that Socrates is fully in charge in the geometrical demonstration, stinging another without simultaneously stinging himself. Yet, not only does Matthews fail to pursue his insight that moral or philosophical questions are, for Socrates, not like mathematical ones; on the contrary, he suggests that, in the Phaedo, philosophical problems are viewed by Socrates as mathematical ones.In The Philosophy of Socrates, Brickhouse and Smith undertake the ambitious task of expounding and defending a coherent and cohesive Socratic philosophy, one that encompasses Socrates' method, his wisdom and ignorance, his understanding of the nature of knowledge, his moral philosophy, psychology, politics, and religion. For a book meant to be a popular introduction, it is remarkably comprehensive—even [End Page 137] exhaustive—and serves to acquaint the reader with the current scholarly controversies surrounding Socratic philosophy as it is debated in the analytic tradition associated most frequently with the late and great Gregory Vlastos.In many respects, The Philosophy of Socrates is but an updated version of Brickhouse and Smith's earlier book, Plato's Socrates (Oxford University Press, 1994)—though without the rich and copious notes. The earlier book is the better one. The new book, although it purports to discuss the philosophy of the historical Socrates, is, from Chapter 2 on, a book about the Socrates of Plato's "early" dialogues. Yet, it is precisely this Socrates who is largely absent from its pages. The Socrates of the early dialogues is a character: both in the sense that he is a protagonist in the dramas that are Plato's dialogues, and in the sense that he is sarcastic, funny, makes bad puns, strikes at his interlocutors where they are most vulnerable, teases, baits, and annoys. But, most importantly, this Socrates is no solitary thinker. He talks to people; and what he says and how he says it is influenced both by his interlocutor and by the context of their conversation. Brickhouse and Smith, however, take such factors into account but rarely—and then only to save their own take on a particular Socratic doctrine.The two interpretive principles that Brickhouse and Smith invoke most often... (shrink)

What makes scientific knowledge possible? The philosopher Immanuel Kant in his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, had a fascinating and puzzling answer to this question. Scientific knowledge, for Kant, is made possible by the faculty of reason and its demand for systematic unity. In other words, cognition about empirical objects can aspire to be scientific only if it is rationally embedded within or transformed into a system. But how can such system form once we take into (...) account the perspectival nature of knowledge, i.e., its being situated in individual human cognitive faculties? My PhD thesis has a two-pronged objective: to reconstruct the complexity of the notion of systematicity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and to defend its plausibility in contemporary debates on the unity or plurality of scientific knowledge. As far as is concerned, Kant’s position is far from being clearly understood in the literature. Despite a renewed interest in Kant’s notion of systematicity in recent decades, existing contributions fail to offer a satisfactory account of it. The aim of my thesis is to provide a unified reading of reason’s systematicity as an essential feature of Kant’s analysis of the sources of cognition. In particular, I defend a novel account of theoretical reason the aims to support the following claims: systematicity is grounded in a legitimate use of reason’s ideas as prescriptive rules for empirical investigation; it is necessary to make empirical cognition possible and generate scientific hypotheses; and it gives us fundamental insights into Kant’s ‘empirical realism’ and his understanding of the role of metaphysics in science. With regard to, I show that Kant’s account of theoretical reason has much more to offer than generally acknowledged. In particular, I present it as providing a reconciling solution to the conflict between unity and pluralism in contemporary philosophy of science. Drawing inspiration from Kant’s ‘perspectivism,’ I argue that unity and pluralism are to be thought as mutually inclusive principles of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This study analyzes Siyāsatnāma tradition in Sunnī political thought in terms of exploring the problem of just ruling. In the relevant literature, the dominant approach considers Siyāsatnāmas as ethical advice in general and regards them as ineffective against an unjust ruler who has no ethical concern. This study criticizes this dominant view by claiming that in addition to the religious/ethical argument to promote a just rule, the Siyāsatnāma tradition develops a second argument designed specifically for an unjust ruler (...) who ignores ethical advice. This second argument is ignored by the dominant position about the Siyāsatnāma tradition. I have called it self-interest argument in this study. An unjust ruler’s self-interest is to maintain, empower, and hand down his power to his descendants. The self-interest argument tries to convince a ruler who dismisses ethical advice to adopt just ruling by revealing that even for an unjust ruler the best strategy is just ruling to reach for his worldly aims. Summary: Earlier civilizations generated a Siyāsatnāma tradition to provide ethical and practical advice to rulers about a just and efficient ruling in a society. This tradition played an important role in classical Islamic political thought. Muslim rulers and thinkers who are acquainted with this tradition as a result of early Islamic conquests. In the beginning, some Siyāsatnāmas were translated into Arabic but later Muslim administrators and thinkers wrote original Siyāsatnāmas by including their experiences and other Islamic sources. The Siyāsatnāmas put forward both ethical advice and practical methods for rulers to rule justly and efficiently their states. While ethical advises are mainly derived from religious sources and individuals considered to be holy, practical methods are gathered from experiences of rulers who became successful in establishing just, efficient, and strong states in history. The Siyāsatnāma tradition does not seek theoretical, abstract, and philosophical models of just ruling. Rather it relies on experimental reason, common sense, historical wisdom, and ethical reasoning. This tradition is called “Mirrors for Princes” in Western political thought. In the relevant literature, the Siyāsatnāma tradition is seen as ethical advice in essence. This approach argues that this tradition simply relies on ethical and religious arguments to promote just ruling without devising any institutional measures such as a check and balance system to constraint the authority of the ruler. In the absence of any institutional control over the power of the ruler, the ethical argument means that: If the ruler rules justly, he would be awarded in the afterlife, while if he rules unjustly he would be punished in the afterlife. According to this approach, without any institutional measure, the Siyāsatnāma tradition, in reality, leaves the problem of just ruling to personal preference and the conscious of the ruler. It is up to the ruler whether he rules justly or unjustly, for there is not any external constraint over his power, given that he does not care about the afterlife. If he has a concern about his salvation in the afterlife, ethical advice would be effective, otherwise, those advice would not have any influence over him. As a result, according to this approach, the ethical argument fails in the final analysis against the unjust ruler who has no ethical concern. This dominant view ignores a second approach developed in the Siyāsatnāma tradition specifically to convince the ruler who has not any ethical concern to rule justly. I call it self-interest argument in this study. Unlike the dominant approach’s claim, the Siyāsatnāma tradition takes the problem of unjust ruler seriously and appeals to his self-interest to convince him to rule justly. The self-interest argument is clearly aware of the limits of the ethical argument against the ruler who does not care about the afterlife. An unjust ruler’s self-interest is to maintain, empower, and then hand down his dynasty to his descendants. The self-interest argument tries to convince a ruler ignoring ethical advice to adopt the just ruling by revealing that even for an unjust ruler the best strategy is just rule to reach for his worldly aims. Many historical examples are given to make it clear that unjust rules are short-lived.The essence of the self-interest argument is that: The just rule creates trust both among individuals and the state and society, then this widespread trust awakens the desire of attaining a comfortable life in human nature. The efforts of the individuals with the purpose of attaining a comfortable life lead to social and economic development in society, which in turn increases the financial sources of the state. That is why a just rule is the only solution to create a strong state as well as a developed society. The unjust ruling on the other hand, leads to distrust between the state and society and among individuals. This distrust and fear from the state lead to deterioration of the economic situation, for the desire embedded in human nature to attain a comfortable life would not awaken in such a society. As a result, the ruler could not have the necessary financial resources, which would weaken his power. That is why the just ruling is the only solution that serves to the interest of a ruler who only wants worldly power. This study analyzes Mâwardî’s and Ghazâlî’s political theories to reveal the self-interest argument in the Siyāsatnāma tradition. This self-interet argument could be seen in Hobbes’ political theory also. Hobbes, as one of the founders of modern political thought, takes the civil wars created by different religious sects and ideologies in the 17th century Europe as his starting point to formulate his model of the state. Hobbes thinks that without social peace and order, there would not be a society. He offers a strong monarchy which relies on the unity of powers as a solution to establish a peaceful society. The only responsibility of Leviathan as a strong and effective state is to establish and maintain peace and order in society. Any restriction over individuals is acceptable to reach that goal according to Hobbes. The source of the authority of the ruler is not just rule but social peace and order. Yet, after securing peace and order, Hobbes argues, it is the best policy for the ruler to rule justly, for a just rule leads to both social and economic development and increases financial sources of the state. The Hobbesian argument is also self-interest argument that we could find within the Siyāsatnāma tradition. He tells the ruler that even though he does not have to rule justly, it is the best policy to serve his self-interest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Emotional Responding Is to Blame It Might Not Be to ResponsibilityR. J. R. Blair (bio)Keywordsblame, responsibility, emotional responses, psychopathyIn this interesting paper, Levy argues that by failing the moral/conventional distinction task (Blair 1995), individuals with psychopathy show a fundamental inability to categorize moral harms and as such their moral responsibility for their actions is reduced. He argues that, although we might still wish to (...) incarcerate such individuals to prevent them inflicting further harm on others, we should be less enthusiastic to blame them for their actions.In many respects, I agree with much of Levy's treatise. I certainly do not regard ascriptions of blame as useful in my own work with this population. I believe that our goal should be to fully understand the nature of their emotional deficit to be able to treat it similarly to other researchers who work to treat other emotional disorders. To me, Levy's argument appears sound.However, I offer three considerations and raise questions within these considerations that might further the debate. First, not all rules involve care-based emotional responses to victims. As Levy notes, this is the origin of the moral/conventional distinction. The problem here is that we do consider someone responsible if they break a conventional transgression. The student talking in class is generally considered blameworthy for this action as long as they knew that the rule of not talking during the lesson applied to that classroom. Yet, there is no victim and no care-based emotional response. Here, the only thing necessary to ascribe blame and responsibility is that the individual knew that a rule exists. Given this holds for conventional transgressions, why must we necessarily make a special case, with respect to responsibility, for moral transgressions?I believe that Levy is fully aware of this concern. He specifically makes reference to moral responsibility and writes that:the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, which attaches to infringements of the rules [against double parking or line-jumping] is very different, and usually much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs. For psychopaths, all offences are merely conventional, and therefore—from their point of view—none of them are all that serious.(2007, p. 132)But the danger here is that issues of blame and responsibility may become highly relativistic and hinge on the strength of the emotional reaction. This is a problem because, although we might judge someone as more blameworthy if he intentionally [End Page 149] runs over five people rather than one, do we really consider that there is a distinction in moral responsibility between these two cases? If not, might not responsibility relate to factual knowledge of the existence of the rule against the transgression rather than the emotional response to the transgression?Second, there is considerable debate regarding whether psychopathy represents a taxon or a continuum (e.g., Vasey et al. 2005; Edens et al. 2006). Assuming it does represent a continuum, then we have an additional concern. How little of an emotional response to the transgression reduces one's moral responsibility and blame? Is it only the very reduced (although usually not absent) levels of emotional response that are shown by individuals with psychopathy? Or should we consider moral responsibility and blame proportional to the level of the emotional response? If this latter option is adopted, then what should we do about individuals who show heightened emotional responses, for example, patients with specific anxiety disorders (Rauch, Shin, and Wright 2003)? There are already some data that inhibited children (a developmental precursor to some anxiety disorders; Kagan and Snidman 1999) show heightened conscience development (Asendorpf and Nunner-Winkler 1992). If such children commit moral transgressions, should we regard them as more morally responsible and more blameworthy than regular folks?Third, the issue of intention received little attention in this paper. I have been considered to show a similar lack of attention to intention in the past (Nichols 2002) and, moreover, in some respects the issue was of limited concern given Levy's main goals. However, I mention it because so much of whether we consider someone responsible for their actions and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 139 twenty years ago has slowly given way to an awareness that cross-cultural differences are real enough to call for different rules of behavior and different sets of values. Several possibilities are still open to the ethicist concerned with the problem of relativism. We may want to reconsider more carefully than ever before the connotations of "relative," of "action" and of "culture" in the context of those (...) anthropologists whose claims are said to be detrimental to ethics. Of these terms so crucial for what Moser calls relativism of right, only the first has been analyzed from opposite perspectives by Stevenson and Berlin. So far as I know, no one has treated "relative" as a relational term in the fruitful way suggested by Berlin.19 We may also come to realize that the issue of relativism is too much imbedded in historical and metaphysical tenets and thus is not amenable to the ahistorical treatment of the logical status of moral judgment. Thus we may want to rewrite its whole history by exploiting one of the best facets of Moser's essay. That is, a comparative study of the sociology of knowledge with the organic model of cultural anthropology. Lastly we may agree with A. Edel and consider the whole issue a closed chapter in the history of philosophy, and move on to the philosophically more fruitful investigation of the why and wherefore of moral change between generations and between historical periods. L. M. PALMER University of Delaware Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. By Seymour W. Itzkoff. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Pp. xi +286. $9.95) There is a sense in which the title of this book is misleading. To be sure, Dr. Itzkoff does deal with Cassirer and with Cassirer's neo-Kantian conception of scientific knowledge and of man. But there is more to the book than this. The first seven chapters are, in effect, a demonstration that "Cassirer left us with a difficult theoretical dilemma: the existence of two contrasting and opposed views of human nature" (p. 172). The last two chapters (pp. 172-252) are the author's attempt to bring those two views into harmony within the framework of contemporary science and philosophical analysis. The first two chapters (pp. 1-37) trace briefly the development of philosophical thought from the time of "the intellectual revolution set in motion by Galileo" to Kant's "Copernican revolution"--to the Kantian thesis, that is, that "the fundamental act of perception and the structuring of experience itseLf depend upon... 'transcendental apperception' as a 'condition of the possibility of perception itself'" (p. 27). It is the concern with "form and function" rather than with "substance and reality," which the Marburg neo-Kantians, and with them Cassirer, accepted as the lasting achievement of Kant's "critical philosophy." But Cassirer found in Kant also a "parallel concern... for humanistic disciplines" (p. 33) and, as "a central theme," the assertion of the "autonomy of human nature" (p. 35). The survey is suggestive but, in some respects, it is also inaccurate. For example, Kant's presumed "lapse into a radical subjectivism" cannot be justified by the reference, in passing, as it were, to the Opus postumum (p. 29)--although the fault is here perhaps that of Norman Kemp Smith rather than that of the author. A more ~o I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), pp. 96-106. 140 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY serious misrepresentation of Kant may be found in the author's acceptance of T. D. Weldon's statement that "the categories... supply principles which are... essential to the existing of a unitary self-consciousness" (p. 32), for this is precisely the reverse of the Kantian position. Also, it is hardly accurate to speak of "Kant's postulation of laws of ethical behavior" (p. 36), for, surely, the various formulations of the categorical imperative are not "laws of ethical behavior" but criteria of such laws. Chapters 3 and 4 (pp. 38-98) are devoted to discussions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Kant's initial commitment to Newtonian mechanics is, of course, a wellknown fact; but Professor Itzkoff quite correctly points out... (shrink)

