Some recent state formations are offshoots of religious societies where the elite clothed the state with religious apparel. Diverse communities and their beliefs compel many modern nations to adopt a secular state ideology in order to avoid religious domination of time. Constitutionally, Islam is the official religion in Malaysia, while the state has maintained peaceful co-existence among its religious groups with an emphasis on religious tolerance and improved wealth distribution. Conversely, Nigeria, constitutionally a secular state with shared populations of mainly (...) Christians and Muslims, is embroiled in yearly religious conflicts. This article aims to show how Nigeria’s secular state status is engulfed in religious bigotry due to institutional inadequacies. This is unlike Malaysia’s state-centered influence on religion, yet its wealth distribution policy makes room for peaceful co-existence in its polity as against more severe challenges of corruption in Nigeria. The paper argues that leadership and institutional failures have exacerbated religious conflicts in Nigeria and hence the state totters in the face of tension. A theoretical debate unveils our proposition on religious practices in both countries. We rely on secondary data and empirical evidence in unveiling issues and conclude with modest recommendations. (shrink)

This study presents the circuitous route taken in an attempt to identify an assessment mechanism for evaluating the impact of STS courses. After initially developing a survey that faculty felt only allowed for the measurement of student opinions about the impact of required STS general education courses, the faculty at Clemson University identified Aikenhead and Ryan's Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS) as an instrument that, when used with the scoring guide created in this project, might be able to assess the sophistication (...) of students views about science and technology in society. The results from administering the pre- and post-VOSTS surveys in one STS course revealed no significant differences when comparing the sophistication of students' views about STS before and after the course. These findings demonstrate that, among other considerations discussed in the manuscript, it will be difficult to find a way of assessing STS courses that can be used for the diverse courses meeting the requirement. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine how different inquiry experiences affect in-service science teachers’ performance in terms of their questions and classroom actions. Teachers in a workshop experience proceeded through structured, guided, and full inquiry stations where materials to make foam were provided. Participants were 26 in-service science teachers who were enrolled in an 8-day workshop learning about science-technology-society (STS) approaches to teaching. Those who experienced full inquiry first resulted in more curiosity, more questions, and more unique experiments (...) than at the other two stations. Success in guided inquiry was observed when the guidance was provided by more open-ended questions posed by the leader teachers. The study raises questions concerning the limitations on student thinking when in structured and guided laboratories that characterize traditional science teaching. An analysis of this study may contribute important direction and information for science teaching and learning and encourage more moves for STS successes. (shrink)

Despite head and neck cancer association with various negative impacts, collective evidence is accumulating regarding the positive impacts of positive psychology on cancer survivors. However, data on how positive psychology is related to the psychological complications of HNC across time are lacking. This longitudinal study examined the trends of positive psychology, perceived spousal support, and psychological complications and determined the association between them, psychological complications, and PTG across two timelines among a cohort of HNC patients. A total of 175 HNC (...) respondents exhibited an increasing trend of positive psychology and perceived spousal support while reporting a decreasing trend of psychological complications between baseline and follow-up assessments. A greater degree of hope and perceived spousal support contributed to a higher degree of PTG across time. Conversely, a higher severity of anxiety symptoms was associated with a lower degree of PTG over time. Female gender had a moderating effect on the association between severity of anxiety symptoms and PTG, but did not moderate the association between hope, perceived spousal support and PTG. This study indicates the pivotal role of incorporating psychosocial interventions into the treatment regimen to enhance the degree of hope and perceived spousal support and reduce the severity of anxiety symptoms, which, in turn, will facilitate the development of PTG in HNC patients. (shrink)

