'Myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity' Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the StateAs a central part of his philosophy of symbolic forms as a form of religious expression, and as a political problematic the question of myth belongs at the heart of Ernst Cassirer's intellectual enterprise. Using a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches, these papers examine the persistence of myth as a symbolic (...) form from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, anthropological, psychological, political, and historico-cultural. In its way each paper attempts, in Cassirer's phrase, to 'see the adversary face to face'.The contributors to this volume are Paul Bishop, Alan Cardew, Milad Doueihi, Dina Gusejnova, Cyrus Hamlin, Stefanie Hölscher, Kai Kresse, John Michael Krois, Barbara Naumann, Detlev Pätzold, Martine Prange, Birgit Recki, Edward Skidelsky, Roger Stephenson and Jonathan Westwood. (shrink)

Using graphics, colored diagrams, and illustrations, Everyday Philosophy Made Easy serves as a calm and patient tutor to help you remember, or learn, the basic theories of philosophy and how they are applied in everyday situations.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.4 (2000) 657-674 [Access article in PDF] European Thought in Nineteenth-Century Iran: David Hume and Others Cyrus Masroori European ideas have played a crucial part in the shaping of the modern Iranian intellectual climate, since Iranian intellectuals have been, one way or another, engaged with these ideas for at least a hundred and fifty years. This engagement has also influenced Iranian society (...) in various ways, as the conceptual foundations of the two Iranian revolutions of the twentieth century present the best evidence. Considering this impact, the study of the reception of European ideas in nineteenth-century Iran becomes important. This article explores neglected questions concerning the reception of ideas: did practical considerations of the Iranian intellectuals play a significant part in the reception of these ideas? And if they did, what was their impact? The examination presented here helps us to further our understanding of the reception and dissemination of political ideas in different cultures and to appreciate the variety of interpretations which they can receive.The article is organized in three parts. The first part provides a brief description of the historical context in which the nineteenth-century Iranian intellectuals were situated. The second part reviews several examples of the interaction between the practical concerns of Iranian intellectuals and their selection, interpretation, and utilization of European ideas. This part intends to provide evidence for the overall suggestion that practical concerns were the determining factor in the pattern of the engagement of Iranian intellectuals with European ideas. The third part of the article concentrates on the same factor in some of the writings of a leading Iranian intellectual of the time, Mirza Fath'ali Akhundzadeh, including his purported "Letter from David Hume to the Muslim Clergy of India," written around 1860. [End Page 657] Historical Background Throughout the nineteenth century Iran suffered from a significant crisis which affected various aspects of life, different social strata, and the ruling Qajar regime. The crisis had three interrelated causes: the expansionist policies of Iran's powerful neighbors, Russia and British India; an economic decline and fiscal difficulties which were in part due to the institutional arrangements, and; the Qajars' inherently weak legitimacy. Between 1800 and 1830, Iranians were involved with disastrous wars against Russians, which clearly demonstrated the weakness of the Iranian state in protecting its territories and population against its northern neighbor.Defeats in these wars pointed to the need for reform in Iran. The state initiated limited institutional reforms, first by the Crown Prince Abbas Mirza (1810s and 1820s) and later by Prime Ministers Mirza Abulqasim Qa'im Maqam (1835) and Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir (1848-51). These reform initiatives, however, proved to be unsuccessful, and the continued weakness of the state was further indicated by defeats by British forces (1856-57).One of the main obstacles to reform in Iran was the opposition by many of the courtiers and the majority of the Shi'i clergymen (ulama). The latter's opposition, particularly to any reform based on European ideas, was important because the ulama enjoyed significant influence over the people. Although on occasions the Shah and some of his ministers supported certain reforms based on European institutional models, the anti-reform coalition of the ulama and conservative courtiers was almost always successful in stopping such attempts. Meanwhile, it must be remembered that even when the Shah supported reform, he remained an autocrat with very little tolerance for any ideas which questioned his absolute political authority. Thus, although debate regarding modernization was at times tolerated by the state, demands for democratization were repressed by both the state and the ulama. 1Against the above background, the nineteenth century Iranian intellectuals who adhered to the principles of liberalism can be divided into three groups: institutional liberals, who believed that Iran could overcome its "underdevelopment" by importing European political and economic institutions without cultural changes or the liberal education of the people as a prerequisite; Islamic liberals who believed that demonstrating the compatibility between Islam and liberal principles such as the rule of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the AmericasWilliam M. HamlinPerhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Hernan Cortés in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortés and Cook (...) were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur ethnographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortés for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.“The Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson. Courtesy of Chronicle Features, San Francisco.Recent scholarly studies and debates—among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians—have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination. 1 [End Page 405] Indeed, the idea that redoubtable European explorers can be (and often are) perceived as supernatural beings by non-European “primitives” has been uncritically perpetuated to this day by filmmakers, fantasists, writers of popular history, and purveyors of cultural literacy. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, informs our children that Caribbean islanders encountered by Columbus “asked if he had come from heaven”—the implication being, of course, that they took him for a god. 2 And in the recent film, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, we hear the indefatigable Admiral (played by Gerard Depardieu) claim that “on every island the natives welcome us with great generosity and trust.... Because of our appearance, we have been mistaken for gods, and are treated accordingly.” 3 Fortunately, we also have a “Far Side” parody of the cultural conceit on which such ideas in part rely, but the cartoon serves as well to demonstrate just how thoroughly the conceit has permeated our collective awareness (see figure 1). 4 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” From The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm, Ltd., 1983. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.Let me offer just one other example. Near the end of the popular 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the forest-dwelling Ewoks begin to chant and salaam upon first glimpsing the golden robot C-3PO, who in turn tells his captured comrades, “I do believe they think I am some sort of god.” When Han Solo sarcastically asks the robot to use his “divine influence” to help extricate them from their predicament, C-3PO replies that such an action would be improper: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Here we see, embedded within a film romance, both the classic trope of the apotheosized foreigner and the related motif of the foreigner’s reluctance to [End Page 406] play the god-role (see figure 2). It is worth noting, however, that while C-3PO may be unwilling to exploit the Ewoks’ misperception, Luke Skywalker is not; he uses the “Force” to convince the Ewoks of the robot’s magical prowess and, more to the point, to perpetuate their misapprehension. 5What I wish to suggest in this essay is that certain habitual Western assumptions or conceits regarding cross-cultural encounters—assumptions which have been usefully termed “myth models” inasmuch as they condition human perception and find frequent discursive expression—coexist easily but in fact disjunctively with certain other ideological structures in many early modern travel narratives and colonial accounts. Obeyesekere, in his provocative book on the supposed deification of Captain Cook in Hawaii, has linked such myth models to the conceptual structures of the longue durée as characterized by Fernand Braudel, and it is possible that they may also be... (shrink)

