A lot of qualitatively very different sensations can be pleasant or unpleasant. The Felt-Quality Views that conceive of sensory affect as having an introspectively available common phenomenology or qualitative character face the “heterogeneity problem” of specifying what that qualitative common phenomenology is. In contrast, according to the Attitudinal Views, what is common to all pleasant or unpleasant sensations is that they are all “wanted” or “unwanted” in a certain sort of way. The commonality is explained not on the basis of (...) phenomenology but by a common mental, usually some sort of conative, attitude toward the sensation. Here I criticize both views and offer an alternative framework that combines what is right in both while avoiding their unintuitive commitments. The result is the reductive (psychofunctionalist) adverbial sensory modification view of pleasure and displeasure. (shrink)

Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is identical to their representational content of a certain sort. This view requires a strong transparency condition on phenomenally conscious experiences. We argue that affective qualities such as experienced pleasantness or unpleasantness are counter-examples to the transparency thesis and thus to the sort of representationalism that implies it.

Pain is the most prominent member of a class of sensations known as bodily sensations, which includes itches, tickles, tingles, orgasms, and so on. Bodily sensations are typically attributed to bodily locations and appear to have features such as volume, intensity, duration, and so on, that are ordinarily attributed to physical objects or quantities. Yet these sensations are often thought to be logically private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge for those who have them. Hence there appear to (...) be reasons both for thinking that pains (along with other similar bodily sensations) are physical objects or conditions that we perceive in body parts, and for thinking that they are not. This apparent paradox is one of the main reasons why philosophers are especially interested in pain. One increasingly popular but still controversial way to deal with this apparent paradox is to defend a perceptual or representational view of pain, according to which feeling pain is in principle no different from undergoing other standard perceptual processes like seeing, hearing, touching, etc. But there are many who think that pains are not amenable to such a treatment. Although it was the treatment of pain as a sensory-discriminative experience that had dominated the philosophical discussions throughout most of the twentieth century, attention to pains’ affective-motivational dimension has gained prominence in recent years. (shrink)

Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes. Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, and world. Some argue that this (...) new orientation calls for a revolutionary new metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes, and even persons, literally extend into the environment. This book is a guide to this movement in cognitive science. Each chapter tackles either a specific area of empirical research or specific sector of the conceptual foundation underlying this research. (shrink)

Afetler doğal ve insan orijinli olay ve olguların sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan ve insan toplumları ve yerleşim yerleri üzerinde can ve mal kaybı yaratarak zararlar meydana getiren olaylardır. Afetlerden topyekun kaçış söz konusu olmasa bile afete neden olan olay ve olgulara karşı yürütülecek risk azaltma önlemleri ile afet yönetimi mümkün olabilecektir. Yüksek düzeyde risk ile mücadelede başarı şansı düşük iken azaltılmış risk ile mücadelenin başarısı daha yüksek olacaktır. Diğer yandan, toplumu oluşturan bireylerin eğitimi ve bu konuda toplumsal direncin, afet direncinin (...) artırılması, sürdürülebilir toplum yaşamı ve hayatta kalma düzeyini arttıracaktır. Afetler ile mücadele bütüncül bir süreç olduğuna göre bu mücadeleye toplumun tüm düzeyleri katılmak zorundadır. Özellikle halka en yakın birim olan belediyelerin bu konudaki rolleri son derece önemlidir. Yerel yönetimler düzeyinde ele alınacak bu çalışmada da toplum içerisinde afetlere karşı direnci en düşük kesim olarak savunmasız kesimlerden yaşlılar ve engelliler ile belediyelerin rolü irdelenecektir. Çünkü hangi tür afet senaryosuna hazırlanmak söz konusu olursa olsun hazırlık çalışmaları bu kesim göz önüne alınarak yapılmalıdır. Özellikle afet sonrası kaosun oluşturacağı olumsuzluklar bu kesimleri çok ciddi zararlarla yüz yüze bırakmaktadır. Bu nedenle gerek potansiyel gerekse reel afet tehlikesine yönelik risk azaltmada ve mücadelede yerel düzeyde belediyelerin özellikle savunmasız kesimlere yönelik gerçekleştireceği roller ulusal ve uluslararası başarının da teminatını oluşturacaktır. (shrink)

In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical-philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs (...) more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations. (shrink)

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely (...) tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of individual auditors from more religious hometowns on audit quality, utilizing social identity and social norm theories via a sample of Turkish companies listed on the Borsa Istanbul and their associated individual auditors between the years 2010 and 2019. The sample includes a unique hand-collected dataset and secondary data gathered from various sources. The main findings demonstrate that individual auditors from more religious hometowns provide higher quality audit work in terms of the magnitudes of discretionary (...) accruals, audit reporting aggressiveness, and the presence of small profits. In order to overcome potential endogeneity and selection problems, this study employs the Heckman two-stage estimation procedure, instrumental variables, system generalized methods of moments regressions, and propensity score matching-difference and differences method. The results of these additional tests also support the main results. When controlled for the religiosity levels of the province where clients operate and the religiosity levels of the province where individual auditors attended and graduated from universities, the results remain similar. The employment of alternative audit firm size and quality proxies also provides additional supportive evidence. The findings are robust when alternative variables of interest and alternative audit quality measures, such as sanction and restatement, are employed in the main models. (shrink)