This book explains exactly what human knowledge is. The key concepts in this book are structures and algorithms, i.e., what the readers “see” and how they make use of what they see. Thus in comparison with some other books on the philosophy of science, which employ a syntactic approach, the author’s approach is model theoretic or structural. Properly understood, it extends the current art and science of mathematical modeling to all fields of knowledge. The link between structure (...) and algorithms is mathematics. But viewing “mathematics” as such a link is not exactly what readers most likely learned in school; thus, the task of this book is to explain what “mathematics” should actually mean. Chapter 1, an introductory essay, presents a general analysis of structures, algorithms and how they are to be linked. Several examples from the natural and social sciences, and from the history of knowledge, are provided in Chapters 2–6. In turn, Chapters 7 and 8 extend the analysis to include language and the mind. Structures are what the readers see. And, as abstract cultural objects, they can almost always be seen in many different ways. But certain structures, such as natural numbers and the basic theory of grammar, seem to have an absolute character. Any theory of knowledge grounded in human culture must explain how this is possible. The author’s analysis of this cultural invariance, combining insights from evolutionary theory and neuroscience, is presented in the book’s closing chapter. The book will be of interest to researchers, students and those outside academia who seek a deeper understanding of knowledge in our present-day society. (shrink)

It has become commonplace in the theory of concepts to distinguish between questions about the structure and questions about the ontology of concepts. Structural questions concern the way concepts are composed of, or otherwise related to, other concepts (or non-conceptual constituents), while ontological questions concern the metaphysical nature of concepts: how concepts exist (if they exist); what kind of entities they are. A tacit assumption in discussions about the structure and ontology of concepts seems to be that structural (...) and ontological questions can be treated more or less independently of each other. Correspondingly, it might be assumed that one can rather arbitrarily combine structural analyses of concepts with any hypothesis about their ontological make-up. In this paper, we would like to question this assumption with regard to a particular recent development in the structural analysis of concepts, the so-called frame theory. As a matter of fact, most frame theorists adopt a subjectivist theory of concepts. Yet, subjectivism attracts philosophical criticisms, which originate mainly in the writings of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. While Wittgenstein appreciated the cognitive dimension of concepts, he came to reject the subjectivist’s causal analysis of mental explanation and their ensuing reification of concepts as causally operative mental particulars. Instead, Wittgenstein suggested that concepts are socially imparted norms of classification and inference – i. e., abstractions from collective word-usages and other practices associated with categorizing and higher-order thinking, which may serve as instructions for individual agents on how to discriminate and interact with things of different kinds. Applying the Wittgensteinian critique of subjectivism to the frame analysis, the we not only find that the frame approach quite nicely dovetails with what the pragmatist has to say about concepts and categorization, insofar as frames seem particularly well-suited to depict the defeasible and context-dependent default character of our usual criteria for semantical understanding. Indeed, pragmatism, with its emphasis on the holistic, indeterminate and normative nature of our conceptual activities, seems able to explain why concepts are frames. This shows that there exist at least some interconnections between structural and ontological analyses, which must not be ignored, especially in interdisciplinary investigations on concepts. Even if frame theory is not strictly incompatible with a subjectivist ontology, it does license an abductive inference to a pragmatist ontology of concepts, as frames precisely formalize the insights into our actual conceptual practice that led Wittgenstein to develop his pragmatist view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature of Proof in PsychiatryPaul Lieberman (bio)Keywordspsychotherapy process, knowledge and psychiatry, externalism, WittgensteinThis vivid clinical report illustrates recognizably, and provocatively, a number of routine, but often unexamined, clinical questions. In its few paragraphs, it depicts challenges that each practitioner confronts, and, in the flux of clinical work, addresses, however implicitly and imperfectly, every day: From what data, and by what processes, does a clinical formulation, (...) or way of understanding, come into being? How do we appraise its accuracy and adequacy? Of what value is even a well-substantiated understanding, in the mind of the therapist, to the patient? What is the power of empathy as a treatment tool? How do we assess someone's status as a “good candidate for therapy?” When, typically, only the outlines of a problem are visible, and its origins and implications are largely hidden, by what right do we recommend psychotherapy, and with what conception, at what level of detail, of what its outcome will be? These are among the questions that Dr. Bailey's story challenges us to address.They are clinical questions, of course, because they deal with empirical matters of fact—psychological processes, outcomes studies, and evidence. But they are also philosophical because, as Freud insisted and Dr. Bailey shows, information obtained in the clinical situation often has power and authority that lead us to believe we understand what is going on, understand the other person, even in the absence of scientifically tested hypotheses, or the clear application of research-based evidence. Interactions between people—including clinical interactions—have a life and ability to engage us. Their meanings can seem so transparent and convincing that no doubt or questioning may seem cogent. At their most powerful, such experiences can reawaken us to important realms of experience and feeling which we might, otherwise, forget, ignore, suppress, deny, or in other ways keep out of awareness; they have the potential to arouse us and reconnect us with truths that, once revived, can seem both valid and important—perhaps the kind of experience that we may derive from works of art or literature (in fact, Dr. Bailey's account could be seen as a clinical parable—meant to be neither true nor false, but instructive). But even less dramatic examples are commonplace: we do routinely claim to know and be able to interpret and understand the actions of other people from our everyday interactions with and observations of them.What is less clear is how to account for these convictions and how to appraise their value, because they do not derive from established scientific procedures. Clinical intuition has a role throughout medicine, but we usually expect it to be subjected later to more rigorous tests to establish the correct diagnosis. Yet, as Dr. Bailey's case illustrates, clinical intuition in the psychiatric encounter seems somehow different. When Colin [End Page 225] leads Dr. Bailey to the conclusion that a “painful lack of wounds” has made him depressed, we find this credible. It seems similarly credible that Dr. Bailey might be anxious about his own capacity to defend his young family, because he says he is, that he perceives Colin as testing his manhood or sincerity, because that seems to fit Colin's temperament, that being accurately understood is helpful, because most of us have had that experience and valued it, and that, most generally, an absence of challenge or of activity could be depressing. But suppose a patient believed that a painful lack of wounds produced diabetes instead of depression, or suppose he had developed epilepsy and attributed that to an absence of combat experience. We might see these as ‘pre-scientific’ or ‘hypothesis-generating’ (or worse). By contrast, it seems timid to consider psychiatric formulations to be always and only provisional or hypothetical.In what ways and to what extent should we expect psychiatry to be different, and why? Several considerations suggest that psychiatry's reasons are not, always and everywhere, the same as those of general medicine, nor are its objectives.In general medicine, we distinguish between signs and symptoms, on the one hand, and “underlying” disease processes, on the other. But in psychiatry, this distinction can be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 Paul Guyer. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 482. Cloth, $59.5 o. Paper, $x9.95. For several years now, Paul Guyer has been publishing articles on what he sees as numerous different strategies pursued by Kant in his attempt to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In this very long, (...) extremely detailed book, he has brought together the results of much of that work, added to it extensively, and defended at length a comprehensive and highly controversial view of the Deduction. The book has five major parts: on Kant's early views, on the deduction from 178187, on the "principles of empirical knowledge" (most of which is devoted to an elaborate reconstruction of the Analogies argument), on the Refutation of Idealism, and on transcendential idealism in general. More broadly Guyer's central thesis has two parts. In the first he tries to show that the more well-known versions of the Deduction are disappointing failures. According to Guyer, Kant variously tried to deduce the objective validity of pure concepts from the assumption that we do possess a priori knowledge of objects, from the assumption of empirical knowledge of objects, for which a priori conditions must be found, from a claim about a priori knowledge of unity of the self, and from the a priori conditions of empirical self-knowledge. The first three attempts are said to fail, all for somewhat different reasons, but all in a way linked to an implausible (and, to a skeptic, question-begging) premise about "necessary connection" in experience. Moreover, given this premise, these strategies all involve a commitment to very strong views about experience (e.g., it is necessary that any possible manifold of experience be subject to the categories) and to an accompanying claim about the mindimposed unity of experience, considered by many the "dark side" of Kant's enterprise. It is the last strategy that for Guyer represents the