In this paper we examine Ɔbenfo Mario H. Beatty’s chapter, ‘Maat the Cultural and Intellectual Allegiance of a Concept’ in terms of its articulation of MꜢꜤt ‘Maat’. This examination sets out to delineate how a return to the principles inherent in MꜢꜤt ‘Maat’ can serve to bring about the Wḥm Mswt ‘Rebirth/Renaissance’ of Kmt ‘Land of Black People’ and Kmt ‘Black People’ economically and politically. This research is significant in that it points us away from the semantically vacuous and etymologically (...) opaque terms “Africa” and “Africans” to terminology, principles and practices that restore our original identity as Kmt ‘Black People’. (shrink)

The ancient Egyptians and Dogon conceive that all elements of the universe operate in harmony. Therefore, the manner in which the Egyptians and Dogon express and experience their cosmologies must agree with this harmony. Using an African-centered approach, this study examines three key factors that define both cosmologies and allow for the full expression of harmony. The first key is Maat. Maat is the Egyptian principle of balance, order, justice, and harmony and is the fundamental descriptive characteristic of the universe (...) for the Egyptians and Dogon. The second key is myth. Myth discloses the sacred world. To the Dogon, myth represents the ultimate revelation of knowledge. In Egypt, creation narratives are told as myths. The third key is Nature. Nature provides the symbols, forms, images, behaviors, and objects used to express the cosmology. This study describes the place where these three factors converge. To do this, a multidisciplinary approach from philosophy, art, myth, and culture is used to provide context, because all have greatly influenced the perception of myth in culture. The articulation of Egyptian and Dogon stories of the universe is a feast for the tactile senses, challenging the mind, and able to be experienced through the simple activities of daily living. This study brings this to light. (shrink)

‌‌‌ابن سینا و ابن میمون هر دو از فیلسوفانی بوده‌‌‌‌اند که دغدغۀ اثبات عقلانی عقاید دینی خود را داشته‌اند. ‌‌‌ابن سینا از منظرِ اسلام معاد را در دو شکل روحانی و جسمانی می‌‌پذیرد، اما در نحوۀ پذیرش آن‌ها دو رویکرد متفاوت دارد. او معاد جسمانی را نه از طریق استدلال، بلکه به دلیل ایمانش به کلام اللّه می‌‌پذیرد و معاد روحانی را از طریق برهان اثبات می‌کند. او سیمای معاد و تمام ویژگی‌ها و اوصاف آن را روحانی تأویل کرده و (...) لذّت والم ابدی را متعلق به نفس می‌دانسته است. نفس است که پس از جدایی از تن نیکبخت یا بدبخت است. غایتِ لذّت، نظر به ذات باری‌تعالی و ملائکه است. ابن میمون هم به همین منوال برای اثبات معادِ روحانی اقامۀ برهان کرده است. او نیز به پاداش و مجازات و لذّت و اَلم روحانی اخروی قائل است و غایت لذّت را رؤیت شخینا می‌‌داند که از آن به «معرفت» تعبیر می‌شود. در این مقاله به بررسی تطبیقی این دو دیدگاه فلسفی یکی با داعیۀ اسلام و دیگری با داعیۀ یهود پرداخته شده است. (shrink)

در عالَم اهل تسنن، دیوبندیه، مکتبی است که طی حدود دو قرن گذشته، از درون مذهب کلامی ماتریدیه برخاسته است. ادعای پیروی از کلام ماتریدیه، مهم‌‌ترین شاخصۀ کلامی دیوبندیه است، اما این مدعا در تطبیق مباحث کلامی، دچار تزلزل‌‌هایی شده است. تطبیق آراء این دو مکتب در تحلیل مباحث توحید و شِرک، نشان می‌‌دهد که دیوبندیه در برخی موارد، دیدگاه متفاوتی را اختیار کرده که بخشی از این مغایرت‌‌ها، به مبنای معناشناختی دیوبندیان در اطلاق «شرک» به هر امر دارای شائبه (...) باز می‌گردد. طی یک بررسی توصیفی- تحلیلی در پاسخ به سؤال از میزان تحوّل دیوبندیه در موضوع تحقیق، این نتیجه حاصل شد که دیوبندیان به توسعۀ مفهومی در تعریف شرک و اقسام آن قائل‌اند و بر بدعت‌زدایی بر پایۀ اموری که شائبۀ شِرک دارند و تسرّی مصادیق شرک به اعمالی که پیش از آن شرک شمرده نمی‌‌شد، تمرکز کرده‌‌اند. (shrink)