Sadr al-Sharīʿah (d. 747/1346) is one of the theologians representing the later period of the Māturīdī kalām. He based his system of thought on his criticisms of Avicenna, al-Rāzī, and Ṭūsī. His criticism of these names stems from his own understanding of being. He thinks differently from the theologians of the later period on issues such as the essence-existence division, the superaddition of existence to essence, and the acceptance of mental being, which are accepted by the majority of theologians of (...) the later period. His understanding of being in question also influenced his analysis of the idea of the wahdat al-wujūd. In the study, some aspects of the framework proposed by Muhammed Bedirhan will be given first. Then, in order to make sense of Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s criticism of wahdat al-wujūd, the major understandings of wahdat al-wujūd will be summarized briefly, and finally, Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s analysis of wahdat al-wujūd will be examined and clarified using Bedirhan’s framework. Although the framework has subheadings, it classifies criticisms into two categories: rationally-based and sharʻī-based objections. Rational objections are directed from the traditions of kalām and philosophy, while sharʻī-based objections come from Salafi thinkers, faqihs, and sufis. The framework is comprehensive in classifying criticisms against the theory of wahdat al-wujūd. This framework will clarify Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s approach, and the source of his criticisms should be identified. According to Bedirhan, the sufis’ theory is in conflict with the members of other schools in two aspects, practical and theoretical. While the first one considers sufism a religious state (ḥal), the second one is the point that shapes the view of other intellectual groups on sufism in terms of the fact that sufism is also a science. Bedirhan has based the theoretical conflict part of his framework on the triple classification of al-Jābiri: burhān, beyān and irfān. According to al-Jābiri’s classification, sufism, which is included under the title of irfān, deals with the previous two traditions mentioned. However, burhan and beyan traditions also offer their criticisms of the epistemological and ontological acceptances of the irfān tradition. Behind the criticism of the traditions of thought towards each other is the claim that the metaphysical theory of the opposite group is insufficient. According to the presented framework Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s criticisms can be considered within not only the kalām tradition but also the sufi tradition, because he is a sufi who accepts ittihād as one of the “sayr sulūk” degrees. Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s explains two proofs by which sufis defend their metaphysical theory, and also presents a counter-proof based on the verbal commonality of sense knowledge and being. He also aims to point out the weakness of the metaphysical theory of sufis with the view that the idea of ittihād is unique to a certain degree. By mentioning Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s criticisms and explanations of wahdat al- wujūd, the study identifies Sadr al-Sharīʿah’s stance on the rational and sharʻī-based objections. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding about the internal fraud and corruption problem in the Turkish construction industry. The reasons behind the internal fraud and corruption problem as well as the types of prevention methods were investigated; and as a result various recommendations were made. To this end, a risk awareness questionnaire was used to understand the behavioral patterns of the construction industry, and to clarify possible proactive and reactive measures against internal fraud and corruption. The (...) type of fraud experienced by Turkish construction companies was also surveyed in the questionnaire. The questionnaire was sent to 89 firms; and depending on the collected data, certain recommendations for construction industry professionals were provided. (shrink)

Waqf system is a judical and financial institution of social security as well as the institutions which conduct educational, cultural, religious, public works, social aid and health investments. The waqf founders lined the services idealized by them in their deeds of trustee. It is aimed that these services countinue forever. This process survived for centuries primarily stemmed from this legal infrastructure, financial resources and efficient inspecting recording order. The accountancy culture which is on the basis of auditing and proper for (...) information characteristics of the accountancy within the Ottoman financial tradition may be read from the accountancy books kept in the awqaf. From another point of view that the waqf culture had survived for centuries primarily stemmed from this efficient, inspecting record order. (shrink)

The current debate that surrounds the issue of patient rights and the transformation of health care, social insurance, and reimbursement systems has put the topic of patient responsibility on both the public and health care sectors' agenda. This climate of debate and transition provides an ideal time to rethink patient responsibilities, together with their underlying rationale, and to determine if they are properly represented when being called `patient' responsibilities. In this article we analyze the various types of patient responsibilities, identify (...) the underlying motivations behind their creation, and conclude upon their sensibleness and merit. The range of patient responsibilities that have been proposed and implemented can be reclassified and placed into one of four groups, which are more accurate descriptors of the nature of these responsibilities. We suggest that, within the framework of a free-market system, where health care services are provided based on the ability to pay for them, none of these can properly be justified as a patient responsibility. (shrink)