most philosophically interesting tactic and that constitutes the second major claim he makes. In this version, Kant is trying to show that "time determination," whether of objects represented in consciousness, or of representations themselves, empirically apperceived, can be shown to presuppose the objective validity of, at least, the Analogies. Guyer claims that this last strategy, while it represents the "original" idea of a Deduction entertained by Kant in the first half of the Silent Decade, only emerges in the Cr/t/que in the Analogies and Refutation of Idealism, and is only fully explored by Kant after the Critique's publication. It involves only a "conditional" argument for the categories ("if there is to be experience there must be objectively valid categories"); the categories are thus valid for whatever in a manifold can be an object of a cognitive claim, and are not "necessarily" imposed on a manifold per se. Guyer's attack on what he regards as the standard reading of the Deduction is far too detailed to address point by point. I can merely note three difficulties with his approach. First, he attributes to Kant a premise that goes far beyond the "standard" beginning contrast between the "arbitrary representations of states of the self as such" and the "rule-governed representation of an object." According to Guyer, all commentators (somewhat surprisingly) have failed to see the following: that when Kant makes this contrast, and appeals to the object as "that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united" (B x37), he really means that the "object" is that in virtue of BOOK REVIEWS 139 which the representations of a manifold are necessarilyunited 0og). This attributes to Kant the very strange view that empirical judgments are necessary truths of some sort, and even though Kant often explicitly denies this (even once in the course of the Deduction, at B142, cited but dismissed by Guyer), Guyer claims that only by such a claim can Kant hope to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In almost all cases of textual evidence cited by Guyer, however, it is possible and often much more natural to read Kant as claiming that... (shrink)

What is it that semanticists think they are doing when using formalisation? What kind of endeavour is the formal semantics of natural language: scientific; linguistic; philosophical; logical; mathematical? If formal semantics is a scientific endeavour, then there ought to be empirical criteria for determining whether such a theory is correct, or an improvement on an alternative account. The question then arises as to the nature of the evidence that is being accounted for. It could be argued (...) that the empirical questions are little different in kind to other aspects of linguistic analysis, involving questions of performance and competence (Chomsky 1965; Saussure 1916). But there are aspects of formal accounts of meaning that appear to sit outside this scientific realm. One key issue concerns the precise nature of the formalisation that is adopted; what criteria are to be used to decide between accounts that are founded on different formal systems, with different ontological assumptions? Indeed, is it necessary to judge semantic frameworks on such grounds? In other words, are two theoretical accounts to be treated as equivalent for all relevant purposes if they account for exactly the same linguistic data? Broadly speaking, there are two related perspectives on the analysis of propositional statements, one “truth conditional” — reducing sentence meaning to the conditions under which the sentence is judged to be true (e.g. Montague 1973) — the other “proof theoretic” — reducing sentence meanings to patterns of entailments that are supported (e.g. Ranta 1994, Fox & Lappin 2005 ,Fox 2000). Variations of these perspectives might be required in the case of non-assertoric utterances. We may wonder what critieria might be used to decide between these approaches. This brings us back to the nature of the data itself. If the data is (merely) about which arguments, or truth conditions, subjects agree with, and which they disagree with, then the terms in which the theory is expressed may be irrelevant. But it may also be legitimate to be concerned with either (a) the intuitions that people have when reasoning with language, or (b) some technical or philosophical issues relating to the chosen formalism. The truth-conditional vs proof-theoretic dichotomy might broadly be characterised as model-theoretic vs axiomatic, where the model-theoretic tend to be built around a pre-existing formal theory, and the axiomatic involves formulating rules of behaviour “from scratch”. In some sense, fitting an analysis of a new problem into an existing framework could be described as providing some kind of “explanatory” power, assuming that the existing framework has some salient motivation that is independent of the specific details of the phenomena in question. In contrast, building a new theory that captures the behaviour might then be characterised as “descriptive”, as — superficially at least — it does not show how an existing theory “already” accounts for the data in some sense. Here we observe instead that the argument can be run in the other direction. that a reductive model-theoretic account merely “describes” how some aspects of a problem can be reduced to some formalisation, but may fail to capture a subject’s understanding or intuitions about meaning. It is surely appropriate for the formal theory itself to be at least sympathetic to the ontological concerns and intuitions of its subjects — if not inform them (Dummett 1991). The alternative amounts to little more than carving out otherwise arbitrary aspects of a system that mimics the required behaviour, without a coherent explanation of why some aspects of a formal theory characterise, or capture, the intended meaning, but not others (cf. Benacerraf 1965). That seems an impoverished approach, weakening any claim to “explain”. Any constraint this imposes on what is it to be an explanatory account of meaning then faces the same problem as naive notions of compositionality (Zadrozny 1994) — that is, what appears to be a meaningful restriction is, in reality, a mirage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy by Jonathan HeadJudith NormanJonathan Head. Schopenhauer and the Nature of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. xviii + 183. Hardback, $95.00.It is a bit strange to read an overview of Schopenhauer's philosophy that does not center on the obvious and attention-grabbing idea of will, but Jonathan Head has brought a fresh and welcome perspective to the topic by focusing (...) instead on Schopenhauer's notion of philosophy itself. This perspective enables Head to paint a more sympathetic picture of Schopenhauer than is often the case—more coherent in his systematic pretensions, more consistent in his philosophical project over the long course of his writings, and (perhaps most surprisingly) more solicitous for the welfare of his readers.Head's thesis is that Schopenhauer analyzed ('diagnosed' might be a better word) the human need for metaphysics and constructed his own philosophy carefully to address this need. "The need for metaphysics," Head explains, "is a natural desire that all human beings have for explanation and consolation, in the face of the recognition of pessimistic truths regarding the world we live in" (xiv), specifically recognition of the "wrongness of the world" (51) and "the illusory nature of the principle of individuation" (70). Several quite specific metaphilosophical insights and methods arise from this seemingly straightforward statement. [End Page 528] For one thing, Head points out that explanation and consolation are rather different goals for philosophy, uniting theoretical and practical concerns in a way that might not be expected from a self-declared Kantian. But he argues for this dual functionality by tracing the notion of "better consciousness" from Schopenhauer's earliest writings to its evolution into a "denial of the will," a form of consciousness with directly salvific consequences (interestingly, according to Head, not just for the individual but intergenerationally), now rooted in a metaphysics of will.The second and more philosophically fruitful peculiarity about Schopenhauer's diagnosis of the human "need for metaphysics" is the manner in which it arises from "the recognition of pessimistic truths" (xiv). There is a lot packed into the notion of recognition here. Schopenhauer has a distinctive philosophical method that grounds philosophical thinking in intuitive apprehension of basic truths. And, as Head argues, while this intuition functions as the ground for truth-seeking, it also hampers philosophy as a discursive discipline, since the concepts in which truth claims are presented cannot capture or communicate the unique proximity to truth characteristic of intuition. Thus, philosophical truths cannot be communicated directly, and the function of philosophical texts is to inspire an intuitive insight on the part of the readers so that they are able to see for themselves what the philosophy purports to say. (Stoicism, for instance, is for Schopenhauer an admirable but ultimately limited philosophical perspective in that it develops a system that relies exclusively on reason without promoting a grounding intuition.) Head argues that insight into the basic nature of the will is the intuition that Schopenhauer spins his philosophy around.This has both metaphysical and metaphilosophical implications. As for the former, it means that metaphysics is possible as a discipline, even in the wake of (and while by and large respecting) the limits Kant imposed on epistemology. Metaphysics has an empirical aspect, relying on empirical cognitive sources to provide a worldview for which it provides a key. Head emphasizes the irreducibility of this "objective" perspective, for offering both understanding as well as consolation (namely, knowledge that we have cognitive resources that other creatures do not). But Head argues that Schopenhauer gives primacy to the (compatible and complementary) subjective standpoint, and in particular our (quasi-speculative) intuition into the thing-in-itself via insight into our own basic essence as will. This peek into a nonrepresentational reality provides the reader with a guiding intuition (and the text with a central thought) that has an "inbuilt [implicitly] inferential structure" (72) from which an extraordinarily fruitful set of implications follows for constructing a metaphysics of will.The implications for metaphilosophy are no less interesting, and the central claim of Head's text is that Schopenhauer carefully constructed his central work, The World as Will and Representation, to guide... (shrink)

