Historians of the Khanate of Khiva have long disagreed about the legal and fiscal status of certain categories of land ownership known as atā’ī mulk and yārlīqlī mulk. In the present article, I try to offer a new reading of these categories. In so doing, I challenge the influential arguments of Russian scholars such as O. Škapskij, V. Giršfel’d, A. Galkin, whose conceptualisations of yārlīqlī mulk reflect a number of interpretative errors and confusions between various different legal and fiscal practices. (...) By analysing in detail the edicts of khans’ yārlīqs and tax registries, I attempt to demonstrate that the lands identified by Russian authors as yārlīqlī mulk enjoyed complete fiscal immunity, and that they were commonly referred to in vernacular usage as mulk-i hālis. (shrink)

Supercommentary on Tattvacintāmaṇi, classical work on Navya Nyaya philosophy by Gaṅgeśa, active 13th century and its commentaries Didhiti by Raghunātha Śiromaṇi and Tattvacintāmaṇidīdhitiprakāśa by Bhavānanda Siddhāntavāgīśa with complete text.

According to the evaluativist theory of bodily pain, the overall phenomenology of a painful experience is explained by attributing to it two types of representational content—an indicative content that represents bodily damage or disturbance, and an evaluative content that represents that condition as bad for the subject. This paper considers whether evaluativism can offer a suitable explanation of aversive auditory phenomenology—the experience of awful noises—and argues that it can only do so by conceding that auditory evaluative content would be guilty (...) of widespread error. Defending such an error-theory, moreover, comes with several explanatory costs. (shrink)

Монографията е завършек на трилогично изследване на автора, обобщаващо основните проблеми на философията на религията. Монографията продължава разсъжденията на автора за Бога. От отношенията между Бога и човека вниманието се насочва към отношението между Бога и света. Те се осмислят от аспекта на понятията трансцендентно и иманентно. Съпоставят се актуалистичната и фабулизиращата парадигма. Използва се алегорията "хармоника", за да се онагледи отношението между "сгънатото" и "разгънатото" състояние на света. Трансцендентното се разглежда като холистичен, "сгънат" аспект на битието, а емпиричноимагинентното - (...) като негов динамично "разгънат" аспект. (shrink)

The ever-increasing dominance of English within analytic philosophy is an aspect of linguistic globalisation. To assess it, I first address fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. Steering a middle course between linguistic universalism and linguistic relativism, I deny that some languages might be philosophically superior to others, notably by capturing the essential categories of reality. On this background I next consider both the pros and cons of the Anglicisation of philosophy. I shall defend the value of English as a (...) lingua franca, while denying both the feasibility and the desirability of English as the sole universal language of philosophy. Finally I turn to the linguistic inequality in contemporary analytic philosophy. While it does not per se amount to an injustice, there is a need to level the playing field. But the remedy does not lie in linguistic academic sectarianism. Instead, what might be called for are piecemeal measures to reduce explicit and implicit biases against analytic philosophers on the geographic fringes, biases that are only partly connected to the predominance of English. (shrink)

We explore Peirce’s pragmatic conception of sign action, as a distributed and emergent view of cognition and exemplify with the emergence of classical ballet. In our approach, semiosis is a temporally distributed process in which a regular tendency towards certain future outcomes emerges out of a history of sign actions. Semiosis self-organizes in time, in a process that continuously entails the production of more signs. Emergence is a ubiquitous condition in this process: the translation of signs into signs cannot be (...) inferred from the properties of the components of a semiotic triad alone, but has to take into account a complex interaction between a micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic level of description. This interaction can be understood as an interplay of potentialities and tendencies, or upward constitutive determinative relations and downward selective determinative relations. According to this view, emergence is a central defining condition of processes of meaning. Ballet is a sign in action. The emergence of classical ballet is a self-regulatory process, in which a system of different kinds of cognitive artifacts (musical, bodily/motor, spatial/architectonic) and agents obtained a stable semiotic relation throughout many phases of development between the 16th and the 19th Century. One case is the development of the verticality of dance in classical ballet as a semiotic relation connecting proscenium arch stages, dancing bodies, and audiences. This development is micro-semiotically determined by the spatial constraints of the proscenium arch stage, and macro-semiotically determined by a historical construction of the dancing body as a sign within a network of semiotic chains, such as the intersemiotic regulation of body of the dancer by principles coming from painting. This is not only the emergence of actual meaning, but also the emergence of an open-ended field of potential and general meanings, an autonomous tendency of development. To say that ballet, as sign action, emerges, is to say that cognitive artifacts such as dancer’s bodies, stages and audience’s point of view, musical compositions, costumes, all sorts of supporting institutions, etc, constitute a niche for sign action, interacting according to tendencies of development that didn’t exist before. (shrink)