برای سخن‌گفتن از اوصاف الهی از دیرباز طریقه‌هایی مطرح بوده است و به دو دستۀ کلی سلبی و ایجابی تقسیم می‌شود که این دو خود دارای زیرمجموعه‌ها و تقسیمات فرعی‌اند‌‌؛ ازجمله تقسیم سلبی به طریقۀ سلب و سکوت‌‌، طریقه سلبی تفضیلی‌‌ و طریقه سلبی- ایجابی است. آن چه در این نوشتار مدنظر ماست بررسی دربارۀ طریقه سلبی- ایجابی و نسبت آن با بیان‌پذیری خداوند است‌‌؛ زیرا این طریقه دارای تفاسیر و معانی مختلف نزد اندیشمندان است و برخی از این معانی (...) با بیان‌ناپذیری خداوند تضاد دارد. حال معنای طریقۀ سلبی- ایجابی نزد ابن سینا‌ و علامه حلی چگونه است؟ رابطه طریقۀ سلبی-ایجابی با بیان‌ناپذیری خداوند نزد این دو اندیشمند چگونه است؟ ابن سینا‌ در باب ذات و صفات الهی صفات واجب تعالی را به سلب‌ها و اضافه بازمی‌گرداند و با بیان‌ناپذیری صفات و ذات الهی موافق نیست. علامه حلی به‌نوعی بازگشت از ایجابی به سلبی قائل و صفات ایجابی را از راه سلب اضداد آن‌ها می‌‌شناسد و بیان‌پذیری در صفات را نیز به توقیفیّت صفات محدود می‌کند. در این نوشتار ضمن بررسی معانی مختلف طریقۀ سلبی- ایجابی نزد اندیشمندانی چون ابن سینا‌ و علامه حلّی‌‌، موضع کلی ابن سینا‌ را که بازگشت همۀ صفات الهی به سلب و اضافه است، بیان می‌داریم. (shrink)

بحث «وحدت و کثرت» یکی از ‌‌مهم‌ترین مسائل فلسفی است. تبیین چگونگی نسبت واحد و کثیر از مسائلی است که همواره محلّ تشتّت آرای حکما است. در این میان، ملاصدرا ضمن ردّ هریک از چهار قسم تقابل و بر اساس مبانی خویش در حکمت متعالیه، نظریۀ تقابل تشکیکی را مطرح می‌‌‌کند، اما از آن‌جا که ایشان در برخی آثار، باز از تقابل وحدت و کثرت سخن گفته است، سؤال مهمی در این‌جا رخ می‌‌‌کند و آن این‌که اگر وحدت و کثرت (...) دو مفهوم مقابل یک‌دیگرند، این مسئله چگونه با نظریۀ او در خصوص وحدت تشکیکی صادق است؟ و آیا این تقابل، تقابلی بالذات است یا بالعرض؟ در پاسخ به این سؤال - چنانکه در مقاله خواهیم دید - ملاصدرا در برخی آثار، با عدول از رأی مشهور حکما، ضمن قائل شدن به تقابل ذاتی بین آن‌‌‌دو، آن‌‌‌ را نوع پنجمی از تقابل دانسته که در آن اختلاف بین واحد و کثیر، نه در طرد ذاتی یک‌دیگر، بلکه تنها در حدّ اختلافی در کمال و نقص است. (shrink)

This is the first full-length commentary on De Motu Animalium since Albertus Magnus's thirteenth century treatise, De Principiis Motus Progresivi. Several paraphrases, and numerous editions, have appeared over the years, but a general belief, particularly in the nineteenth century, that MA was not an authentic work of Aristotle's, and doubt about the overall importance of this brief and cryptic work, had served to discourage more ambitious projects. Scholarly opinion changed in this century, and the authenticity of MA is now generally (...) accepted. Nussbaum relates this history, establishes MA's authenticity beyond a doubt, and finds ample philosophical reason for bringing her--and our--attention to a full-length commentary. For MA, as she shows, is a treatise not only in biology, but also in cosmology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, theory of action, and practical reasoning. (shrink)

Faylasū al-ʻArab: al-Kindī -- al-Muʻallim al-thānī: al-Fārābī -- al-Shāʻir al-ḥakīm: al-Mutanabbī -- Baṭalīmūs al-ʻArab: Ibn al-Haytham -- Shaykh al-Islām: Ibn Taymīyah.

Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976- Criticism and interpretation ; Corbin, Henry, 1903-1978- Criticism and interpretation ; Fardīd, Aḥmad, 1912-1994- Criticism and interpretation.

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge (...) in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book's key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory. (shrink)

Contains papers that cover a conference held at the Warburg Institute in 2006 to consider the philosophy of al-Farabi alongside other intellectual developments of his time, together with a wide range of other figures and traditions from the period.

The Neoplatonic notion of “emanation” implies a required progression through hierarchical stages, originating from the highest principle (the One or God) and cascading down through a series of principles. While this process is deemed necessary, it is also inherently good, even “choiceworthy”, aligning with the identification of the first principle with the Good. Plotinus, a prominent Neoplatonist, emphasizes the beauty and goodness of the sensible world, governed by divine providence. This perspective, transmitted through Arabic adaptations of Plotinus, influences Islamic philosophers (...) too. This paper delves into the thought of the Ismāʿīlī philosopher Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (d. after. 349/971), exploring the interplay of necessity and goodness in his cosmology, with a focus on non-human animals. Sijistānī’s Persian Uncovering the Veiled provides a unique perspective on animals, presenting them as both necessary unfoldings of the universal intellect and inherently good beings with intrinsic value. The paper concludes with an appendix featuring an improved edition and English translation of relevant passages. (shrink)

There have been few attempts, so far, to document the history of artificial intelligence. It is argued that the “historical sociology of scientific knowledge” can provide a broad historiographical approach for the history of AI, particularly as it has proved fruitful within the history of science in recent years. The article shows how the sociology of knowledge can inform and enrich four types of project within the history of AI; organizational history; AI viewed as technology; AI viewed as cognitive science (...) and historical biography. In the latter area the historical treatments of Darwin and Turing are compared to warn against the pitfalls of “rational reconstructions” of the past. (shrink)

Most of the works on creation theology in the past have departed from a functional point of view with the assumption that creation is for the sake of human use, thus a means to an end. It has been believed that this utilitarian perception is supported by the sacred texts of theistic religions, saying that people were masters and possessors of the natural world. They were created in the likeness of God, ‘in His image’, and the rest of creation existed (...) solely for human benefit, to serve a human need. If there is an issue regarding the protection of the environment, it is behind the logic of convenience. Thus, eco-theology aims to be a practical ethic controlling and shaping human behaviour towards the natural environment. This article discusses a different approach to nature that is not a utilitarian point of view, but mystical, which regards creation as self-disclosure of God, so that each has its intrinsic meaning for itself and there is genuine and deep respect for the integrity of creation.Contribution: This article gives an alternative approach to the issue on environment in the study of eco-theology. The approach is an Islamic mystical approach. It also promotes inter-religious studies on the subject and demonstrates the textual studies within Christian and Islamic traditions, and beyond. (shrink)

jild-i 1. [Without special title] -- jild-i 2. Shāmil-i mustadrakāt va muṣṭalaḥāt va kullīyāt-i falsafah -- jild-i 3. Ilāhiyāt -- jildi 4. Ilāhiyāt bi-maʻnī-i akhaṣṣ -- jild-i 5. Dar Ilāhiyāt bi-maʻnī-i akhaṣṣ.

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge, could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on (...) the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to illustrate the role played by Augustine’s Commentary on the Genesis in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. This work is of great importance for Aquinas, not only because it is the work where Augustine clarifies his interpretation of creation, but also because creation is, among the theological topics, perhaps the most philosophical, insofar as it gives the opportunity of elaborating on many philosophical issues. In particular, the goal of the study is to rethink the (...) positions of Aquinas and Augustine on one of these issues, that is the relationship between soul and body. I mean to call into question two historiographical theses: first, that Augustine and Aquinas formulate positions that are irreconcilable with each other, and second, that they in no way address that which we today call the Mind-Body Problem. (shrink)

Given the accelerating robotic AI revolution and China’s perceived central role in it, how will this grand transformation in the human experience be received and responded to within a distinctively Confucian cultural context?