Butchvarov is chairman of the department of philosophy at the University of Iowa. His book, a contribution to a new series, the Northwestern University Publications in Analytical Philosophy, deals with "the conceptual foundations of epistemology." It is divided into four main parts. The first undertakes an account of the general concept of knowledge. The second treats the objects of a priori knowledge; the third, the nature of primary a posteriori knowledge. The fourth part regards nondemonstrative inference and the (...) class='Hi'>nature of derivative knowledge in general. The focus of the book is upon fundamental epistemic concepts rather than such particular issues as knowledge of the future, of bodies, of other minds, etc. Butchvarov urges that such specialized problems be treated only after the general conceptual framework has been investigated, lest one's common-sense opinions on the former unduly influence his philosophical conclusions as to the latter. For the inherent demands of the discipline itself must be respected: "In philosophy, as in any other purely theoretical discipline, it is better to be wrong as the result of inquiry and argument than to be right as the result of mere conviction." One of the author's central conclusions concerns evidential criteria. One unquestionable criterion of evidence is the impossibility of mistake, the "demonstrative" criterion. Is there, in addition, any "nondemonstrative" criterion of evidence, with the consequent possibility of nondemonstrative derivative knowledge or at least nondemonstrative rational belief? While not ruling out the possibility of such a criterion, Butchvarov judges that at least one has not yet been brought forth. Particular criteria proposed as nondemonstrative, such as inductive and behavioral, either presuppose the demonstrative criterion or else lack intelligible content. More generally, the nondemonstrative criterion either would or would not possess something in common with the demonstrative criterion, such that both could be understood as species of the same genus, "criterion of evidence." But no successful attempt has thus far been made in showing just what this shared trait might be; and the thesis that there can be multiple criteria of evidence without any generic commonality equivocates on the very notion of evidence. It follows, therefore, that knowledge and rational belief are much more restricted than one would ordinarily surmise. This book manifests both the scholar's mastery of his field and the teacher's concern for clear, well-structured presentation. It reads well, employs good examples, and includes the all-important index.--J. M. V. (shrink)

In ?155 of his New Theory of Vision Berkeley explains that a hypothetical ?unbodied spirit? ?cannot comprehend the manner wherein geometers describe a right line or circle?.1The reason for this, Berkeley continues, is that ?the rule and compass with their use being things of which it is impossible he should have any notion.? This reference to geometrical tools has led virtually all commentators to conclude that at least one reason why the unbodied spirit cannot have knowledge of plane geometry (...) is because it cannot manipulate a ruler or a compass. In this article I will show that such an interpretation is flawed. I will instead argue that Berkeley's understanding of Euclidian geometry was based on Isaac Barrow's account of the foundations of geometry. On this view geometrical objects are conceived in terms of the idealized motion that generates the objects of geometry. Consequently, that what the unbodied spirit cannot do in this context is to form an idea of motion rather than being unable to handle geometrical tools. 1All references to Berkeley are from, A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (eds.), The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1948) The following abbreviations are used: An Essay Towards A New Theory of Vision, section x = New Theory x; Philosophical Commentaries, entry x = Commentaries x; Part I of A Treatise concerning the Principles of Knowledge, section x = Principles x. All other references to Berkeley's works are of the form The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, volume x, page y = Works, x, y. (shrink)

In the Hanafī madhab (school law), al-hukm al-taklifī have been determined in different categories, taking into account that the relevant evidence is conjecture-conclusive in terms of certitude-dalāla and whether the request is binding or not. In general terms, it is stated in the usūlworks that the orders and prohibitions that are fixed with definite evidence are fard and haram, and the binding provisions in which there is suspicion and doubt in their evidence are wājib and tahrīman makrūh. However, some “fards” (...) have been identified, which have stronger effects than “wājib” in the Hanafi fiqh doctrine, and which are subject to suspicion and doubt in their evidence, and therefore there is disagreement about their ruling among fiqh scholars. The Hanafī jurists of the later period adopted the concept of “al-fard al-amalī (al-zannī)” for such judgments. In addition, while examining the propositional provisions in the Hanafī Usūl literature, the wājib is generally compared with the fard. However, in some of the later usūl works and in many other issues in fiqh, wājib is compared with sunnah, and its connection with sunnah or its distinction from sunnah is considered as an important issue. In this article, it is aimed to clarify the nature of the “al-fard al-amalī”, which expresses an intermediate category in the classification of propositional provisions in the Hanafī school, and similarly, attention is drawn to the existence of some “haram” in the Hanafī school of which there is doubt. Some of the evaluations made by Hanafi jurists regarding the distinction between wajib and sunnah, taking into account the quality of the evidence, have been discussed and it has been tried to determine what is the ruling of abandoning the muakkad sunnah, which is often not explicitly included in the proposed judgment classifications made depending on the nature of the relevant evidence. In this study, it has been tried to make a comparative and chronological reading between the usūl and furū works in Hanafī school. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:46. HUME AND THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIETY OF NATIONS In the section of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature entitled Of the laws of nations (Section XI of Book III) he says: Political writers tell us, that in every kind of intercourse, a body politic is to be consider 'd as one person; and indeed this assertion is so far just, that different nations, as well as private (...) persons, require mutual assistance; at the same time that their selfishness and ambition are perpetual sources of war and discord.But tho' nations in this particular resemble individuals, yet as they are very different in other respects, no wonder they regulate themselves by different maxims, and give rise to a new set of rules, which we call the laws of nations. 1 He goes on to give examples of such laws:the sacredness of the persons of ambassadors, the declaration of war, the abstaining from poison'd arms, with other duties of that kind, which are evidently calculated for the commerce, that is peculiar to different.societies. (T 567) Hume then tells us in the next paragraph that such laws of nations may be added to the three laws of nature (that possessions should be stable, that possessions should be transferable by consent, and that promises or contracts should be kept) but that these laws of nations do not supersede the laws of nature; that is, they do not make the laws of nature irrelevant to relations among nation-states. In fact, the morality among nation-states involves the same kinds of obligations as morality among private persons, but the obligations are not as binding. The obligations of nation-states to each other can more readily be overridden by concerns of self-interest than would be legitimate in the case of private persons because nation-states are more nearly able to maintain themselves without external assistance than are individual persons. In Hume's words,... tho' the 47. morality of princes has the same extent, yet it has not the same force as that of private persons (T 558) because tho' the intercourse of different states be advantageous, and even sometimes necessary, yet it is not so necessary nor advantageous as that among individuals, without which 'tis utterly impossible for human nature ever to subsist. (T 569) In the last paragraph of this section Hume addresses himself to the question of the proportion these two species of morality bear to each other. (T 569) He says that we can never give any precise answer (T 569) and that the proper proportion is exhibited in the actual practice of the world. He takes this fact as showing that all men recognize that the rules of morality, both among private individuals and among nation-states, arise from human conventions, and from the interest, which we have in the preservation of peace and order. (T 569) When discussing the same issue in his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Hume is more succinct. The observance of justice, though useful among them [nations], is not guarded by so strong a necessity as among individuals; and the moral obligation holds proportion with the usefulness. 2 """ The moral obligations of individuals to each other is thus greater than that of nations to each other because keeping the rules of justice is inore useful in the former case than in the latter. But Hume did not live in an age of atomic weapons, long-range missiles, and precision-guided munitions. Furthermore, the nations of the world are now much more interdependent than in his day, not only with regard to where they get the resources they need but also with regard to what they do with their wastes. There seems to be little roo.? _or dtubt that the utility of following the rules of justice among nations is much greater now than it was in the eighteenth 48. century. Since a nuclear war might mean the end of the human species, the utility of justice among nations seems to be approaching, perhaps even surpassing, the utility which moral rules have at the level of private persons. In view of this changed situation, I intend to review what Hume has... (shrink)

