The concept of green jobs emerged in 2007 as a means for conserving energy, minimizing natural gas emissions, reducing pollution and waste and protecting and improving ecosystems. The practice of decent employment through such jobs has caught on significantly and shown much positive effects. Decent work refers to employment opportunities that provide for fair income, security, improving personal and social development and promoting equality. Combining green job and decent work as a new approach can alter the traditional perspective of labour (...) laws. According to the Islamic view, the Qur’an has taken into account all such concepts directly or indirectly. This article focuses on reviewing green jobs from the Islamic perspective, and concepts and principles such as squander, cleanliness, waste, no-harm and causation are directly mentioned as a necessary condition for green jobs. This paper examines the concept of green job based on content analysis approach within Islamic jurisprudence. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose a new framework for extended epistemology, based on a second-wave approach to extended cognition. The framework is inclusive, in that it takes into account the complex interplay between the diverse embodiments of extended knowers and the salient properties of technological artifacts, as well as the environment in which they are embedded. Thus it both emphasizes and exploits the complementary roles played by these different elements. Finally, I motivate and explain this framework by applying it to (...) a case of interaction with contemporary technologies. (shrink)

Language is both a biological and a cultural phenomenon. Our aim here is to discuss, in an evolutionary perspective, the articulation of these two aspects of language. For this, we draw on the general conceptual framework developed by Ruth Millikan (1984) while at the same time dissociating ourselves from her view of language.

El presente artículo ofrece una traducción anotada del _Tratado acerca de las reglas del arte de los poetas_ (_Qawānīn fī ṣināʿat al-šuʿarāʾ_) de Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī. Acompañamos esta traducción de una introducción dividida en tres partes. En primer lugar, se ofrece un contexto general acerca del lugar del Qawānīn en la obra de al-Fārābī y en la tradición filosófica árabe. En segundo, se plantea una posible división temática del texto. Y finalmente, en tercer lugar, se especifican las peculiaridades de la (...) traducción, referente al texto tomado como base y las principales decisiones de traducción. (shrink)

Millions of children in conflict-affected countries are deprived of their fundamental rights to education. Using the qualitative exploratory research method, this study aims to explore ways of providing education to such children, and to identify the challenges facing their implementation. It also presents two short case studies conducted on Palestinian and Syrian refugees residing in Malaysia to explore their perceptions towards their education in their current situation and future orientation. The results show that despite the educational programmes initiated by various (...) organizations, the affected community continue to face numerous political, financial, psychological, economic, administrative, or institutional challenges. The analysis of the interviews data revealed several categories and themes, among them related to the participants’ current situation, educational needs, roles of different members of the community involved, and the challenges. The study recommends increasing efforts to meet the educational demands of the huge number of children out of schools. (shrink)

This volume consists of a collection of essays that explores the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, also known as Rabindrasangeet as independent poetic verses. It is an intellectual reading of his songs that are collected in the Gitabitan, which is a collection of all of his 2232 songs.

Sri Aurobindo dedicated his life to the transformation of humanity. His journey saw him traverse many paths, including that of poet, journalist, jailed revolutionary, philosopher, and radical mystic. Essays, translations, literary criticism, political articles, philosophical treatises, poetry, epics, plays and short stories-his writings encompass the depth and range of his extraordinary life. The modern sage commented on spiritual texts such as the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita, authored an epic poem, Savitri, presented his integral vision in The Life (...) Divine, wrote on contemporary issues, all the while writing thousands of letters to guide his disciples, and even documenting his inner life in meticulous detail. The relevance of Sri Aurobindo's message has never been more urgent and compelling, yet, his Complete Works, thirty-six volumes in all, can be a daunting prospect even for those acquainted with his philosophy and practice. Reading Sri Aurobindo introduces each of these volumes through the perspectives of twenty-one contributors. The result is a book packed with insights inviting us to explore Sri Aurobindo's deep wisdom and vision for resolving the fundamental issues facing individuals, societies, and nations today. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to refute the fregean assumption that declarative sentences refer to truth-Values. A consequence of the assumption is that the truth-Value of a declarative sentence containing another as part remains unchanged when the part is replaced by another sentence having the same truth-Value, Provided that the part as part has only customary reference and expresses a complete thought. The refutation proceeds by demonstrating this consequence to be false.

