The Indonesian Constitution guarantees the freedom of Indonesian citizens to worship according to their religion. In reality, however, the Indonesian government had issued regulations that restrict the building of worship places, which is one way of expressing religious freedom. These regulations, being trapped in the discourse of the politicisation of religion and the religionisation of politics, are contradictory to the aspirations of the founding fathers as expressed in the Indonesian Constitution. This article seeks to deal with this problem by conducting (...) a critical and reflective study on religion–state relations, particularly on the concept of sphere sovereignty proposed by Abraham Kuyper. This study employed the content analysis method. The study demonstrates that this concept, when applied to the Indonesian situation, would prove helpful in restoring normative leadership to Indonesian politics and would enable it to align itself with the values of the Indonesian Constitution. The study also recommends a number of practical strategies in protecting religious freedom and rights in Indonesia, especially with regard to the restrictions on building worship places.Contribution: The study of the concept of Kuyper’s Sphere Sovereignty can be helpful in restoring normative leadership to Indonesian politics and would enable it to align itself with the values of the Indonesian Constitution and allow religion to fulfil its responsibility towards the state and the state towards religion, without being trapped in the discourse of the politicisation of religion and the religionisation of politics. (shrink)

Reproductive health technology allows married couples who experience infertility to have a child through assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) process. The transfer of the extracted embryo to the woman’s womb is called surrogacy technology (gestational surrogacy). The legality of the practice of surrogacy is still questionable, both on a national and international level. This research discussed the legality of surrogacy in some religious countries, focusing on Indonesia. This research used normative juridical research methods or (...) literature review through a comparative religion-legal approach. This study indicated that most do not have a specific legal instrument regarding surrogacy practice. International law also does not have a standard legal instrument regarding the legality of surrogacy. Legality is determined by each religious country’s national laws and customs. For example, Indonesian law prohibits this practice implicitly under Law No. 36 of 2009 concerning health. The United Kingdom legalised surrogacy through the Surrogacy Agreement Act 1985, which was amended to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act 2008, Greece through the Greek Legislation Law 3089/2002 and Law 3305/2005, and India through the 2019 Surrogacy Regulation Bill. Those countries have their limitations and characteristics that rule surrogacy. Surrogacy is indeed a technological advancement in the health sector. However, for countries that are influenced much by religion, technological advances sometimes conflict with the culture and the belief that has long been followed by most of the population. For Indonesia, the largest of Sunni Islam ruled surrogacy against the law. Next, Iran, as a Shia Islam country, ruled that surrogacy is a legal action.Contribution: The research provided information and knowledge regarding the different settings of surrogacy practice. Most religious countries bravely rejected or put strict limits on the practice of surrogacy. (shrink)

The rhetoric of decolonising feminism has been increasingly connected to reformism rather than a radical intervention. Problematising the idea of finality in the calls to decolonise, I suggest that decolonial feminism should be understood as an experiment, a risky, unfinished project rather than a fixed location, and I argue that it should be based on a more radicalised notion of what María Lugones calls ‘learning from other resisters’. I draw on my experience working with feminists across the vast and diverse (...) Indonesian nusantara and reflect on Lugones’s concept of ‘other resisters’ in her essay ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’. Learning from feminists from places such as Nusa Tenggara and West Papua who challenge the singular imagination of the Global South, I advocate shifting the debate away from Euro-American academia as the locus of knowledge production by centring other resisters on the path towards decolonial feminism. I propose three aspects in learning from other resisters: actively engaging in the process of creating feminist linkages, acknowledging borders and friction within the Global South and interrogating the notion of resistance. (shrink)

Abstract:What makes a leader ethical? This paper critically examines the answer given by developmental theory, which argues that individuals can develop through cumulative stages of ethical orientation and behavior (e.g. Hobbesian, Kantian, Rawlsian), such that leaders at later developmental stages (of whom there are empirically very few today) are more ethical. By contrast to a simple progressive model of ethical development, this paper shows that each developmental stage has both positive (light) and negative (shadow) aspects, which affect the ethical behaviors (...) of leaders at that stage. It also explores an unexpected result: later stage leaders can have more significantly negative effects than earlier stage leadership. (shrink)