In the Preface to the Discourses Machiavelli laments that the greatness of the ancients is “rather admired than imitated” by his contemporaries and expresses the belief that recurring to past examples would be most beneficial to those interested in “ordering republics, maintaining states, governing kingdoms, ordering the military and administering war, judging subjects, and increasing empire” (D I 2.2). Machiavelli is indeed persuaded that the laws governing human nature are unchangeable, and that the ancients can be imitated, since the (...) causes for their actions and the reasons for their choices are the same that determine the conduct of the contemporaries. Thus, an analysis of Titus Livy’s work on the Roman republic might shed light on the weaknesses and strengths of existing governments and encourage men to the emulation of past greatness. More specifically, such an analysis would make clear that the greatness of Rome lied in that both the city and its citizens enjoyed a high level of freedom. In fact, the city had sovereign power over itself and other cities, rather than being ruled by others. Besides, no social group had enough power to overcome the others: people were able to foster their interests by participating in the civic life of the city and by protesting against those public decisions which they found contrary to their interests. But what did this freedom exactly consist in? In other words, does Machiavelli conceive freedom as non-interference, or rather as non-domination, by others? Moreover, does he consider participation and contestation as constitutive of liberty, or rather instrumental to it? In this paper, I will first present Philip Pettit’s account of three alternative conceptions of liberty and indicate which of them might have been endorsed by Machiavelli. I will then consider the issue of contestations and tumults and of their role within the polity. I will argue not only that Machiavelli endorses a republican view of freedom but also that, in contrast to Pettit, he maintains contestations and tumults to be instrumental to freedom, rather than constitutive of it. I will conclude by claiming that Machiavelli’s and Pettit’s different stance on the value of tumults and contestations reflects the kind of freedom as non-domination in which they are interested in. Pettit supports a more democratic form of republicanism, in which not only groups but also individuals must be able to contest given decisions. By contrast, Machiavelli endorses a republicanism in which power must be distributed among different political figures within a polity. Dissensions are seen as a means for one of these figures, i.e. the multitude, to raise its voice when its interests are damaged by public decisions. In Machiavelli’s view, the end to which a state should aim is to be great, for which it needs to be free only at the collective level. Different means might be employed in order to realise this aim. Tumults are just one of them: the one that made Rome a great city, worthy of being imitated. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious (...) way, those institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 85-102 [Access article in PDF] Culture in the Disk Drive Computationalism, Memetics, and the Rise of Posthumanism Stephen Dougherty Ever since Descartes argued that there are striking similarities between a man and a clock, humanism has been in a state of crisis. To put it more pointedly, humanism has always been in a state of crisis, ever since it emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (...) as a constellation of beliefs that made man rather than God the measure of all things. Thus, since we are arguably witnesses now to the eclipse of the humanist tradition, we might take some comfort (if any is desired) in considering that if we have failed the ideal of humanism, it has also failed us. From the beginning its borders were too porous, its boundaries too ill defined. For even as man turned himself into a god, he increasingly began to resemble a machine.In terms of bodily representation, our machinic evolution through the last four centuries culminates in the figure of the cyborg; and if we have already become posthuman, as N. Katherine Hayles suggests, then the cyborg stands as the iconic pop culture figure of our epochal transformation. But you don't need electronic prosthetic devices attached to your body or silicon chips implanted in your head to be posthuman. As Hayles argues, "[w]hether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman" [4]. What counts especially, according to Hayles, is not the body/machine interface but how we conceptualize the workings of the mind/brain.In the humanist tradition signalled by Descartes, the subject is an I, an ego that is master of itself, a unified consciousness thinking itself. Before it is anything else, the Cartesian subject is a function of thought—ineffable and immaterial, and partaking in its nature of the divine and ineffable spirit that guarantees its communication with the material world. Thus, even though God has always been in the process of disappearing through the centuries since the Renaissance, spirit hasn't. Humanism never abandoned the concept of a spiritualized man, registering at the least a dissatisfaction with science's conventional claim to the possession of special and superior knowledge, and until quite recently dualism of one variety or another has been the normative philosophical attitude.But in posthumanism matters are different. To begin with, as Hayles puts it, "computation rather than possessive individualism is taken as the ground of being" [34]. Human consciousness is no longer that which thinks itself into its own unity, a mysterious phenomenon of infinite reflexivity that would become the central subject of, and the central problem for, modern philosophy. In fact, in the posthumanist regime human consciousness is no longer primarily a matter for philosophy, since questions regarding ontology and epistemology are displaced by the question of functionality. Cognitive processes are turned into syntactical operations similar to those that computers perform, 1 [End Page 85] and consciousness is reduced to mere epiphenomena of those machinic operations. 2Further, the cognitive functions of posthuman subjectivity are dispersed among a complex network of interrelated systems and subsystems (modules) responsible for receiving and interpreting data. 3 Consciousness thus loses the holistic unity it had possessed with a considerable degree of consensus from Descartes up to the behavioralists. Just as significantly, it loses its ineffability. The computationalists do not interrogate the mind as something beyond the grasp of scientific rationality because they do not approach thought as immaterial. Insofar as the brain has become a machine, mind is reduced to matter. In the new posthuman dispensation, then, philosophical dualism gives way to monism.Such an outcome would seem to suggest that the onset of posthumanism represents the ultimate victory for positivism and scientific rationalism in explaining human behavior. As Francis Crick explains in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, "the aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behavior of our brains, including... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Respecting the Boundaries of Knowledge:Teaching Christian Discernment with Humility and Dignity, a Response to Paul O. IngramSandra Costen KunzNatural Science and Buddhist Philosophy and Practice as Resources for Christian Spiritual DiscernmentBoundary Questions Arise When Teaching Spiritual Discernment in Western ContextsMy response to Paul Ingram's chapter titled "Constrained by Boundaries" in The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science1 will examine ways the Buddhist-Christian-natural science "trilogue" he advocates (...) class='Hi'>might address some recurring problems encountered when teaching spiritual discernment in Western Christian contexts. These problems are examples of what Ingram calls boundary questions. He describes boundary questions as issues raised within a tradition of learning (such as an academic discipline or a religious community) that cannot be completely resolved within this tradition because of the culturally constructed "constraints" of the scope of its investigations and the assumptions and methods with which it makes its investigations. Ingram argues that boundary questions push hard against the cultural constraints that define a tradition. He gives examples of ways these questions can engender renewal within a tradition of learning if they are addressed honestly in conversation with another tradition (or traditions) of learning. This requires humility, but such conversation can help a tradition distinguish between the cultural constraints that still sharpen its core discovery processes and those that impede its quest in its current context.I will argue that dichotomous habits of thought endemic in modern Western cultures have constructed unnecessary boundary constraints within Western Christian theological anthropology and practical theology. I have watched Western Christians who are trying to discover God's guidance through spiritual discernment slam up against these constraints, and I have listened to the recurring boundary questions they [End Page 175] pose at these borders. Dichotomous assumptions and methods of investigation often weaken Western Christian spiritual discernment processes.I will suggest that particular Buddhist and natural science theories and practices of discovering knowledge—and some of the knowledge these practices have discovered—can be useful in teaching Christians spiritual discernment. This is because they can widen the scope of what human beings notice. This scope includes what people notice in their mental imagery, in the practices of their culture, and in creation around them. Spiritual discernment, as I describe it, involves the interplay of human imagination and discovery with God's guidance of all of creation, including human imagination and discovery. The human side of this interplay is made possible by the human spirit that (following practical theologian James E. Loder [1931-2001]) I describe as those unique human capacities that (1) allow us to reflect on our thinking and thus make partially free unselfish choices, and (2) draw us toward loving harmony with our creator and fellow creatures.2I am writing as a practical theologian specializing in Christian education who has studied cognitive neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy and practice. My job is to prepare those who lead Christian churches and schools to teach Christians how to continue Jesus's mission to rescue this world. I believe the most effective way I can help Christian organizations engage in positive, long-term social transformation is to teach their leaders how to teach their members time-tested spiritual discernment practices framed within the context of Christian faith.Spiritual Discernment and Christian Spiritual DiscernmentI assume that all cultures and communities that have sustained a healthy life together have done so in part because at least some of their members have practiced at least some form of spiritual discernment. Therefore I assume all healthy Christian and non-Christian religious communities have developed practices of spiritual discernment. I do distinguish, however, between spiritual discernment in general and specifically Christian spiritual discernment. Drawing on Christian, Buddhist, and neuroscience perspectives on decision making, creative problem solving, and behavioral change, I describe spiritual discernment in general as a transformative "process of divine-human cooperative imagination, focused upon reconfiguring the relationships among the actors and the other factors in a specific situation. This reconfiguration often begins in the imaginative rearrangement of mental images of these relationships, and continues in concrete social actions which eventually result in the actual rearrangement of social structures."3I thus describe spiritual discernment as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Saving Honor:The Ideology of Equal Esteem and the Good of Honor, Friendship, and Glory according to St. ThomasDominic Verner O.P.In his book Natural Law and Human Rights, Pierre Manent assesses and critiques a practical ideology that he finds pervasive within the European academy and sees increasingly informing the practical sensibilities of much of the Western world. "Our governing doctrine," as Manent calls it, is chiefly characterized by the primacy (...) of right over law and the rejection of any objective principle by which actions and persons might be judged.1 It is "the plasticity of the human form" itself which demands respect.2 The only non-constructed and thus normative characteristic of equal human nature is the power of being an "individval-conatus," the power to be one's own rule and reason for acting.3 And the only generally recognized purpose of this "individual-conatus" is to satisfy the desire for power, which is the sole universal motive of human action.4 Such an individual can be legitimately ruled and governed only by himself, a claim reflected in the ideal of the autonomous subject and representative government.5 In sum, Manent characterizes this ideology in terms of a thoroughgoing [End Page 335] rejection of any objective rule, "any law of God or of nature," according to which man is defined and judged.6Manent warns that this ideology is opposed to the very wellsprings of action, since an operation is rightly called an action only when it is performed according to some deliberate choice, which requires some rule and reason. If all rules and reasons are entirely self-generated, then there is no principle according to which deliberation might occur. Such a so-called autonomous subject purports to command himself, but in fact he is more patient than agent: the subject is moved by desires and preferences which cannot be weighed according to any discriminatory rule or principle, since the desires and preferences themselves are the only rule the subject acknowledges. Aside from submitting to the movement of the inexplicably strongest preference, the only positive reason for acting that remains is to destroy any vestiges of objective rules or reasons for acting—that is, the law—that might hinder the realization of individual preference: "The acting animal is now the prisoner of the very audacious and ingenious arrangement that he once devised to escape the urgency and to avoid the difficulty of the practical question. Caught in the realm of inaction, he seeks out, in a kind of terminal fever, the last corners of social existence that still escape the laissez-faire idea and where the very idea of the law might suffer its final defeat."7What is a Christian to make of this practical ideology? What natural inclinations does it privilege and how might the goods it seeks be sought rightly? Manent argues that the sole universal motive for action explicitly recognized by this practical ideology is a certain kind of power: the power of self-determination. According to the governing doctrine, this power is the only universal human motive that can be relied upon to construct common life and political order. Manent's response to this ideology is therefore to propose a recovery of a natural law account of the heterogeneity of universal human motivations to include useful, pleasing, and honorable goods. In this article, I will argue that Manent's own account of the ideology he critiques suggests a more fundamental motive driving the ideology, namely, a desire for an unassailable esteem. And since it is a desire for esteem that best explains the attractiveness of the ideology of modern freedom, an alternative vision of practical life will need to address the desire for esteem and articulate its proper bases. In advancing this argument, I will first show that Manent's own analysis highlights the importance of the desire for esteem in motivating the ideology of modern freedom. I will then turn to the anthropology of Thomas [End Page 336] Aquinas to show that the desire for esteem is manifested in the desire for honor and for friendship and is rooted in a fundamental inclination to have certain knowledge of one's... (shrink)