The contemporary Qur’anic studies have been marked by amazing development. Various methods and approaches to understand the Qur’an are offered by the scholars. One of the prominent figures in this field is Nashr Hamid Abu Zayd. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010 M) is a highly controversial contemporary thinker. He is an Egyptian scholar who is accused of being apostate, because of his theory of qur’anic hermeneutic (the textual of Qur’an). This is reflected in his stances towards contemporary religious (...) discourse and the approach to reading religious texts, especially the Quran, which requires reading according to a hermeneutic mechanism. His books ‘Naqd al-Khitab al-Dini (Criticism of Religious Discourse)’ and ‘Al-Takfir fi Zaman al-Takfir (Thinking in the Time of Atonement)’ caused a great uproar in the early nineties of the last century. Abu Zayd was accused of criticising atheists because of their stances on the text. Therefore, this study aimed to discuss Abu Zayd’s position on contemporary religious discourse and his new approach to reading religious texts, and also aims to discuss why Abu Zayd’s theory has been string up Islamic world and ending by his expulsive from his native country. To deal with this problem, this article discusses Abd Zayd’s biography and some cultural framework of his people. The methodology of Qur’anic hermeneutic is the least his. Having examined the topic, the author finds that Abu Zayd believes that modem literary theory and criticism denote the way to understand and interpret the Qur’an ‘objectively’. The contribution of this research is discussing Abu Zayd’s contemporary religious discourse and his new approach to reading religious texts. Contribution: The contribution of this research is discussing Abu Zayd’s contemporary religious discourse and his new approach to reading religious texts. (shrink)

This paper analyzes perceptions of responsible leadership in eight Asia-based firms during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focal firms were a mixture of multinational corporations (MNCs), large-sized enterprises, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In all eight focal firms, we found that the responsible decision-making of leaders during the pandemic was perceived to be guided by five main moral principles. These comprised equity-based justice for employees, meeting employees’ basic needs, ethics of care for employees, concern for non-employee (...) stakeholders, and interactional justice for employees. We developed a conceptual map of how these principles related to aspects of four ethics-oriented leadership theories. Our analysis also identified four types of responsible leadership policies and practices. These comprised prioritizing the health and safety of stakeholders, flexible work arrangements, meeting employees’ and customers’ special needs, and financial and psychological support for employees. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

This article argues that Clauberg defends the theory of concurrentism concerning the relationship between divine and secondary causality. It does so by examining Clauberg's theory of corporeal causation in light of his doctrines of cause in general and of corporeal substance. Clauberg's work represents one of the first attempts to reconcile Cartesian physics with the traditional doctrine in theology, according to which both God and created substances are true and immediate causes of all natural effects, in opposition to the occasionalist (...) trend which would soon develop in the Cartesian school as well as to the conservationist alternative of Durand de Saint-Pourçain. -/- Cet article soutient que Clauberg défend la théorie du concurrentisme sur la relation entre la causalité divine et la causalité seconde. Il le fait en examinant la théorie de la causalité corporelle de Clauberg à la lumière de ses doctrines de la cause en général et de la substance corporelle. L'œuvre de Clauberg représente l’une des premières tentatives de réconcilier la physique cartésienne avec la doctrine théologique traditionelle, selon laquelle Dieu et les substances créées sont des causes vrais et immédiates de tout effet naturel, en opposition au courant occasionnaliste qui se développera bientôt dans l'école cartésienne ainsi qu'à l'alternative conservationniste de Durand de Saint-Pourçain. (shrink)

In their paper titled “Gender and philosophical intuition,” Buckwalter and Stich argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men's intuitions, so the authors claim, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument goes, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the (...) paper is to appear in the second edition of Experimental Philosophy edited by Knobe and Nichols , which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter and Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using several different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures.. (shrink)

Developmental processes in complex animals are directed by a hardwired genomic regulatory code, the ultimate function of which is to set up a progression of transcriptional regulatory states in space and time. The code specifies the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that underlie all major developmental events. Models of GRNs are required for analysis, for experimental manipulation and, most fundamentally, for comprehension of how GRNs work. To model GRNs requires knowledge of both their overall structure, which depends upon linkage amongst regulatory (...) genes, and the modular building blocks of which GRNs are heirarchically constructed. The building blocks consist of basic transcriptional control processes executed by one or a few functionally linked genes. We show how the functions of several such building blocks can be considered in mathematical terms, and discuss resolution of GRNs by both “top down” and “bottom up” approaches. BioEssays 24:1118–1129, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of how to best account for the diversity of our (synchronic) mental activities. The discussion starts with Mark Textor’s mental monism. According to mental monism, our mental life is constituted by just one simple mental act, in which different sub-acts can be conceptually distinguished. Textor grounds this view in the work of the early Brentano and contrasts it with the theory of the later Brentano, who introduces a mental substance into his philosophy. According to Textor, (...) Brentano needs a substance because he is unable to explain how mental monism can account for the separability of our mental activities, e.g. the fact that I can stop hearing F while still seeing blue. Textor argues, however, that mental monism can solve this problem. I address two issues regarding Textor’s view. First, I challenge his interpretation of Brentano by arguing that the early Brentano imports ontological complexity into our mental life; I defend Brentano’s view against possible criticisms, and I address some objections to mental monism. Second, I oppose Textor’s narrative about the mental substance. I argue that Brentano needs a substance not to explain separability, but rather to individuate our mental acts. I still argue, however, that Brentano’s earlier view (understood in my sense) is better than the substance account for dividing the mind. (shrink)

