The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be named Russell space, introduced in Part III of that book, may be viewed as more fundamental than many other types of spaces since the highly abstract nature of the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell there would (...) incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, but not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. We also point out the curious historical fact that the book The Analysis of Matter can be chronologically considered the earliest book-length generic attempt to reflect on the relation between quantum mechanics, just emerging by that time, and general relativity. (shrink)

Imam Abü Hamid al-Ghazalı is perhaps the most celebrated Muslim theologian of medieval Islam yet little attention has been paid to his personal theology. This book sets out to investigate the relationship between law and politics in the writings of Ghazalı and aims to establish the extent to which this relationship explains Ghazalı’s political theology. Articles concerned with Ghazalı’s political thought have invariably paid little attention to his theology and his thinking about God, neglecting to ask what role these have (...) contributed to his definition of politics and political ethics. Here, the question of Ghazalı’s politics takes into account his thinking on God, knowledge, law, and the Koran, in addition to political systems and ethics. _Yazeed Said_ puts forward the convincing argument that if Ghazalı’s legal and political epistemology provide a polemic analogous to his writings on philosophy, for which he is more famed, they would reveal to us a manifesto for an alternative order, concerned with a coherent definition of the community, or _Ummah_. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the Middle East, political theology and Islamic studies. (shrink)

A provocative critique of Western attitudes about the Orient, this history examines the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East from the 1700s to the present.

Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida—that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader—would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (...) criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it. · 1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique , pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard .· 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination , p. 297. Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. (shrink)

We propose a new event ontology of the world, which is part of a general approach to philosophy based on combining ideas from science, ontology, and the philosophy of nature. While the position advocated here is grounded in science and philosophy, it attempts to move _beyond_ each of them by devising and exploring a series of technical (naturalized or naturalistic) ontological concepts such as Interconnectedness, the Whole, the Global, Chaos, the event assemblage, and Nonspace. A central theme in our event (...) ontology is the mapping out of a fundamental critique of the theory of the organism and organization, especially when the latter two are viewed as processes in spacetime. In particular, and following earlier leads, we criticize the spacetime doctrine by arguing that it is not ontologically fundamental, where we suggest its replacement by more primordial naturalized ontological concepts of space such as ontospace and Nonspace. The event ontology of nature can be considered a radical alternative attitude toward the relation between the human and nature, an attitude, in fact, that has been repeatedly explored, though under very different headings, by numerous scattered thinkers throughout the history of ideas. We examine some of the past thinkers who contributed to this general but still incoherent body of thought, including Leibniz, Heidegger, Simondon, Ruyer, Deleuze, Whitehead, and Guattari. The goal of this article is to provide a condensed high-level view on this very complex and still evolving subject intended for a large audience, not necessarily only philosophers, but also scientists, mathematicians, technologists, theologians, sociologists, artists, and psychologists. (shrink)

A Common Word Between Us and You is an open letter, dated 13 October 2007, from leaders of the Islamic religion to those of the Christian religion. It calls for peace between Muslims and Christians and seeks common ground and understanding between both religions. This volume examines the document from a number of perspectives. Exploring the events that led to ACW, it provides an overview of responses to the document and its use of scripture. It also relates the reception of (...) ACW to several specific and contrasting contexts, and recommends new avenues for ACW-inspired discussion. Advancing debate and dialogue between Jews, Muslims and Christians, this volume promotes a distinctive methodology for inter-religious studies, and serves as an invaluable resource for students and scholars of theology and religious studies. (shrink)

This paper explores event ontology, a foundational philosophy of the materialist worldview, and presents an analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophical materialism, drawing upon his late notebooks, particularly his project on the Will to Power. Our approach situates Nietzsche’s perspective within the metaphysical direction of immanent materialism, and we draw connections between his ideas and the materialist monism of Russell, the process ontology of Whitehead, and the ontology of individuation developed by Simondon. The paper contributes to ongoing discussions on materialism in philosophy (...) and sheds light on the intersection of Nietzsche’s thought with other prominent materialist theories. (shrink)

We know the history of philosophy as Arabian, English, American, Greece, Indian, Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, French, Japanese… But it is surprisingly that we do not use more common concept as "national philosophy", which may be included in notions "regional" and "world" philosophy. The other words common to all mankind. As the President of Independent Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov emphasized, "It is important to understand the life giving, deep sources of national culture, East philosophy which serve at vigorous stimulus (...) of rapid progress and renovation". We suppose that the main part of philosophy is human life, man's coming to be and evolution as a subject of interaction with the world. Any philosophy is the philosophy of a man, His life. A man belongs tosome nationality, nation and mankind. The nature is definite geographic midst for a man. Each nationality, nation has its own history and specific outlines – style of life, way of life, traditions, nation interests, psychology, ideas, values, culture. It is common and typical for all nations and it imposes an imprint at all sides of realityas well as philosophy. (shrink)