We would be wrong to state that Plato’s approach to the Golden Age in the Statesman occurs through nostalgia, even if he stresses the immense distance between our world and that blessed time. After evoking the shepherd-god as a ruler, Plato shows that the completely abandoned disposition of the ruled is only justifiable in presence of an unbridgeable chasm between the two, such as that between gods and men, or men and beasts. The real question in the (...) class='Hi'>Statesman is how to single out the peculiar form of knowledge possessed by the few men that are truly capable to rule. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the HumanAmanda Anderson (bio)Satya P. Mohanty. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.Martha C. Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.It is arguably a peculiar fact that a book announcing itself as a defense of objectivity and realism would begin by assuring readers of the political efficacy (...) of its theories. After all, the critique of objectivity and realism within progressive cultural criticism of the past several decades has taken for granted that claims to objectivity and realism are suspicious in part because of their pretense to value-neutrality. But Satya P. Mohanty’s ambitious and wide-ranging Literary Theory and the Claims of History joins with other recent attempts to lay claim to a refurbished realism that not only overcomes variously construed limitations of postmodernism but fully answers to the charges leveled against “traditional” objectivity or “naïve” realism [see Alcoff; Livingston]. Such a project can in part be analyzed against a broader critique of postmodernism and poststructuralism advanced through reconsideration of Enlightenment ideals, including, most prominently, the ideals of universalism and its less abstract cousin, cosmopolitanism [see Anderson]. The reconstructions of both universalism and realism have claimed a greater intellectual integrity and coherence than the forms of postmodernism that they challenge and a more promising ethico-political vision, one that more convincingly acknowledges the place and claims of marginalized others. These reconstructive projects thus fundamentally challenge the familiar postmodernist idea that claims to universalism or objectivity themselves enact forms of privilege or exclusion that inherently disable any properly egalitarian or nonviolent relation to others.Mohanty would appear to combine the universalist and realist ambitions, insofar as he asserts a moral position based on Kantian notions of autonomy and dignity at the same time that, in epistemological terms, he elaborates a “postpositivist realist alternative.” Maintaining that the critique of objectivity within postmodernism is propped up by an outdated understanding of scientific method and theory, he argues that the more sophisticated theories within current philosophy of science elaborate epistemological models that are fully compatible with a generalized hermeneutical method, precisely because they acknowledge both the theory-laden nature of all inquiry and the larger social and historical contexts of knowledge and experience. Before elaborating this realist alternative, however, Mohanty situates his project by forwarding a number of critiques of “constructivist postmodernism,” critiques that enable us to better gauge the motivations behind his work. Foregrounded at the start are what Mohanty sees as the [End Page 3] harmful political and ethical consequences of relativism, skepticism, and constructivism. According to Mohanty, while the claims for diversity and difference in the 1960s “had a political edge,” at this historical moment they are used primarily for conservative ends, via a state-sponsored bland multiculturalism that diverts attention from the blunt material issues of race politics [17]. In broader ethico-political terms, moreover, relativist arguments that display skepticism toward the possibilities for rational exchange between variously construed collectivities and cultures lead not to a proper respect for the other but rather to indifference. As Mohanty puts it, to deny the possibility of “general criteria” for “interpretive validity” is “to assert that all spaces are equivalent, that they have equal value, that since the lowest common principle of evaluation is all that I can invoke, I cannot—and consequently need not—think about how your space impinges on mine or how my history is defined together with yours. If that is the case, I may have started by declaring a pious political wish, but I end by denying that I need to take you seriously” [131; Mohanty’s emphasis].Beyond these harmful consequences, however, lies a more fundamental problem. In its monolithic assault on Western Reason and the unified subject of humanism, constructivist postmodernism has deprived itself of any coherent account of human agency and rationality. Without a philosophical anthropology establishing the “capacities, tasks, and limits that might make up a specifically human existence,” Mohanty argues, it becomes impossible to account properly for cultural practices and historical agency, for the self-understanding of cultures and the historical transformations they enact [138... (shrink)

The emotions are at the centre of our lives and, for better or worse, imbue them with much of their significance. The philosophical problems stirred up by the existence of the emotions, over which many great philosophers of the past have laboured, revolve around attempts to understand what this significance amounts to. Are emotions feelings, thoughts, or experiences? If they are experiences, what are they experiences of? Are emotions rational? In what sense do emotions give meaning to (...) what surrounds us? -/- The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction introduces and explores these questions in a clear and accessible way. The authors discuss the following key topics: -/- the diversity and unity of the emotions the relations between emotion, belief and desire the nature of values the relations between emotions and perceptions emotions viewed as evaluative attitudes the link between emotions and evaluative knowledge the nature of moods, sentiments, and character traits. -/- Including chapter summaries and guides to further reading, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal starting point for any philosopher or student studying the emotions. It will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as psychology and the social sciences. (shrink)

The central claim of Aristotelian naturalism is that moral goodness is a kind of species-specific natural goodness. Aristotelian naturalism has recently enjoyed a resurgence in the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. However, any view that takes moral goodness to be a type of natural goodness faces a challenge: Granting that moral goodness is natural goodness for human beings, why should we care about being good human beings? Given that we are rational creatures (...) who can ‘step back’ from our nature, why should we see human nature as authoritative for us? This is the authority-of-nature challenge. In this essay, I state this challenge clearly, identify its deep motivation, and distinguish it from other criticisms of Aristotelian naturalism. I also articulate what I consider the best response, which I term the practical reason response. This response, however, exposes Aristotelian naturalism to a new criticism – that it has abandoned the naturalist claim that moral goodness is species-specific natural goodness. Thus, I argue, Aristotelian naturalists appear to face a dilemma: Either they cannot answer the authority-of-nature challenge, or in meeting the challenge they must abandon naturalism. Aristotelian naturalists might overcome this dilemma, but doing so is harder than some Aristotelians have supposed. In the final sections of the paper, I examine the difficulties in overcoming the dilemma, and I suggest ways that Aristotelians might answer the authority-of-nature challenge while preserving naturalism. (shrink)