In the spirit of Von Neumann and Morgenstern (Theory of games and economic behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1944), we introduce a notion of network stability. We study the structure of stable economic networks and their associated stable payoff allocations by analyzing the conditions under which complete networks and star networks (both with desirable property of inclusiveness) are stable. We also address conditions for existence and uniqueness of stable set of networks.

The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections as interchangeable with real experiences. The method thus always contrasts a pair of experiences, at least one of (...) which is imagined or remembered rather than occurrent. Surveying all eighteen forms of implementing the method, I argue that in all of the proposed pairings, the substitution of imagination or recollection for perceptual experience in the method, is either inconceivable or impermissible. I identify four reasons why I think imagination cannot be substituted for real experience, and three reasons why recollection cannot be substituted for real experience. If my argument works, there is no form of implementing the method that is useful for discovering the contents of experience, and thus the method is not a well‐functioning tool to study the contents of perception. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates the early Husserl’s account of typicality. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl holds that the meaning of ordinary language (common) names is sensitive to typicality: this meaning depends on typical examples which vary in different contexts and are more or less similar to one another. This seems to entail that meanings, which according to Husserl are concepts, are “fluctuating” (schwankend) and vague. Prima facie, such a claim contravenes his theory of ideal meanings, or concepts, which are (...) “fixed” (fest) and sharp. However, Husserl wants to save this theory. He claims that the fluctuation and vagueness in question are not to be found in the meaning itself, or the concept, but rather derive from the act of meaning. Thus, he apparently manages to make room for typicality in ordinary language while accepting only fixed and sharp meanings. After presenting Husserl’s theory, I evaluate it and ask whether he will still be committed, despite his own claims, to accepting prototype concepts to account for typicality in ordinary language. (shrink)

One of the earliest and most‐fundamental pattern‐ formation events in embryonic development is endoderm and mesoderm specification. In sea urchin embryos, this process begins with blimp1 and wnt8 gene expression at the vegetal pole as soon as embryonic transcription begins. Shortly afterwards, wnt8/blimp1 expression spreads to the adjacent ring of mesoderm progenitor cells and is extinguished in the vegetal‐most cells. A little later, the ring of wnt8/blimp1 activity moves out of the mesoderm progenitors and into the neighboring endoderm cells. Remarkably, (...) this moving ring of gene expression has now been shown to be controlled entirely by transcriptional cis‐regulatory logic.1. BioEssays 30:412–417, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Dilthey frequently recognizes anthropology as a foundational science of human nature and as a cornerstone in the system of the human sciences. While much has been written about Dilthey’s “philosophical anthropology,” relatively little attention has been paid to his views on the emerging empirical science of anthropology. This paper examines Dilthey’s relation to the new discipline by focusing on his reception of its leading German representatives. Using his book reviews, essays, and drafts for Introduction to the Human Sciences from the (...) 1860s-70s, it highlights the influence of the new anthropology on his earliest attempts to elaborate the foundations of the Geisteswissenschaften. It argues that anthropology was a key source for some of the naturalistic features of Dilthey’s philosophy, and that it pulled him in a direction contrary to the historicist hermeneutics of his teachers. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wolff’s rejection of Leibnizian monads is rooted in a disagreement concerning the general notion of substance. Briefly, whereas Leibniz defines substance in terms of activity, Wolff retains a broadly scholastic and Cartesian conception of substance as that which per se subsists and sustains accidents. One consequence of this difference is that it leads Wolff to interpret Leibniz’s concept of a constantly striving force as denoting a feature of substance separate from its static powers, and not as (...) their replacement. For Wolff, powers are essential possibilities of acting in subjects suited for independent existence. Force is a further ingredient that provides a reason for the contingent operation of powers. Unlike Leibniz, Wolff conceives force narrowly as a principle of actuality, which he calls the nature of substance, as distinct from its principle of possibility, or essence. (shrink)