XI. yüzyılda başlayan özellikle de XII. yüzyılın ilk çeyreğinde hızlanan Arapçadan İbraniceye tercüme süreci XVI. yüzyılın sonlarına kadar devam etmiştir. Bu süreçte Fârâbî, İbn Sînâ, Gazzâlî ve İbn Rüşd gibi önde gelen Müslüman filozofların felsefe ve teolojiye dair eserleri doğrudan ya da aracı diller üzerinden İbraniceye tercüme edilmiştir. Bu tercüme sürecinde Arapça bilen Yahudi düşünür ve mütercimler bir yandan farklı alanlardan seçtikleri eserleri İbraniceye tercüme ederken, diğer yandan da Arapça eserlerden yararlanarak yazdıkları İbranice eserleriyle Yahudi düşünürlerin İslam düşünce mirasıyla tanışmalarında (...) kolaylaştırıcı rol oynamışlardır. Sınırlı sayıda eseri İbraniceye tercüme edilmesi nedeniyle İbn Sînâ’nın felsefî görüşlerinin Yahudi düşünürleri arasındaki yaygınlığı ve etkisi, Latinceye tercüme süreci ve Latin düşünürleri üzerindeki etkisine nazaran daha sınırlı olsa da yine de onun farklı felsefî meselelerdeki Yahudi düşünürler üzerindeki etkisi tartışmasızdır. Biz bu çalışmamızda, Türkçede genelde ihmal edilmiş, yeteri kadar ele alınmamış olan İbn Sînâ’nın XII. - XIV. yüzyıllar arasında Yahudi düşüncesinin gelişiminde nasıl bir rol oynadığı, onları hangi felsefî ve teolojik meselelerde etkilediği hususunu ele alacağız. Bunu yapabilmek için İbn Sînâ’nın eserlerinin İbraniceye tercüme sürecine dair genel bilgi verdikten sonra İbn Sînâ’nın eserlerinin tamamının ya da en azından önemli eserlerinin neden İbraniceye tercüme edilmediği sorusunun yanıtını bulmaya çalışacağız. Daha sonra da İbn Sînâ’nın düşünsel mirasının Yahudi düşünürler üzerindeki etkisini, üç farklı döneme ayırarak somut örnekler üzerinden tespit etmeye çalışacağız. (shrink)

W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet it illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought. It memorializes a tragedy central to his turn from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion. Its rhetoric also exemplifies a broader tension in his writings, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses. In its normalizing rhetorical mode, which dominates, the (...) elegy depicts an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household—potentially eliciting white readers’ sympathetic identification, but failing to displace the gendered and classed logic of racial exclusion. Its moments of transgressive rhetoric complicate or refuse such identification, celebrating Burghardt’s racial impurity and invoking a lineage of black maternal ambivalence. Though each is vexed and ephemeral, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal countervailing impulses that Du Bois would articulate in later writings. (shrink)

Habit in semiosis can be modeled both as a macro-level in a hierarchical multi-level system where it functions as boundary conditions for emergence of semiosis, and as a cognitive niche produced by an ecologically-inherited environment of cognitive artifacts. According to the first perspective, semiosis is modeled in terms of a multilayered system, with micro functional entities at the lower-level and with higher-level processes being mereologically composed of these lower-level entities. According to the second perspective, habits are embedded in ecologically-inherited environments (...) of signs that co-evolve with cognition. Both descriptions offer a novel approximation of Peirce’s semiotics and theoretical findings in other areas (hierarchy theory, evolutionary biology), suggesting new frameworks to approach the concept of habit integrated with its role in semiosis. (shrink)

In _Opposition to Philosophy in Safavid Iran_ Ata Anzali and S.M. Hadi Gerami offer a critical edition of what is arguably the most erudite and extensive critique of philosophy from the Safavid period. The editors’ extensive introduction offers an in-depth analysis that places the work within the broader framework of Safavid intellectual and social history.

