Civilization; Modernism; Arab countries; intellectual life.

قد يكون من نافلة القول، أو من باب تحصيل الحاصل، كما يقول المناطقة، قولنا: إن مبحث الكلام في الغرب الإسلامي مازال تراثاً بكراً لم يتم بعد اكتشافه والتعرف عليه، ولم تطأه الكثير من الأقلام. فهو مبحث عذب المذاق، لكنه صعب المورد، لأن الخوض فيه ليس سهلاً ويسيراً، بل مثقلاً وعسيراً. ومرد هذه العواصة ـ التي هي من البداهة إلى حد أن التصريح بها أصبح من قبيل الإطناب ـ إلى التبديد الذي أصاب التراث الكلامي في هذه المنطقة. وهو التبديد الذي يقف (...) عقبة كؤوداً في طريق الحكم على الوضع الكلامي ـ الذي يفتقر إلى دراسات ـ عن كثب في هذا الجناح الغربي من العالم الإسلامي. فالعدد الجم من هذا الجنس من القول الذي هو الكلام قد ضاع كله واندرس، إما قصداً عبر التاريخ لمحوه، أو مدفوناً في ثنايا خزائن العالم. ومسألة إخراجه من "الوجود بالقوة" إلى "الوجود بالفعل"، بالمعنى الأرسطي، مغامرة دونها خرط القتاد، كما يقول أهل اللغة! وتبعاً لذلك، يمكننا الاطمئنان إلى القول بأن الاتجاهات الكلامية في الغرب الإسلامي منطقة مجهولة يندر روادها وتتعذر مسالكها. (shrink)

We discuss the possible nature and role of non-physical entanglement, and the classical vs. non-classical interface, in models of human decision-making. We also introduce an experimental setting designed after the double-slit experiment in physics, and discuss how it could be used to discriminate between classical and non-classical interference effects in human decisions.

In this article a reference to Jacques Lacan’s ‘capitalist discourse’ will help highlight the bio-political workings of neo-liberalism in times of austerity, detecting the transition from so-called ‘debt economy’ to an ‘economy of anxiety.’ An ‘il-liberal’ turn at the core of neoliberal discourses will be examined in particular, which pivots on an ‘astute’ intersecting between outbursts of renunciation; irreducible circularity of guilt and satisfaction; persistent attachment to forms of dissipative enjoyment; and a pervasive blackmail under the register of all-encompassing regulations (...) and evaluations — all of which elevates the production of success up to the point of a production and consumption of failure. (shrink)

This paper presents a new account of Hume’s “probability of causes”. There are two main results attained in this investigation. The first, and perhaps the most significant, is that Hume developed – albeit informally – an essentially sound system of probabilistic inductive logic that turns out to be a powerful forerunner of Carnap’s systems. The Humean set of principles include, along with rules that turn out to be new for us, well known Carnapian principles, such as the axioms of semiregularity, (...) symmetry with respect to individuals (exchangeability), predictive irrelevance and positive instantial relevance. The second result is that Hume developed an original conception of probability, which is subjective in character, although it differs from contemporary personalistic views because it includes constraints that are additional to simple consistency and do not vary between different persons. The final section is a response to Gower’s thesis, by which Hume’s probability of causes is essentially non-Bayesian in character. It is argued that, on closer examination, Gower’s reading of the relevant passages is untenable and that, on the contrary, they are in accordance with the Bayesian reconstruction presented in this paper. (shrink)

Thirty-four scholars from 18 countries on five continents met in Cairo to debate for the first time the ideals of the Enlightenment and secularism while celebrating the 800th anniversary of the death of one of Islam's greatest philosophers. Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroës, may be viewed as a medieval precursor of the European Enlightenment and as a rallying point for dialogue between East and West. Averroës's attempt to harmonise philosophy and religion, reason and faith, (...) led to a rethinking of the tenets of Christianity. His work spurred on some of the great rational syntheses of Christian thought, such as Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. This book offers a rare opportunity to learn about the contemporary Arab world and its efforts to dialogue with the West. (shrink)

Contracts play an important role in business management where relationships among different parties are dictated by legal rules. Electronic contracts have emerged mostly due to technological advances and electronic trading between companies and customers. New challenges have then arisen to guarantee reliability among the stakeholders in electronic negotiations. In this scenario, automatic verification of electronic contracts appeared as an imperative support, specially the conflict detection task of multi-party contracts. The problem of checking contracts has been largely addressed in the literature, (...) but there are few, if any, methods and practical tools that can deal with multi-party contracts using a contract language with deontic and dynamic aspects as well as relativizations, over the same formalism. In this work we present an automatic checker for finding conflicts on multi-party contracts modeled by an extended contract language with deontic operators and relativizations. Moreover a well-known case study of sales contract is modeled and automatically verified by our tool. Further, we performed practical experiments in order to evaluate the efficiency of our method and the practical tool. (shrink)

This note makes a contribution to the issue raised in a paper by Popper and Miller (1983) in which it was claimed that probabilistic support is purely deductive. Developing R. C. Jeffrey's remarks, a new general approach to the crucial concept of "going beyond" is here proposed. By means of it a quantitative measure of the inductive component of a probabilistic inference is reached. This proposal leads to vindicating the view that typical predictive probabilistic inferences by enumeration and analogy are (...) purely inductive. (shrink)

Metaphysics; utopias; Fārābī; political and social views.