In ancient philosophy, Logic was seen as the instrument and method of philosophy. However, sometimes detailed and profound discussions have been made about the demonstrativeness of philosophical sciences. Most philosophers have accepted that the mathematical sciences were especially demonstrative and likewise, most of the natural sciences are demonstrative for them. But can metaphysics be demonstrative or not? This is one of the fundamental issues around which the great debates were made in Islamic philosophy. While these issues are known to specialists (...) in this field, we can hardly find studies and research that deal with this issue to a sufficient degree and precise discussions in our day, I mean the issue of demonstrativeness of art of demonstration, art of dialectic, art of sophistry, art of rhetoric and art of poetry. It is clear that the peripatetic philosophers did not write a separate book or treatise on the issue of the demonstrativeness of the logical arts, but we can claim that they believed that all these arts were demonstrative and that they were extracted/abstracted using the art of demonstration. We can come across important phrases and statements that prove this claim between the lines of the books that these philosophers wrote in the science of logic. And while Aristotle is the founder of the science of logic, then how is it to be understood that there are practical particular examples and some easy rules of these arts? According to their texts, we can say that they believed that the actual performance of these arts by their actors in materials by particular and practical actions differs from extracting their universal rules by abstracting them from their materials through theoretical and analytical research. For example, the poems of the great poets; Homer and al-Mutanabbi, are particular works in the matter of the art of poetry performed by poets. The books written by Aristotle and Ibn Rushd in the art of poetry contain universal rules extracted abstractly from the materials of their particular poems. As for understanding the demonstrativeness of the remaining four arts, it is easier, but how should we understand the demonstrativeness of the art of demonstration itself? It seems that the peripatetic logicians also distinguished between applying demonstrative inferences to significant materials and extracting the universal rules of the art of demonstration from these materials. These five logical arts are not particular and practical things, but they are philosophical, demonstrative, and analytical studies for the peripatetic logicians in Islam. In this paper, we will try to draw attention to the issue of the demonstrativeness of the five arts and to open a new discussion about it based on some important sentences and phrases expressed by al-Fārābī, Ibn Zur‘a, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Bājja and Ibn Rushd between the lines in their books, which they wrote in the field of logic and within different and multiple contexts. (shrink)

In the history of Islam after the martyrdom of Hz.Uthman, serious problems emerged among the Muslims, and two great wars took place between the Companions. While these events are called strife, this time is called the time of strife. The enemies of Islam who wanted to take advantage of this confused situation of the Islamic ummah, they engaged in various activities that they thought could harm Muslims in order to grow the seeds of strife among Muslims more. Zindīḳs are the (...) leading enemies of Islam. It was necessary for Muslims to recognize the zindīḳs, who were said to have made thousands of narrations on almost every subject. Therefore, Islamic scholars wrote many works about them. In fact the authors of tabaḳāt and ridjāl many of whom were hadith scholars, also mentioned zindīḳs in their works, such that these works were extremely useful in terms of knowing zindīḳs. In this article it was determined for whom the term zindīḳ was used in the works of tabaḳāt and ridjāl and also the situation of hadith transmitters who lived in the first three centuries of the hijri who are alleged to be zindīḳ are discussed. (shrink)

The third sex, which for a long period of history meant the androgyne and the homosexual, took on a new sense around 1900, when it was applied to emancipated women, who were featured by novelists and analysed by psychiatrists. Assimilated with lesbians, 'desexualized' by their modern way of life, they were labelled 'neuter', worker bees in a hive-state where 'female–male' markers were tending to disappear. Neither men in sex, nor women in gender (at least according to traditional assumptions), they constituted (...) a new 'battalion' which highlighted all the anxieties of the time: the involution of dimorphism, the threat of lack of differentiation and the 'extinction of the race'. But for those who accepted the label, neuterdom evolved from a pejorative concept into an instrument of a kind of liberation and the strategic means to set up creative space cleared of sexual stigma, until political cooption, aware of the resurgence of a 'superior species', changed its meaning and tipped over into the worst sort of excess. (shrink)

According to the standard and largely traditional interpretation, Aristotle’s conception of nous, at least as it occurs in the Posterior Analytics, is geared against a certain set of skeptical worries about the possibility of scientific knowledge, and ultimately of the knowledge of Aristotelian first principles. On this view, Aristotle introduces nous as an intuitive faculty that grasps the first principles once and for all as true in such a way that it does not leave any room for the skeptic to (...) press his skeptical point any further. Thus the tradi- tional interpretation views Aristotelian nous as having an internalist justificatory role in Aristotelian epistemology. In contrast, a minority (empiricist) view that has emerged recently holds the same internalist justificatory view of nous but rejects its internally certifiable infallibility by stressing the connection between nous and Aristotelian induction. I argue that both approaches are flawed in that Aristotle’s project in the Posterior Analytics is not to answer the skeptic on internalist justificatory grounds, but rather lay out a largely externalist explication of scientific knowledge, i.e. what scientific knowledge consists in, without worrying as to whether we can ever show the skeptic to his satisfaction that we do ever possess knowledge so defined. (shrink)