This paper follows the history of an object. The purpose of doing so is to come to terms with a distinctive kind of research object – which we are calling a ‘test object’ – as well as to chronicle a significant line of research and technology development associated with the broader nanoscience/nanotechnology movement. A test object is one of a family of epistemic things that makes up the material culture of laboratory science. Depending upon the case, it can have variable (...) shadings of practical, mathematical and epistemic significance. Clear cases of test objects have highly regular and reproducible visible properties that can be used for testing instruments and training novices. The test object featured in this paper is the silicon 7×7, a particular surface configuration of silicon atoms. Research on this object over a period of several decades has been closely bound up with the development of novel instruments for visualizing atomic structures. Despite having little direct commercial value, the Si 7×7 also has been a focal object for the formation of a research community bridging industry and academia. It exhibits a complex structure that became a sustained focus of observation and modelling. Our study follows shifts in the epistemic status of the Si 7×7, and uses it to re-examine familiar conceptions of representation and observation in the history, philosophy and social study of science. (shrink)

Population Dynamics fills the gap between the classical supply-side population theory of Malthus and the modern demand-side theory of economic demography. In doing so, author Cyrus Chu investigates specifically the dynamic macro implications of various static micro family economic decisions. Holding the characteristic composition of the macro population to always be an aggregate result of some corresponding individual micro decision, Chu extends his research on the fertility-related decisions of families to an analysis of other economic determinations. Within this framework, (...) Chu studies the income distribution, attitude composition, job structure, and aggregate savings and pensions of the population. While in some cases a micro-macro connection is easily established under regular behavioral assumptions, in several chapters Chu enlists the mathematical tool of branching processes to determine the connection. Offering a wealth of detail, this book provides a balanced discussion of background motivation, theoretical characterization, and empirical evidence in an effort to bring about a renewal in the economic approach to population dynamics. This welcome addition to the research and theory of economic demography will interest professional economists as well as professors and graduate students of economics. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy and Sufism evolved as distinct yet interpenetrating strands of Islamic thought and practice. Despite differences, they have shared a concern with the perfection of the soul through the development of character. In The Polished Mirror, Cyrus Ali Zargar studies the ways in which, through teaching and storytelling, pre-modern Muslims lived, negotiated, and cultivated virtues. Examining the writings of philosophers, ascetics, poets, and saints, he locates virtue ethics within a dynamic moral tradition."--Amazon.com.