El «mundo entero» vive un gran desasosiego al estar inmiscuido en la dominación de la Naturaleza sustentada en la gran inversión económica, desde el paradigma antropocéntrico neoliberal. El objetivo del presente trabajo es reconocer y abrazar epistemologías y metodologías alternativas, entre ellas validar las contribuciones de los pueblos indígenas (PI) como protagonistas de la sustentabilidad y soberanía alimentaria. La investigación es de corte documental y la reflexión personal de más de 20 años de labor junto a los PI en Mesoamérica (...) y los Andes. Valorar dichas contribuciones, es centrarse en sus acervos y corpus cognoscitivos, antes que sea tarde. Son los sabios guardianes de la sustentabilidad biocultural de la Naturaleza y la Vida. Se concluye principalmente que son quienes conocen las claves, llaves y secretos que dan respuesta al reto de estelarizar la sustentabilidad y seguridad alimentaria global, que tanto persigue la humanidad. La sociedad en general y en particular las instancias oficiales, formativas, políticas, corporativas, industriales, de extensión y académicas, deben distinguir a estos actores sociales que soportan hoy la seguridad alimentaria mundial. El hallazgo principal cual severa advertencia, es que al «desaparecer» estaríamos ante un fenómeno descomunal de inseguridad alimentaria mundial. (shrink)

El presente artículo se centra en explorar una cuestión fundamental del pensamiento de al-Fārābī, específicamente su comprensión de la potencia de la poesía y su papel político y social en el contexto del mundo árabe clásico. La lectura de este filósofo implica una reinterpretación innovadora de la Poética y la Retórica de Aristóteles, destacando el carácter productivo de la imaginación en términos de evocación de imágenes y creación de semejanzas. Se explora, asimismo, la influencia de la filosofía de al-Fārābī en (...) otros filósofos árabes e islámicos, como Avicena y Averroes, quienes se convirtieron en principales referentes en la reivindicación de la filosofía en este contexto cultural. (shrink)

In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on medieval (...) scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy. (shrink)

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which they belong. In contrast, the notion of knowledge as foundational and absolute has been extensively challenged. A transformation and pluralisation has occurred: knowledge has come to be seen as situated and localized into (...) various ‘knowledges’, and the status of the body has taken on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, the embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological perspective in exploring the notion of embodied knowing as it relates to higher education programs and, more specifically, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in these programs. (shrink)

As students progress towards their PhD degrees, they will become more independent and practitioner-like; for those moving into academia, it is often assumed the programs of their PhD mentors will serve as prototypes for their own successful research programs. However, the author's research program as an Assistant Professor led him in directions never considered as a graduate student. The author had to make significant decisions in choosing a primary audience, finding an overarching theme, defining the individual problems, and developing these (...) problems into researchable projects. Infrastructure-related issues associated with the author's research program were also considered. The details of his journey from the end of his doctoral degree to his current position as an Assistant Professor are described in this article. (shrink)

Anthropocene jurisprudence amounts to a legal attitude that posits human beings as the ultimate subject to which the legal ontology, epistemology, and language serve. This attitude inevitably leads to exceptionalism not only in terminology but also in the impact which legal verdicts incur, especially on the natural environment and species. In this paper, we make a coupled reading of jurisprudence and environmental science while suggesting a post-Anthropocene model of law which can be made philosophically consistent by appropriating a new theory (...) of human as a 'biocultural creature' to outgrow the attitude of exceptionalism in law. In doing so, we take recourse of dynamic systems and complexity theory for a law to account for the ontology, epistemology and linguistics of post-Anthropocene jurisprudence. (shrink)

Concept of self in Indic philosophy; based on Mahābhārata, Hindu epic.

Las Conferencias John Dewey marcan el cambio en el pensamiento de Putnam hacia un nuevo realismo naturalista que trataba de ofrecer un camino medio al debate entre realistas y antirrealistas. Este giro vendrá fuertemente influenciado por la corriente pragmatista y, en particular, por los filósofos William James y John Dewey. Estas páginas buscan rastrear las ideas deweyanas que Putnam recoge, enfatizando esa recuperación de la filosofía como disciplina que atienda a los problemas del hombre común.