Among Turks, major religions with universal messages have always been welcomed with tolerance. The fact that Turks generally did not convert to religions other than Islam led to the interpretation of Islam as the most suitable religion for the character and national culture of Turks, and for this reason, Turks accepted Islam voluntarily, not by force. The proximity of the Turks to the Muslim regions made it easier for them to become Muslims and they became Muslims in groups. The statement (...) in the Qur’ānic Ayat âl -Kursi; His pulpit has encompassed the heavens and the earth كُرْسِيُّهُ السَّمٰوَاتِ وَالْاَرْضَۚ وَلَََا يَؤُ۫دُهُ حِفْظُهُمَاۚ وَهُوَ الْعَلِيُّ الْعَظ۪يمُ the similarity in the fact that Gök Tengri, which they have believed in since the beginning of their existence, is both in the sky and much closer to them (closer than their jugular veins) has facilitated the change of belief in the Turks. The seven stories of the sky, which their ancestors saw as Uçmak, the fact that hell is seven stories below the earth, free thought and tolerance in both religions and the fact that there is only one God religion. The compatibility of the belief in God with hundreds of years of customs and traditions facilitated the acceptance of the idea that Islam was a suitable religion for them. The enmity against Muslim Turks, which started in the Christian world with the progress of Turkish tribes towards the West after the adoption of Islam, has increased the efforts of fanatical missionary Christian writers to create prejudice with their publications, which are far from historical facts, to demonize Turks in the Western public opinion. The common characteristics of these writers are that they fictionalize alleged inhumane crimes against Christians and present them as if they were true, and that they unconditionally support Greeks and Armenians, whom they see as the real owners of Anatolia. In this way, they accelerated the spread of "Islamophobia" in Western public opinion, and the persecution and massacres of Muslims were ignored. However, neither the Holy Qur’ān, the Turks, nor the Prophet Muhammad deserve these accusations and slanders. However, the literature review revealed that no specific research (thesis, book, article) has been conducted on the subject. In this context, although Muslim-Turkish enmity has been used in different ways in original studies conducted by researchers, the impact of missionary activities that started especially in the 19th century and the main reasons for this enmity have not been investigated specifically by missionary writers. The publications of the two missionary authors researched in this study have not been translated into Turkish until today. As a methodology, the literature review on the impact of missionary and missionary activities on Muslim Turcophobia was applied in the form of the publications and analysis of the missionary authors taken as an example for the study during the period. The study aims to investigate the root causes of Muslim Turcophobia and to draw the attention of researchers to the issue in the context of two missionary writers (George Horton (d. 1942), Sir Edwin Pears (d. 1919)) who insulted, slandered, and attacked Muslims and saw Muslims as a threat to Christianity in the Turkish nation. (shrink)

A healthy and robust public political culture is generally regarded as being of utmost necessity for the maintenance of a stable democratic environment. Especially when a country is facing significant challenges and is in the process of devising and implementing radical reforms, the presence of satisfactory collective deliberation can ensure durability and stability. This article will focus on one type of argumentation that stands in the way of such healthy deliberation. It will explore the various forms that ad hominem arguments (...) take and consider the harmful consequences of their wide prominence in the political culture of the country. (shrink)

As a result of its failure to embrace the increasingly visible social and political diversity in the country, Kemalism, the founding ideology of modern Turkey, is currently facing its severest legitimacy crisis. Through interviews with representatives of leading voluntary Kemalist associations, this article inquires whether there are attempts to reinterpret the doctrine in order to offer an alternative, credible vision in harmony with the existing social, political and economic realities of Turkey.

This article seeks to address the increasingly pertinent concern of how to form a satisfactory liberal stance in the face of certain democratically mandated policies of non-liberal and even sometimes illiberal governments. To that end, a close analysis is provided of a particular debate that generated controversy in certain liberal circles in Turkey during the run-up to the referendum on constitutional amendments in 2010. Identifying and evaluating 5 factors which seemed to have influenced the opposing positions in the debate, the (...) article tries to demonstrate how disagreement over the ‘correct’ liberal position entails differences in overall judgement of the political situation and assessment of the circumstances. (shrink)

In this article, recent attempts by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to address the problems of Alevi citizens in Turkey are analysed. After briefly outlining the sources of Alevi revitalization in the 1990s, the article critically discusses different aspects of the Alevi Opening process. It concludes by arguing that the Alevi question reveals many aspects of the problematic nature of secularism in Turkey.