In this paper, we showcase our research on the use of ontologies and information extraction for the purpose of modeling damages incurred on car bodies. With the increasing use of technology in the automotive industry, it is important to have a standardized and efficient way of documenting and analyzing car damage reports. Most existing reports are unstructured, and there is a lack of standardization in describing the damage. To address this issue, we have developed a domain ontology for car damage (...) modeling (OCD),11 industryportal.enit.fr/ontologies/OCD,22 github.com/OntologyCarDamage/OCD and proposed an end-to-end system to extract information from French automotive reports. The information extraction process involves using named entity recognition (NER) and relationship extraction (RE) techniques to identify and extract relevant information from the reports. Then, the extracted information is used to populate the OCD ontology, allowing a structured and standardized representation of the damage information. The proposed system was tested on a real dataset of automotive reports and showed promising results. (shrink)

In the famous Appendix to paragraphs 11 and 20 of his 5th Logical Investigation, Husserl criticizes the concept of ‘immanent object’ defended by Brentano and his pupils. Husserl holds that intentional objects, even non-existent ones, are ‘transcendent’. Yet long before Husserl’s criticism, Brentano and his pupils, in their theories of intentionality, besides immanent objects also took into account transcendent ones, in a similar way to Husserl, since such transcendent objects were not necessarily objects that exist. The ‘immanent object’ (immanenter Gegenstand) (...) was also called ‘presented-thing as presented’ (Vorgestelltes als Vorgestelltes), whereas the ‘transcendent object’ was called ‘object tout court’ (Gegenstand schlechtweg) or ‘presented-thing tout court’ (Vorgestelltes schlechtweg). Even if it is in Marty that one finds the clearest distinction between these two kinds of objects, other pupils of Brentano, and Brentano himself, made similar distinctions. Despite its importance, this point has been neglected in the Brentanian literature. In the first part of this article, I present the way in which immanent and transcendent objects have been distinguished in the School of Brentano. In the second part of the article, I present some problems linked to the distinction of two objects for every mental act, an immanent and a transcendent one; these problems could explain the abandonment of the notion of ‘immanent object’ by many philosophers of the Brentanian tradition. I conclude with some remarks on the distinction between content and object in the School of Brentano. (shrink)

Global changes in capital, power, technology and the media have caused massive shifts in how we define home and community, leaving redrawn territories and globalized contexts. This interdisciplinary study of the media brings together essays by accomplished critics to discuss the way film, television, music, and computer and electronic media are shaping identities and cultures in an increasingly globalized world. Ranging from intensely personal to highly theoretical, the contributors explore our complex negotiation of "home" and homeland" in a postmodern world. (...) Contributors: Homi Bhabha, Thomas Elsaesser, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Teshome H. Gabriel, George Lipsitz, Margaret Morse, David Morley, John Peters, Patricia Seed, Ella Shohat, and Vivian Sobchack. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant’s treatment of the design argument for the existence of God, or physicotheology. It criticizes the interpretation that, for Kant, the assumption of intelligent design satisfies an internal demand of inquiry. It argues that Kant’s positive appraisal of physicotheology is instead better understood on account of its polemical utility for rebutting objections to practical belief in God upon which Kant’s ethicotheological argument rests, and thus as an instrument in the transition from theoretical to practical philosophy. Kantian physicotheology (...) plays this role a) by criticizing alternative speculative accounts of the ground of nature, and b) by analogizing from the structure of finite rational agency in order to represent more clearly the action of an ideal agent. (shrink)

Radiography images are widely utilized in the health sector to recognize the patient health condition. The noise and irrelevant region information minimize the entire disease detection accuracy and computation complexity. Therefore, in this study, statistical Kolmogorov–Smirnov test has been integrated with wavelet transform to overcome the de-noising issues. Then the cat swarm-optimized deep belief network is applied to extract the features from the affected region. The optimized deep learning model reduces the feature training cost and time and improves the overall (...) disease detection accuracy. The network learning process is enhanced according to the AdaDelta learning process, which replaces the learning parameter with a delta value. This process minimizes the error rate while recognizing the disease. The efficiency of the system evaluated using image retrieval in medical application dataset. This process helps to determine the various diseases such as breast, lung, and pediatric studies. (shrink)