In the western tradition utopia is often associated with Sir Thomas More’s description of an ideal city. This association has resulted in a number of consequences. For instance, until recently, the pre-More utopian texts have been to a large extent neglected. Also, overshadowed by modern European adventure fictions, non-western utopian writings have received relatively little attention. This article briefly reviews various Persian utopian traditions,1 followed by a more detailed examination of one of them, the Alexandrian genre. It will show that (...) some of the accounts presented by More were anticipated by Persian utopian authors. The article also shows that the Alexandrian utopia, like many of its European .. (shrink)

I examine what I take to be an important consideration for the later Wittgenstein: the understanding of a rule does not exceed or transcend an understanding of explanations or instructions in the rule. I contend that this consideration plays a central role in the later Wittgenstein's views on rule-following. I first show that it serves as a key premiss in a sceptical argument concerning our ability to follow rules. I then argue that this consideration is vital to Wittgenstein's case against (...) what I describe as a realist view of rules. This realist view requires that our understanding of a rule extend beyond what can be understood from any set of instructions or explanation. For Wittgenstein, because this is to transcend publicly available means of conveying understanding, this realist's understanding is a private understanding. He calls this private source of understanding an ‘intuition’ and the main line of argument against intuition in our understanding of a rule draws, appropriately, on what is called his ‘private language argument’. In this paper, I defend a non-verificationist reading of this argument and its use against the realist so-construed. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

THE GREEK ISLAND of Spetsais, which I like to think of as my island, is a small, wooded rock that rises gently out of the Argolic Gulf. ...

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points (...) that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms. (shrink)

James Geikie's Great Ice Age first presented to the geological public the Pleistocene. modern interpretation of alternating mild and cold periods during the Though it was supported by geological evidence, Geikie's view of the Ice Age was based on a theoretical framework supplied by the climatic physics of James Croll. Mid-nineteenth-century British geologists had encountered great difficulty in making sense out of the varied and complicated glacial deposits, or ‘drift’, and had formulated the ‘iceberg’ theory to account for the apparent (...) chaos of the drift, an explanation which discouraged its stratigraphic study. The reaffirmation of faith in continental glaciation by several Scottish geologists in the 1850s brought with it a belief in an eventful Pleistocene, but it remained difficult to discover the events of Ice Age history from study of the glacial deposits. In 1864 Croll presented a detailed climatic history of the Ice Age deduced from astronomy and physical geography. By 1871 James Geikie was using Croll's scheme of Ice Age history as the basis for his impressive synthesis of Pleistocene data from throughout the world. (shrink)

It has been almost twenty‐five years since Huberman and Riggs first showed that there are multiple bidirectional origins of replication scattered at ∼100 kb intervals along mammalian chromosomal fibers. Since that time, every conceivable physical property unique to replicating DNA has been taken advantage of to determine whether origins of replication are defined sequence elements, as they are in microorganisms. The most thoroughly studied mammalian locus to date is the dihydrofolate reductase domain of Chinese hamster cells, which will be used (...) as a model to discuss the various methods of investigation. While several laboratories agree on the rough location of the [initiation locus] in this large chromosomal domain, different experimental approaches paint different pictures of the mechanism by which initiation occurs. However, a variety of new techniques and synchronizing agents promises to clarify the picture for this particular locus, and to provide the means for identifying and isolating other origins of replication for comparison. (shrink)

While writing the foreword for this special edition of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, I was informed of Dr. Nelson R. Mandela’s death. While saddened with his passing, I was struck by the fact, he was one of the two men who most influenced my study and practice of Restorative Justice; the other was my father. Both passed away while this edition was compiled and edited.In the mid 1990s, I first read about Restorative Justice as an aspect (...) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (“TRC”) established by Dr. Mandela in post-apartheid South Africa. I was fascinated by his forgiveness of his oppressors and how he infused the ideals of reconciliation and forgiveness into a court-like hearing. It was an opportunity for the victim of human rights violations to face the perpetrator and tell the perpetrator the extent of the injuries he or she suffered. After the victim spoke, the perpetrator had an opportunity to admit to the wrongdoing, take full responsibility for the har. (shrink)

Intellectual encounters between Europe and the Middle East have a long and rich history. During the last two centuries these encounters have accelerated, creating valuable opportunities to study the evolution of political concepts and dissemination of political ideas. This article examines one example of such encounters, showing how a liberal Persian intellectual of the late nineteenth century has borrowed and manipulated concepts from a French Romanticist of the late seventeenth century. Guided by theoretical insights from Quentin Skinner and Fred Dallmayr, (...) this article demonstrates the importance of context to the development of political thought, and refutes the conventional suggestion that Middle Eastern liberals have been the passive recipients of Western ideas. (shrink)