Insofar as empirical inquiry involves the coevolution of descriptive language and theoretical commitments, a satisfactory model of empirical knowledge should describe the coordinated evolution of both language and theory. But since we do not know what conceptual resources we might need to express our future theories or to provide our best future faithful descriptions of the world, we do not now know even what the space of future descriptive options might be. One strategy for addressing this (...) shifting-resource problem is to track the predictive and linguistic dispositions of inquirers rather than to track their theories and conceptual resources directly. Sender-predictor games, a variant of Skyrms–Lewis sender-receiver games, provide very simple models for the coordinated coevolution of predictive and linguistic dispositions. Such models explain how it is possible for (1) predictive and descriptive dispositions of inquirers to coevolve, (2) term-wise incommensurable, but nevertheless descriptively faithful languages, to sequentially evolve, and (3) a sort of underdetermination to occur where inquirers might satisfy their descriptive and predictive aims by revising their linguistic dispositions, their theoretical dispositions, or both. Such models also provide an elementary characterization of what it might mean for descriptions of the world to be faithful and hence for empirical inquiry to be successful. In doing so they provide a relatively weak, but perfectly clear, endogenous account of epistemic norms. (shrink)

While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and (...) organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own. (shrink)

The author emphasize the fact, that the world of really existing compound and distinct things leads to the first questions in our spontaneous cognition of the world, such as: "What is it?", "What for?" Spontaneous cognition thus means the primary, direct experience of the real world, which is the basis of common sense. From common sense arise the first fundamental principles of thought and knowledge, such as "For that, what is, it is impossible not to (...) be", expressed in natural language. Although the designations and functions of the natural language are manifold, the rules of its real meanings are determined by the reality itself. All this pre-scientific, spontaneous cognition enters philosophy, being a necessary and sufficient starting point for the epistemological realism, which offers the way leading to the know_ledge of the real world. The common sense knowledge, based on natural language, prevents the philosophical knowledge from apriori formulations in interpretation of reality. The realistic philosophy thus must meet the natural needs of human know_ledge. This can be achieved through developing the common sense knowledge in the frame of realistic knowledge. (shrink)

This dissertation explores Plato's conception of the nature and value of wisdom and its relationship to the ethical virtues. It is argued that throughout what are referred to as Plato's early and middle dialogues, wisdom is identified with the political art and that, as such, those, dialogues consistently treat moral knowledge as a kind of craft knowledge. When this conception of wisdom is combined with the Socratic doctrine of the unity of the virtues, however, it raises serious (...) problems for Socrates' ethical theory. It is argued that the dilemma that results in the Euthydemus highlights these problems and that there is an important sense in which the Lysis, Gorgias, and Republic represent attempts to solve this dilemma. It is argued that in the early dialogues Plato focuses solely on the contributive value of virtue but that in these latter dialogues Plato changes his account of the nature and value of the ethical virtues. In these dialogues Plato articulates what I will call the "constitutive value" of virtue, where the value of the virtues is rooted the way in which they constitute the good order of the soul. Ultimately, this allows the ethical virtues to be put forth as the beneficial work that wisdom provides for us. A central goal of the dissertation, then, is to explain this new account of the value of the virtues and to explain the sense in which wisdom rules over or governs the other parts of the soul so as to make the soul good. In this way, the dissertation deals centrally with Plato's conception of value and his moral psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of NarrativeJeanette BicknellIn this passage from his Confessions, St. Augustine recounts some youthful shenanigans: "In a garden nearby to our vineyard there was a pear tree.... Late one night—to which hour, according to our pestilential custom, we had kept up our street games, a group of very bad youngsters set out to shake down and rob this tree. We took great loads of fruit from (...) it, not for our own eating, but rather to throw it to the pigs.... Foul was the evil, and I loved it... I loved my fault itself. Base in soul was I...."1Here a mature Augustine looks back on his boyhood self with recrimination and reproach. Stealing pears is not seen as an immature prank but as evidence of a base soul. Yet for all the force and gravity of his words, it is not difficult to imagine a younger Augustine, before his conversion to Christianity, light-heartedly reminiscing with friends about these very same incidents. Of these two stories—the one he tells in the Confessions and the one he might have told—which provides a more accurate portrayal of Augustine's boyhood soul? Which is closer to the truth?Narrative and personal identity would seem to be inextricably bound.2 Telling stories or imposing a narrative coherence on events is one of the main ways in which we make sense of our experience. We also get to know others by listening to their stories, thus learning the narrative coherence they have placed on events in their own lives. Over the course of a lifetime stories may change. Characters first dismissed as "bit players" may gain importance. Gestures or words earlier thought to [End Page 406] be unimportant may, in retrospect, take on greater significance. With time and reflection one's past may be re-interpreted as displaying error, alienation or ignorance. A cataclysmic religious conversion is only one of many factors which might prompt such reflection and reinterpretation. Illness, divorce, and the death of loved ones are other possible causes.Here is my worry: presumably we would like to believe that our "new" stories are improvements on the old, and that they reflect greater self-knowledge, possibly even greater moral awareness. Yet given that any number of possible narratives can make sense of a set of events, how can we determine that any one story or way of understanding the past is better than any other? How are we to distinguish those stories which reflect greater understanding from those which are simply re-descriptions or re-interpretations without greater insight on the part of the individual? We may disagree about particular cases; those with a religious world view are likely to believe that, post-conversion, Augustine is telling the "right" story about the pear theft. However most would concede that some ways of understanding the world are simply less adequate than others—"less adequate" both in the sense of "less reflective of the truth" and "less conducive to good relations with others." Few would defend the worldview of the inveterate racist, for example. The problem of determining whether a story reflects greater understanding and self-understanding is all the more challenging if we take seriously the view that narrative structure is the organizing principle, not only of experiences and actions, but of the very self that experiences and acts.3 How radically must one's personal narratives change before her very identity has also changed?Concerns about the epistemological status of personal narratives bring us up against the limitations of narrative as a tool for understanding persons. Given the under-determination of narrative by events, listening to a person's stories will not be enough to understand her. In this paper I do two things. First, I illustrate some of my worries about the epistemological status of narratives through an examination of Tolstoy's short novel The Kreutzer Sonata. I argue that, despite protestations to the contrary, the protagonist has not acquired greater self-knowledge. He has changed the stories he tells about himself without having understood his past or those around him any better. Then I sketch what a genuine increase in self... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:150 PERCEPTIONS, OBJECTS AND THE NATURE OF MIND In this paper I consider the relation between perceptions and objects for Hume and the bearing which this has on his conception of the mind as composed of perceptions. But first it is necessary to distinguish at least two senses in which he uses the term 'object'. In the first, "perceptions of the human mind" — both impressions and ideas (...) — are referred to as "our objects" (T 1,2). Objects in this sense are intentional objects. Hume almost consistently uses the noun 'perception', rarely the verb 'to perceive'. This serves to emphasize that for him perception is an object, not the perceiving of an object — a departure from the tradition of Locke and Berkeley for whom perceptions are cognitive acts having objects. That perception is not conceived by Hume as a cognitive act or form of awareness but purely as an object of awareness is evident when he says, For since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear. Everything that enters the mind, being in reality a perception, 'tis impossible anything shou'd to feeling appear different. This were to suppose, that even when we are most intimately conscious, we might be mistaken (T 190). 1 Or again, "The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions, which being immediately present to us by consciousness, command our strongest assent...." (T 212). In its other sense the term 'object' is used to denote bodies, or that to which we attribute a continued existence "distinct from the mind and perception", or, borrowing Locke's expression "external 151 objects". It is just because we attribute a continued and independent existence to bodies that we distinguish them from perceptions, for "all impressions are internal and perishing existences, and appear as such" (T 194). But while we make this distinction in our everyday role of common man, the difference between a perception and an (external) object is really only a difference between two types of perceptions, on the one hand those that are characterized in their occurrence by constancy and coherence, and on the other those, for example the passions, which exhibit a different type of "regularity" in their occurrence (T 195). The constancy and coherence which some perceptions exhibit, together with a natural tendency of the mind "to bestow on the objects a greater regularity than what is observ'd in our mere perceptions" (T 197) causes us to attribute to these perceptions an uninterrupted and independent existence, an existence which is, of course, fictitious, because all perceptions are really internal and perishing. 'Tis certain, that almost all mankind, and even philosophers themselves, for the greatest part of their lives, take their perceptions to be their only objects, and suppose, that the very being, which is intimately present to the mind, is the real body or material existence (T 206). This is not to say, however, that "what any common man means by a hat, or shoe, or stone" (T 202) he also believes to be a perception. What he does believe is that the hat or the shoe is immediately present to the mind, or directly appears to his consciousness. It is Hume, the philosopher, who is here interposing the philosophical doctrine that "no beings are ever present to the mind but perceptions" (T 212). This is, of course, not an empirical generalization. It is the definition of a perception as "whatever can be present 152 to the mind" (Abstract 647). It is this definition which gives sense to the statement "their perceptions are their only objects", the term "objects" here referring to "external objects". And the common man would, no doubt, be surprised to learn that these hats, shoes, etc., which directly appear to his consciousness, are by that circumstance really only his own perceptions which he has imagined, falsely, to have a continued and independent existence. Only a few experiments, however, are needed for the philosopher to realize that perceptions, i.e., what is present to the mind, do not have a continued and independent existence. Unable to give up his vulgar... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Knowledge, Friendship, and the Promulgation of the Natural LawScott J. RonigerKnow Thyself.—Inscription on the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at DelphiChristian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God's own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Know who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power (...) of darkness and brought into the light of the kingdom of God.—Pope St. Leo the GreatIn this essay, I wish to discuss the relationships between self-knowledge, ethics and political life, and our knowledge of the natural law. I hope to show that our knowledge of natural law depends to a large extent on what we take ourselves to be, simply as human beings, and that our knowledge of what it is to be human is foundational for and textured by our social and political life. It is through the lens of these interconnected issues that I will engage Pierre Manent's thoughtful and provocative book, Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason. I will not simply provide an exegesis of Manent's work, which is rich and repays careful reading, nor will I argue directly for or against his fundamental points; rather, I take his work as a springboard to discuss the connection between our knowledge of ourselves, our ethical and political lives, and our knowledge of the natural law. In so doing, I will perhaps confirm and strengthen what I take to be Manent's central thesis. [End Page 287]Manent claims that the project of human rights, with the modern "state" understood as the guarantor of such rights, is inextricably tied to an erroneous understanding of human beings as naturally isolated and apolitical individuals. He shows that this impoverished modern understanding of human nature, and of human rights protected by the state as its offspring, distorts our self-understanding and saps the intelligibility of law, natural or otherwise, as well as the fecundity of human action. According to Manent, and contra Jacques Maritain, modern human rights must be understood as a feeble replacement for, not founded upon, the classical understanding of natural law.1 Further, Manent argues that it is modern political philosophy that generates the modern state as the "sovereign instrument" wielded to protect human rights, with the result that civic and political friendship becomes more difficult as the state becomes more powerful. Modern political philosophy is therefore at the basis of our distorted understanding of ourselves and our inability to engage in the friendships that hold polities together.Before discussing these issues in detail, it will be helpful to say a word about the way in which Manent approaches them and about how my own approach relates to his. Manent says that he is "inside a triangle: politics, philosophy, religion." He claims that he has never been able to devote himself entirely to any one of those three poles and that he finds "a fragile equilibrium, or rather a productive disequilibrium, in this questioning... concerning the very manner in which these three dimensions are articulated throughout Western history."2 Manent's book on natural law and human rights evidences this fecund triangulation of politics, philosophy, and religion. Manent also says that, through his studies, he has come to adopt a "'classic' view of political life, which gives... a better view of the eternal play between the few and the many, beyond the democratic enthusiasm characteristic of modern societies."3 Aristotle, as the political scientist and philosopher par excellence, occupies a prominent place in Manent's classical [End Page 288] view of political life, and the central role of Aristotle's ethics and political philosophy is also on display in Manent's work on natural law, especially in the book's final chapter. Manent's knowledge of modern political philosophy and his Aristotelian view of political life give him a sharp awareness of the differences between ancient and modern approaches to philosophical, ethical, and political questions, an awareness that permeates his previous work on political form and his recent book on natural law.I will concentrate... (shrink)