Fronto-parietal activity has been frequently observed in fMRI and PET studies of attention, working memory, and episodic memory retrieval. Several recent fMRI studies have also reported fronto-parietal activity during conscious visual perception. A major goal of this review was to assess the degree of anatomical overlap among activation patterns associated with these four functions. A second goal was to shed light on the possible cognitive relationship of processes that relate to common brain activity across functions. For all reviewed functions we (...) observed a consistent and overlapping pattern of brain activity. The overlap was most pronounced for the bilateral parietal cortex , and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex . The common fronto-parietal activity will be discussed in terms of processes related to integration of distributed representations in the brain. (shrink)

Corporate activities conducted under the banner of creating shared value (CSV) have gained popularity over the last decade, and some MNCs have espoused that CSV has entered the heart of their practices. There has, however, been criticism about the lack of a standard definition of CSV. The purpose of the current study was to develop a working definition of CSV by identifying distinctions between CSV and various conceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with managers and (...) stakeholder representatives of five multinational corporations (MNCs) and three small and medium enterprises (SMEs), all headquartered or rooted in Asia. These firms had received public recognition for their CSV engagement. We compared and contrasted interviewees’ conceptions and descriptions of CSV and traditional CSR (philanthropy) and mapped these against Carroll’s four-layer model of responsible corporate management. Interviewees tended to frame CSV as a sustainable business model that generates social and economic value simultaneously. Traditional CSR was characterized as “giving back” some of the surplus from economic returns. In addition, interviewees described examples of strategic CSR, which involved pump-priming interventions for empowering and enabling stakeholders of the CSV practices of the focal firm to participate in the associated wealth and well-being co-creation. Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, creating shared value, qualitative, Asia. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and defends Kant's argument for the transcendental status of reason's principles of the systematic unity of nature in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. On the present account, these principles are neither mere methodological recommendations for conducting scientific inquiry nor do they have the normative force of categorical imperatives, two extant interpretations of Kant's discussion of reason in the Appendix. Instead, they are regulative yet transcendental principles restricted to theoretical cognition. The principles of the systematic unity of (...) nature count as transcendental in virtue of their role as conditions of the inferential articulation of empirical concepts. (shrink)

Emotions play vital roles in our psychology and our lives. They also often form the basis of our evaluative beliefs. On some views, emotions, like perceptions, justify the beliefs to which they give rise. It has, however, been claimed that, unlike perceptions, emotions are merely proxies for the genuine reasons that are constituted by their cognitive bases. In this paper, I argue that this objection arises from the failure to notice the difference between the notions of ‘reasons there are’ and (...) ‘possessed reasons’. After developing an account of what it is to possess a reason, it will be argued that emotions do constitute genuine reasons for the evaluative beliefs that result from them. To support this claim, a distinction is made between thinner and thicker descriptions of the same event, where a thinner description may be in terms of the emotional response, whereas a thicker description may be in terms of possessing a normative reason to hold a belief or to act. (shrink)

As a form of da’wah, the grave pilgrimage has didactic function. Some didactic values contained in the pilgrimage of the grave are the exemplary to the charismatic figures, the transformation of remembering death as a spirit of the good deed, the building of social capital, the medium of gratitude, and of order and obedience. One of the challenges faced in Indonesian education is the rampant violence done by students and parents to teachers. This problem can not be solved only through (...) the application of the concept of humanistic education. Therefore, the author offers the concept of humanistic religious education. This concept contains the use of some didactic values of the grave pilgrimage to complement the weaknesses of the concept of humanistic education. The use of didactic value is motivated by the reason that the grave pilgrimage is the religious practice that is easily accessible to the public from all social classes, except for those who reject it. Some of the companion values of the concept of humanistic education are the sacralization of the function of the teacher, the transformation of remembering death for charity and commitment to order and obedience. The sacralization of teachers is necessary to awaken parents and students that violence to teachers can lead to quality for perpetrators of violence. The concept of charity should be maintained in education to encourage the awareness of parents and students to not only need to respect the teacher during the learning process, but also to continue after the student completes his education. Commitment to obeying the order is necessary so that the parents and the student do not resort to violence to the teacher when the teacher carries out his disciplinary duties. (shrink)

Shāhnāmeh, Book of Kings, is one of the greatest epics in the world, beautifully put into verse by Abolqāsem Ferdowsi. It is the great Persian epic which makes the Persian language proud. One of th...