Abstract:What makes a leader ethical? This paper critically examines the answer given by developmental theory, which argues that individuals can develop through cumulative stages of ethical orientation and behavior (e.g. Hobbesian, Kantian, Rawlsian), such that leaders at later developmental stages (of whom there are empirically very few today) are more ethical. By contrast to a simple progressive model of ethical development, this paper shows that each developmental stage has both positive (light) and negative (shadow) aspects, which affect the ethical behaviors (...) of leaders at that stage. It also explores an unexpected result: later stage leaders can have more significantly negative effects than earlier stage leadership. (shrink)

Generative Emergence provides insight into the non-linear dynamics that lead to organizational emergence through the use of complexity sciences. The book explores how the model of Generative Emergence could be applied to enact emergence within and across organizations.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

With fascinating historical anecdotes and incisive scientific analysis, this important work combines ancient thought with modern theory to reveal a new way of viewing our universe that can expand our awareness, our lives, and may well point the way to a new science for the twenty-first century.

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of (...) 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

I begin by criticizing an elaboration of an argument in this journal due to Hawley , who argued that, where Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles faces counterexamples, invoking relations to save PII fails. I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to a particular distinction. I proceed by demonstrating that in most putative counterexamples to PII , the so-called Discerning Defence trumps the Summing Defence of PII. The general kind of objects that do the discerning in all cases (...) form a category that has received little if any attention in metaphysics. This category of objects lies between indiscernibles and individuals and is called relationals: objects that can be discerned by means of relations only and not by properties. Remarkably, relationals turn out to populate the universe. (shrink)

"Not only one of the best but also the most comprehensive treatment of Stoicism written in this century." --Times Literary Supplement.

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

This landmark work provides a systematic introduction to systems of modal logic and stands as the first presentation of what have become central ideas in philosophy of language and metaphysics, from the "new theory of reference" and non-linguistic necessity and essentialism to "Kripke semantics.".

Ethics for Enemies comprises three original philosophical essays on torture, terrorism, and war. F. M. Kamm deploys ethical theory in her challenging new treatments of these most controversial practical issues. First she considers the nature of torture and the various occasions on which it could occur, in order to determine why it might be wrong to torture a wrongdoer held captive, even if this were necessary to save his victims. In the second essay she considers what makes terrorism wrong--whether it (...) is the intention to harm civilians, rather than harm to them being 'collateral damage,' or something else--and whether terrorism is always wrong. The third essay discusses whether having a right reason, in the sense of a right intention, is necessary in order for a war to be just. Kamm then examines ways in which the harms of war can be proportional to the achievement of the just cause and other goods that war can bring about, so as to make the declaration of war permissible. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

Recent advances in physics render a reconsideration of the Place of Mathematics in the Interpretation of the Universe particularly timely. On the one hand, we have the introduction of non-euclidian geometry, which has given rise to much controversy informed or otherwise; on the other hand, we find mysterious forms of mathematics, invented to cope with the quantum difficulties, which so far have escaped metaphysical investigation or criticism. It would seem most desirable that these modes of interpreting reality should be examined (...) from the broader philosophical point of view. (shrink)

John F. Post argues that physicalistic materialism is compatible with a number of views often deemed incompatible with it, such as the objectivity of values, the irreducibility of subjective experience, the power of the metaphor, the normativity of meaning, and even theism.

The essays in this collection address different aspects of Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

Neuroscience has studied deductive reasoning over the last 20 years under the assumption that deductive inferences are not only de jure but also de facto distinct from other forms of inference. The objective of this research is to verify if logically valid deductions leave any cerebral electrical trait that is distinct from the trait left by non-valid deductions. 23 subjects with an average age of 20.35 years were registered with MEG and placed into a two conditions paradigm (100 trials for (...) each condition) which each presented the exact same relational complexity (same variables and content) but had distinct logical complexity. Both conditions show the same electromagnetic components (P3, N4) in the early temporal window (250–525 ms) and P6 in the late temporal window (500–775 ms). The significant activity in both valid and invalid conditions is found in sensors from medial prefrontal regions, probably corresponding to the ACC or to the medial prefrontal cortex. The amplitude and intensity of valid deductions is significantly lower in both temporal windows (p = 0.0003). The reaction time was 54.37% slower in the valid condition. Validity leaves a minimal but measurable hypoactive electrical trait in brain processing. The minor electrical demand is attributable to the recursive and automatable character of valid deductions, suggesting a physical indicator of computational deductive properties. It is hypothesized that all valid deductions are recursive and hypoactive. (shrink)