The current study examined the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept in young children, and whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds participated. Children were between the ages of 3.52 and 6.98 years of age. Four main findings emerged from this study. First, children conceptualized God as more humanlike than their (...) parents did. Second, younger children were more likely to have a humanlike conception of God than older children. Third, parents’ concept of God and children’s concept of God had a stronger relationship when the child’s mental-state reasoning was more accurate. Fourth, the frequency of children’s engagement in religious practices was unrelated to children’s concept of God after controlling for child’s age. Taken together, these findings lend support for the view that social cognition is an important factor in young children’s acquisition of cultural information about abstract entities. (shrink)

Background Behavior is known as misconduct when individuals do not adhere to ethical standards, rules, or regulations. Several factors lead to misconduct, including the lack of understanding of what misconduct is among undergraduate students. However, misconduct as a concept needs more clarity and specificity. Objective This study aimed to examine the concept of misconduct from the literature and establish an operational definition for application to nursing education. Research design A concept analysis using Rodger’s evolutionary view was used to analyze the (...) literature from the disciplines of: academics, business, law, and religious perspectives. Findings and discussion An operational definition was developed based on the multidisciplinary concept analysis. A concept map was designed to help visualize the antecedents, attributes, and consequences and to assist in the conceptualization of misconduct. Implications for nursing science, administration, and education are provided. Conclusion Understanding misconduct is necessary for nurse educators to ensure ethical practice within the academic context. (shrink)

This paper provides a broad bibliometric overview of the important conceptual advances that have been published during COVID-19 within “e-learning in higher education.” E-learning as a concept has been widely used in the academic and professional communities and has been approved as an educational approach during COVID-19. This article starts with a literature review of e-learning. Diverse subjects have appeared on the topic of e-learning, which is indicative of the dynamic and multidisciplinary nature of the field. These include analyses of (...) the most influential authors, of models and networks for bibliometric analysis, and progress towards the current research within the most critical areas. A bibliometric review analyzes data of 602 studies published in the Web of Science database to fully understand this field. The data were examined using VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and KnowledgeMatrix Plus to extract networks and bibliometric indicators about keywords, authors, organizations, and countries. The study concluded with several results within higher education. Many converging words or sub-fields of e-learning in higher education included distance learning, distance learning, interactive learning, online learning, virtual learning, computer-based learning, digital learning, and blended learning. This research is mainly focused on pedagogical techniques, particularly e-learning and collaborative learning, but these are not the only trends developing in this area. The sub-fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning constitute new research directions for e-learning in light of COVID-19 and are suggestive of new approaches for further analysis. (shrink)

The importance of web designs for commercial and informational use has been a focus of research for over a decade and a half. At present, findings concerning the influence of news website designs on the perception and recall of information are rather contradictory. This study aims to identify how the basic web designs aesthetically affect users. A total of 214 students from Arab universities were shown three news sites with different designs and asked to complete two tests to determine their (...) levels of perception and recall. The results revealed that interactive sites with multiple aesthetic elements representing the message of the news item enable users to perceive and remember the information better. The findings of this study can be useful in creating news website templates that improve user comprehension and recall. (shrink)

Although critical discourse analysis (CDA) sets out to investigate both oppressive and progressive discourses, the vast bulk of published studies seem to prioritize the former. This paper is a response to scholarly calls to engage with (non)oppressive discourses by integrating positive impulses in critical discourse analysis, and thus contribute to the growth of positive discourse analysis (PDA), a complement to CDA, which attends to the emancipatory mechanisms of resistance. Using a combination of theoretical tools, this paper takes a case study (...) approach to explore the potentials of ‘complexification’ [Macgilchrist, F. (2007). Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 1(1), 74–94], a counter-discursive strategy for propelling marginal discourses into the dominant official school discourse. Specifically, the paper discusses three layers of complexification found in a selected Moroccan EFL textbook which has been developed, approved and distributed by the Moroccan Ministry of Education, and has been required to be used in every school, public or private. The analysis highlights the role this textbook plays in promoting emancipatory and progressive discourses about Amazigh social actors, and hence, signals a new shift in analytic focus by illuminating a concrete application of PDA in education curricula. (shrink)

In this paper, we define a new cosine similarity between two interval valued neutrosophic sets based on Bhattacharya’s distance [19]. The notions of interval valued neutrosophic sets (IVNS, for short) will be used as vector representations in 3D-vector space. Based on the comparative analysis of the existing similarity measures for IVNS, we find that our proposed similarity measure is better and more robust. An illustrative example of the pattern recognition shows that the proposed method is simple and effective.