Talking of “medieval aesthetics” is historiographically disputable. During the Middle Ages, in fact, there is no discipline comparable with the aesthetics as from the eighteenth century we know it. In the medieval period, aesthetic considerations mostly occur in spurious contexts, and are all, so to say, pre-theoretical. They refer to different insights on what is the beautiful and what relationship holds between the beauty and its artistic expression. In the Middle Ages, that is, one can frequently encounters forms we would (...) nowadays call of descriptive aesthetics, occasionally forms of normative aesthetics, rather sporadically meta-aesthetic considerations. Not even a privileged attention is reserved to aesthetics understood as the description of the conditions of pleasure that follow from the perception of the beautiful, despite the theme of dilectum is important in the aesthetic meditations of medieval masters. Aesthetic discussions predominantly concern the relationships between the artist, an object and its representation. In this essay, I reconsider these relationships by discussing a key point of Thomas Aquinas’s reflection on the beauty: the role played by of the notion of representation in the explanation of the artistic process. (shrink)

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than (...) science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te. (shrink)

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in adefinition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the “scientific of first principles.” Taoism proceeds from art rather than (...) science, and produces an ars contextualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making aperson, making a community and making a world. This idea of an “aesthetic cosmology” is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world-between tao and te. (shrink)

Tianxia--conventionally translated as "all-under-Heaven"--in everyday Chinese parlance simply means "the world." But tianxia is also a geopolitical term found in canonical writings that has a deeper historical and philosophical significance. Although there are many understandings of tianxia in this literature, interpretations within the Chinese process cosmology generally begin with an ecological understanding of intra-national relations that acknowledge the mutuality and interdependence of all economic and political activity. This volume contextualizes the tianxia vision of geopolitical order within a variety of strategies (...) drawn from a broad spectrum of cultures and peoples: Buddhist, Islamic, Indian, African, Confucian, European. The conversation among the contributors is guided by several central questions: Is tianxia the only model of cosmopolitanism? Are there ideas and ideals comparable to tianxia that exist in other cultures? What alternative perspectives of global justice have inspired Western, Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, and African cultural traditions? The fundamental premise here is that in order for a planetary tianxia system to be relevant and significant for the present time and for our vision of the future, it must acknowledge the plurality of moral ideals defining the world's cultures while at the same time seek practical ways to formulate a minimalist morality that can provide the solidarity needed to bring the world's people together. (shrink)

A discussion of the psychological aspects of love, marriage, and divorce.

This chapter examines John Locke's interest in and views on the Cartesian vortex theory.

"This book brings together articles, which I previously published on my blog, Barrarsīhā-ye Tārīkhī, about the history of kalām and falsafa (Islamic theology and philosophy). Many of the articles contain research on the history of Muʿtazilī kalām, especially among the Shīʿa, whether Zaydīs or Imāmīs. Some articles also discuss the history of philosophical theology in Islam, the Avicennian tradition in Khurāsān and the relationship between the theologians and the philosophers, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries hijrī. A chapter about (...) the maktab-e tafkīk is also included, in which the relationship between the Akhbārī position and the philosophical approach among the Imāmiyya, is discussed. In addition, some of the articles treat the concept of imāma according to Zaydī and Muʿtazilī thinkers, and the genre of imāma in their literature, as well as the refutations that were written between Zaydīs and Muʿtazilīs, and also Imāmīs. Some articles on the history of Sunnī kalām are also included. Part of the book takes a bibliographical approach, or is based on texts, and part takes a historical approach to study the history of kalām and falsafa as well as the relationship between both. The purpose of this book is to provide readers a historical reading of the history of kalām and falsafa —mostly within the Shīʿī and Muʿtazilī traditions. Even at present, many Muʿtazilī texts have not been edited and studied. Although most of the texts of Ibn Sīnā and his students have already been edited, we still need to provide a historical approach to the falsafa of Ibn Sīnā in order to situate the philosophical questions in the Avicennian tradition in a broader context, among the theologians and the philosophers. Many of the topics which are discussed in the Avicennian tradition are also approached in theological texts by the Muʿtazilīs and the Ashʿarīs, and I hope that this book provides a basic foundation in preparation for future studies on this topic." -- from publishers. (shrink)