The passionate and staunch defence of logic of the controversial thinker Ibn Ḥazm, Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Saʿīd of Córdoba (384-456/994-1064), had lasting consequences in the Islamic world. Indeed, his book Facilitating the Understanding of the Rules of Logic and Introduction Thereto, with Common Expressions and Juristic Examples (Kitāb al-Taqrīb li-ḥadd al-manṭiq wa-l-mudkhal ilayhi bi-l-alfāẓ al-ʿāmmiyya wa-l-amthila al-fiqhiyya), composed in 1025-1029, was well known and discussed during and after his time; and it paved the way for the studies (...) of his compatriots Ibn Bājjah (d. 1138), Ibn Ṭufayl (1185), and Ibn Rushd (1198), who each gave demonstrative reasoning a privileged place within the methods of attaining knowledge. Unfortunately, as too often in the history of science, Ibn Ḥazm’s innovative perspectives and contributions in logic have been overlooked or considered with an attitude of contempt. On the one hand, his work has been seen, at best, as promulgating the benefits of studying Aristotle’s logic, so that his contribution is assessed as more didactical than conceptual. And on the other hand, those who do examine his innovations often consider them to be mistaken. As indicated by Chejne (1984, p. 2) contempt towards the logical work of Ibn Ḥazm was also present in its reception by the Eastern philosophers who accused him of deviating from Aristotelian logic and of dabbling in things beyond his capability. However, a reassessment of his work on logic has since begun, by delving into the ways the thinker of Córdoba studied the links between deontic and modal qualification of propositions. In this context Lameer’s (2013) paper on the logical sources of Ibn Ḥazm is worth mentioning; the author (p. 417, footnote 1) observes that, although, strictly speaking, it was al-Fārābī who first drew the parallelism between deontic and modal concepts, it was Ibn Ḥazm who developed it and worked it out in a more precise manner. A primary aim of this paper is to help fill some of these gaps by stressing the role of the work of Ibn Ḥazm in developing a notion of deontic necessity deeply rooted in legal normativity, and in explicitly discussing the transference between deontic and modal concepts. According to our view; the basic units of Islamic deontic logic are what we might call, indulging in terminological anachronism, heteronomous imperatives. As it turns out, the heteronomy of imperatives within Islamic legal systems contrasts with those of the purely moral realm, which seem to be closer to an autonomous conception of moral law. There it concurs again with Leibniz’s proposal to define obligatory as “what is necessary for a good person to do”. In the present paper, we will focus on the heteronomous imperatives of legal systems rather than on the imperatives of the purely moral realm. In this context, the work of Ibn Ḥazm extends the parallelism between the necessity of events and that of human actions stressed by his predecessors. According to our understanding, Ibn Ḥazm’s parallelism can be rendered explicit formally by means of a conditional (or hypothetical) structure shared by both deontic and modal propositions. Moreover, this structure makes apparent that this parallelism displays an underlying system of “degrees”. Indeed, while in the domain of events, given some conditions, it makes sense to distinguish between an event that is more likely to happen than another. Ibn Ḥazm speaks of near and distant possibility (such as the higher degree of likelihood of rain, given the condensation of clouds in December, and its lower degree, when the condensation occurs in summer); and, in the domain of actions, the Islamic notion of weighting actions determines degrees of virtue (or of legal and moral value). So whereas the degree of virtue of performing a forbidden act as determined by the distribution of sanction and reward is 0, we obtain the same value by pondering the likelihood of an impossible event to take place. Furthermore, as discussed in section II.3.2, the system of values at work in the parallelism can be seen as opening the way to a more direct correspondence. Thus, while in the realm of nature, likelihood of occurrence of an event is dependent upon the conditions specific to the occurrence of that event; while, in the realm of jurisprudence, likelihood of performing an action is dependent upon the distribution of reward and sanction specific to that action (being that, given the choice to perform or not perform a given action, those that will be rewarded are more likely to be performed than those that are not). According to this perspective, the point of the parallelism is that both deontic and modal qualifications measure the degree of an action or event to become actual; that is – indulging once more in anachronism (but this time from the Leibnizian background) – the degree measures how feasible (facile) an action or event may be. This suggests that Ibn Ḥazm’s perspectives already herald the links to probability and possibility explored by Leibniz six centuries later – see for example Leibniz’s (1671, A VI, I, p. 424-26) use of probability in the context of conditional right. Nevertheless, it also shows a crucial difference to the approach developed in the Elementa Jura Naturalis: whereas Leibniz’s studies seek to define what is to be just or virtuous, the logical system of deontic imperatives within Islamic jurisprudence presupposes that what is to be virtuous has already been settled. Determining what is to be virtuous is not achieved by logical reasoning within the system of legal jurisprudence, but by delving into the higher objectives of the Sharīʿa. While developing our point, we will delve into the logical structure of the heteronomous imperatives. This distinguishes our contribution from the existing literature, such as the papers of Chejne (1984), Lameer (2014), and Guerrero (1997, 2010, 2014), which do not provide a logical analysis of the deontic concepts put into work by Ibn Ḥazm. The true antecedent to the present paper is the work of Farid Zidani (2007, 2015), who, so far as we know, was the first to undertake such a task. Some of our own developments and general epistemological thoughts go beyond Ibn Ḥazm’s framework and motivations; mainly those contained in sections II.3.2 and IV. However, according to our view, these reflections suggest that Ibn Ḥazm’s approach has the substance for a broader and deeper exploration of the logic of norms. The paper is structured as follows:I.Ibn Ḥazm’s Logic of Heteronomous Imperatives. After presenting some extracts of the relevant text, we proceed by providing a formal reconstruction of the five forms of deontic modalities. II. A Landmark in the History of the Logical Analysis of Norms. Duties and Modalities. In this section, we study the transferences from deontic to modal necessity and possibility. We briefly compare the deontic system of Islamic Jurisprudence with that of Leibniz.III. Leibniz and Hypothetical Imperatives in Law.IV. Beyond Ibn Ḥazm: Conclusions and the Work Ahead. We will conclude the paper by discussing briefly some conceptual points that distinguish the logic of heteronomous imperatives from contemporary deontic logic. Our final words will discuss deontic-modal parallelism in the context of Ibn Ḥazm’s rejection of reasoning by conjecture and what we call “the internalization of nature.”. (shrink)

The case for anti-realism in the theory of meaning, as presented by Dummen and Wright, 1 is only partly convincing. There is, I shall suggest, a crucial lacuna in the argument, that can only be filled by the later Wittgenstein's following-a-rule considerations. So it is the latter that provides the strongest argument for the rejection of semantic realism.
By 'realism', throughout, I should be taken as referring to any conception of meaning that leaves open the possibility that a sentence may (...) have a determinate truth-value although we are incapable - either in practice or in principle - of discovering what truth-value it has ('the possibility of veritication-transcendence' for short). 2 I shall say nothing further about what an anti-realist semantics might look like, nor about the possible consequences for logic, epistemology and metaphysics, beyond the fact that it must involve the rejection of any such conception of meaning. (shrink)