We investigate the fundamental relationship between philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of nature, arguing for a position in which the latter encompasses the former. Two traditions are set against each other, one is natural aesthetics, whose covering philosophy is Idealism, and the other is the aesthetics of nature, the position defended in this article, with the general program of a comprehensive philosophy of nature as its covering theory. Our approach is philosophical, operating within the framework of the ontology of the (...) process of the production of art, inspired especially by the views of Antonin Artaud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. We interrogate Dilthey and Worringer while outlining an ontology of art based on the production of nonhuman images and a nonpersonal experiential field of nature. (shrink)

At one point Fish says that a profession produces no “real” commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish’s position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn’t say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he (...) is “turning everything into professionalism” —an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn “everything” into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism—and the particular values associated with it—there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism.On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals “exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors” is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism , he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies “machinery” and “labors” with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish’s important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, “the profession” is the context to which “everything” can be related. Edward W. Said’s most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions” and “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”. (shrink)

Social interpretation on vernacular architecture in Kudus, Jawa Tengah Province, Indonesia.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israel’s status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of (...) Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel—and with it, Zionism—had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of Israel’s supporters in the West that the Palestinian Arabs who paid a large part of the price for Israel’s establishment were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in 1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first time perceived more or less universally as not so great and, indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and, therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated to, a particular historical moment and a specific political situation. Edward Said, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The Question of Palestine , The World, the Text, and the Critic , and After the Last Sky . He will give the 1985 T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism, at the University of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” and “On Professionalism: Response to Stanley Fish”. (shrink)

El presente artículo presenta recursos teóricos que evidencian cómo el género no binario ha sido estigmatizado, invisibilizado y no reconocido dentro de la sociedad occidental contemporánea. Desde el lenguaje en el que estamos sumergidos, la lógica patriarcal ha discriminado a aquellas personas que no se sienten identificadas con los géneros hegemónicos, hombre-mujer, los cuales representan dos únicas maneras de ver el mundo. El género define una manera de interpretar el mundo, por lo tanto, el género no binario también tiene esta (...) cualidad. Dialogar con los distintos géneros, incluyendo los disidentes, nos permitirá deconstruir los conceptos que tenemos en torno al sexo, identidad de género, expresión de género y orientación sexual. En un primer lugar, se aborda el tema del binarismo y la crisis de las identidades en la sociedad occidental. En una segunda instancia, analizo las complejidades lingüísticas y epistemologías del género no binario; finalmente, realizo una lectura de la noción de género a través de la perspectiva hermenéutica, para comprender cómo el género no binario constituye una disidencia de los géneros hegemónicos y aporta una concepción e interpretación deconstruida del lenguaje y, por lo tanto, del mundo. (shrink)

This collection by a distinguished group of philosophers, psychologists, and physiologists reflects an interdisciplinary approach to the central question of cognitive science: how do we model the mind? Among the topics explored are the relationships (theoretical, reductive, and explanatory) between philosophy, psychology, computer science, and physiology; what should be asked of models in science generally, and in cognitive science in particular; whether theoretical models must make essential reference to objects in the environment; whether there are human competences that are resistant, (...) in principle, to modelling; whether simulated thinking and intentionality are really thinking and intentionality; how semantics can be generated from syntactics; the meaning of the terms "representations" and "modelling;" whether the nature of the "hardware" matters; and whether computer models of humans are "dehumanizing." Contributors include Donald Davidson, Daniel C. Dennett, Margaret A. Boden, Adam Morton, Dennis Noble, T. Poggio, Colin Blakemore, K.V. Wilkes, P.N. Johnson-Laird, and Jonathan St. B.T. Evans. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which Islamic civilization has faced the challenges of the modern age and of globalization. The expansion of Islam in world history is itself a global or proto-global process with its own distinctive internal dynamics. The main challenge to modern Islam, coming from the global political culture in the form of constitutionalism and democratization and human rights, has set in motion a civilizational encounter that has significantly altered the politico-religious dynamics of the proto-global, pre-modern Islamic (...) pattern. The intermingling of these inter- and intra-civilizational processes is traced with respect to the subversion of constitutionalism by ideology during the 1945–1989 period, and the slow recovery of the rule of law since 1989. The same framework of civilizational analysis is used for understanding Islamic fundamentalism, and counter-global defensive developments in contemporary Islam. (shrink)