In De veritate I.2, Thomas Aquinas claims that “to every true act of understanding there must correspond some being and likewise to every being there corresponds a true act of understanding.” For Aquinas, the ratio of truth consists in a conformity between intellect and being. This account of truth, however, doesnot appear to allow for a certain class of truths, namely those that are about nonbeings. Many think that it is true that ‘no chimeras exist,’ that ‘blindness can becaused by (...) exposure to bright lights,’ and that ‘evil should be avoided.’ Yet, in each of these cases of truth, there does not appear to be a being to which the intellectconforms. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Aquinas’s notion of truth as “conformity to being” is able to accommodate truths about nonbeings. (shrink)

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to (...) move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1.When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things. (shrink)

Extended cognition brings with it a particular phenomenology. It has been argued that when an artifact is integrated into an agent’s cognitive system, it becomes transparent in use to the cognizing subject. In this paper, I challenge some of the assumptions underlying how the transparency of artifacts is described in extended cognition theory. To this end, I offer two arguments. First, I make room for some forms of conscious thought and attention within extended cognitive routines, and I question the close (...) association drawn between attention and effort. Second, I vindicate the importance of paying careful attention to individual differences and the diverse ways in which bodies and technologies can be experienced. I end by offering some hints toward an alternative, and more accurate, account of the phenomenology of extended cognition. (shrink)

Should the regulation of production and distribution in a socialist society be based on the law of value? In this article we ask (1) Is this question not based on an ontological understanding of labour, on a rational and therefore conceptual understanding of abstract labour and, ultimately, a transhistorical understanding of value and the so-called ‘law of value’?; (2) is it not precisely this deception and power of the fetishism of commodities that, by eternalising value and the ‘law of value’, (...) limits the horizon and perspective of ‘realistic politics’ (Realpolitik)?; and (3) whether this question does not treat socialism as a political situation where the solution to its ‘economic’ problem is unrelated to its very identity? In order to answer these questions, we provide a novel understanding of Marx’s fundamental category of value, its substance, form and magnitude, with the help of the German expression Formgehalt, translated as form-content. (shrink)

Advances in science and technology have allowed for incredible improvements in healthcare. Additionally, the digital revolution in healthcare provides new ways of collecting and storing large volum...

The data mining field in computer science specializes in extracting implicit information that is distributed across the stored data records and/or exists as associations among groups of records. Criminal databases contain information on the crimes themselves, the offenders, the victims as well as the vehicles that were involved in the crime. Among these records lie groups of crimes that can be attributed to serial criminals who are responsible for multiple criminal offenses and usually exhibit patterns in their operations, by specializing (...) in a particular crime category (i.e., rape, murder, robbery, etc.), and applying a specific method for implementing their crimes. Discovering serial criminal patterns in crime databases is, in general, a clustering activity in the area of data mining that is concerned with detecting trends in the data by classifying and grouping similar records. In this paper, we report on the different statistical and neural network approaches to the clustering problem in data mining in general, and as it applies to our crime domain in particular. We discuss our approach of using a cascaded network of Kohonen neural networks followed by heuristic processing of the networks outputs that best simulated the experts in the field. We address the issues in this project and the reasoning behind this approach, including: the choice of neural networks, in general, over statistical algorithms as the main tool, and the use of Kohonen networks in particular, the choice for the cascaded approach instead of the direct approach, and the choice of a heuristics subsystem as a back-end subsystem to the neural networks. We also report on the advantages of this approach over both the traditional approach of using a single neural network to accommodate all the attributes, and that of applying a single clustering algorithm on all the data attributes. (shrink)

Mody and Carey (2016) investigated children's capacity to reason by the disjunctive syllogism by hiding stickers within two pairs of cups (i.e., there is one sticker in cup A or B, and one in cup C or D) and then showing one cup to be empty. They found that children as young as 3 years of age chose the most likely cup (i.e., not A, therefore choose B; and disregard C and D) and suggested that these children were representing the (...) dependent relationship between A and B by applying the logical operator “or”. However, it is possible that children succeeded using simpler strategies, such as avoiding the empty cup and choosing within the manipulated pair. We devised a new version of the task in which a sticker was visibly removed from one of the four cups so that 2.5- to 5-year-old children (N = 100) would fail if they relied on such strategies. We also included a conceptual replication of Mody and Carey's (2016) original condition. Our results replicated their findings and showed that even younger children, 2.5 years of age, could pass above chance levels. Yet, 2.5-, 3- and 4-year-olds failed the new condition. Only 5-year-old children performed above chance in both conditions and so provided compelling evidence of deductive reasoning from the premise “A or B", where “or” is exclusive. We propose that younger children may instead conceive of the relationship between A and B as inclusive “or” across both versions of the task. (shrink)

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.