IntroductionNowadays, biotechnology has a significant influence on different aspects of human life. The applications of biotechnology are so broad, and the advantages so compelling, that virtually every industry is using this technology. Developments are under way in areas as diverse as pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, textiles, aquaculture, forestry, chemicals, household products, environmental cleanup, food processing, and forensics, to name a few. Biotechnology is enabling these industries to make new or better products, often with greater speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Biotechnology is any technological (...) application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof to make or modify products or processes for specific use. It applies the knowledge of biology to enhance and improve the environment, health, and food supply. Using biotechnology, scientists work to develop environment-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels and plastics; new medicines, vaccines, and. (shrink)

Anton Marty (1847-1914) is known to be the most faithful pupil of Franz Brentano. As a matter of fact, most of his philosophical ideas find their source in the works of his master. Yet, the faithfulness of Marty is not constant. As the rich correspondence between the two thinkers shows, Marty elaborates an original theory of intentionality from ca. 1904 onward. This theory is based on the idea that intentionality is a process of mental assimilation (ideelle Verähnlichung), a process at (...) the core of which lies a sui generis relation of “ideal similitude” holding between a thinking subject and its object. This study spells out the Martyian notion of mental assimilation and traces back Marty’s evolution from his earlier position (prominently described in the recently published Deskriptive Psychologie of 1893-1894) to his final view as it is found in the Untersuchungen of 1908. It turns out that besides Brentano, Husserl is a key figure in that evolution. Such a “genetic”elucidation of Marty’s last theory is required in order to reach the main goal of this paper, namely: the clarification of Marty’s degree of dependence upon Brentano with respect to the theory of intentionality. That being said, we do not merely intend to compare the mature Marty with Brentano: our “genetic” considerations will also allow us to describe the interaction between the two thinkers before 1904. Accordingly, we begin by presenting Brentano’s own position on intentionality in discussing its two currently competing readings, namely the “discontinuist” and the “continuist” one. Against a recent interpretation, we argue that Marty’s endorsement of a “discontinuist” reading is not based on a misunderstanding of Brentano’s position. (shrink)

The legal-ethical dynamism in Islamic law which allows it to respond to the challenges of modernity is said to reside in the institution of ijtihād (independent legal thinking and hermeneutics). However, jurists like Mohsen Kadivar and Ayatollah Faḍlalla have argued that the “traditional ijtihād” paradigm has reached its limits of flexibility as it allows for only minor adaptations and lacks a rigorous methodology because of its reliance on vague and highly subjective juridical devices such as public welfare (maṣlaḥa), imperative necessity (...) (ḍarūra), emergency (iḍtirār), need (ḥāja), averting difficulty (‘usr) and distress (ḥaraj), hardship (mashaqqa), and harm (ḍarar) without interrogating the fundamentals (uṣūl) of ijtihād. In contrast, in the “foundational ijtihād” model theology, ethics, intellect, epistemology, linguistics, hermeneutics, modern sciences, history, cosmology, anthropology, and the sources of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) interact with one another to obtain resolutions that are just and non-discriminatory. (shrink)

In recent years a new discussion on the nature of philosophical expertise has emerged: whether philosophers possess a special kind of expertise, what such expertise would entail, how to measure it, and related concerns. The aim of the present article is to clarify certain related points across these debates in the hope of paving a clearer path forward, by addressing the following. (1) The expertise defense, which seems central to many discussions on methodology and expertise, has been misconstrued at times. (...) (2) Questions of expertise and methodology could be separated more clearly. (3) The study of expertise may be important in its own right; however, there may be good reasons to give priority to methodological concerns. (4) Finally, when viewed in light of methodological concerns, a new project emerges when engaging with recent contributions to the expertise debate. The present article attempts a brief outline of this project. (shrink)