The icon is the type of sign connected to efficient representational features, and its manipulation reveals more information about its object. The London Underground Diagram (LUD) is an iconic artifact and a well-known example of representational efficiency, having been copied by urban transportation systems worldwide. This paper investigates the efficiency of the LUD in the light of different conceptions of iconicity. We stress that a specialized representation is an icon of the formal structure of the problem for which it has (...) been specialized. By embedding such rules of action and behavior, the icon acts as a semiotic artifact distributing cognitive effort and participating in niche construction. (shrink)

Probably no intellectual has suffered more distortion and abuse than Spencer. He is continually condemned for things he never said – indeed, he is taken to task for things he explicitly denied. The target of academic criticism is usually the mythical Spencer rather than the real Spencer; and although some critics may derive immense satisfaction from their devastating refutations of a Spencer who never existed, these treatments hinder rather than advance the cause of knowledge.

Argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Poems are treated by translators as hierarchical multilevel systems. Here we propose the notion of “multilevel poetry translation” to characterize such cases of poetry translation in terms of selection and rebuilding of a multilevel system of constraints across languages. Different levels of a poem correspond to different sets of components that asymmetrically constrain each other (e. g., grammar, lexicon, syntactic construction, prosody, rhythm, typography, etc.). This perspective allows a poem to be approached as a thinking-tool: an “experimental lab” which submits (...) language to unusual conditions and provides a scenario to observe the emergence of new patterns of semiotic behaviour as a result. We describe this operation as a problem-solving task, and exemplify with Augusto de Campos’ Portuguese translation of John Donne’s poem “The Expiration.”. (shrink)

La réflexion sur l’éthique et la déontologie des médias en Afrique de l’Ouest suscite diverses questions. Il convient d’abord de clarifier les concepts pour alimenter le débat qui a ses moments forts, notamment pendant les périodes électorales.D’un côté, les professionnels de l’information, les acteurs des médias mettent l’accent sur la nécessaire liberté de la presse et peuvent être en porte-à-faux dans leur pratique avec la philosophie et les règles de la profession. D’un autre côté, différentes institutions, que ce soit les (...) institutions gouvernementales, la société civile ou de « simples » citoyens, s’appuient sur les médias, mais les interpellent au sujet d’une liberté qui ne saurait être sans responsabilité.Il s’agira donc de contextualiser l’environnement d’intervention des médias et d’examiner les réponses données aux problèmes posés y compris par les citoyens dans leurs rapports aux médias. La mise en place d’une législation et de structures institutionnelles – que ce soit les organes de régulation, dans leur diversité, ou de manière plus problématique, les organes d’autorégulation ou le tribunal des pairs – montre qu’il existe une dynamique à prendre en compte dans le dévelop­pement des médias en Afrique de l’Ouest.Enfin, nous nous attaquerons à quelques défis, qu’il s’agisse de la formation des professionnels, de la pratique des médias en période de conflit ou des technologies de l’information et de la communication, pour montrer que l’éthique et la déontologie sont au cœur du développement démocratique en Afrique de l’Ouest et en sont un élément constitutif. (shrink)

The ethical Principle of Proportionality requires combatants not to cause collateral harm excessive in comparison to the anticipated military advantage of an attack. This principle is considered a major (and perhaps insurmountable) obstacle to ethical use of autonomous weapon systems (AWS). This article reviews three possible solutions to the problem of achieving Proportionality compliance in AWS. In doing so, I describe and discuss the three components Proportionality judgments, namely collateral damage estimation, assessment of anticipated military advantage, and judgment of “excessiveness”. (...) Some possible approaches to Proportionality compliance are then presented, such as restricting AWS operations to environments lacking civilian presence, using AWS in targeted strikes in which proportionality judgments are pre-made by human commanders, and a ‘price tag’ approach of pre-assigning acceptable collateral damage values to military hardware in conventional attritional warfare. The article argues that application of these three compliance methods would result in AWS’ achieving acceptable Proportionality compliance levels in many combat environments and scenarios, allowing AWS to perform most key tasks in conventional warfare. (shrink)