Nūr Muḥammad is one of the teachings in Sufism that studies the beginning of the creation of the universe. The Sufis discussed Nūr Muḥammad through God's tajallī (manifestation), and they believed that only Insan Kamil (Perfect Humans) possessed the perfection of His tajallī. This Sufi theory can be comprehended through the dhawqi approach. This research will deal with Nūr Muḥammad's theory of Sufism through the perspective of Tijaniyah Tarekat. The data for this study was obtained through library research utilizing a (...) documentary technique. The collected data will be analyzed using the descriptive analysis method. This study finds that the Tijaniyah Tarekat is a Sufism institution that bases its teachings and practices on the concept of Nūr Muḥammad in the form of ṣalawāt al-fātiḥ and ṣalawāt jawharah al-kamāl. This Tarekat's elucidation of Nūr Muḥammad is also built on and consistent with the explication of authoritative Sufis in Islam's intellectual and spiritual tradition. (shrink)

Includes an introd. of 49 p. by S. G. Abbas.

Could some social kinds be natural kinds? In this paper, I argue that there are three kinds of social kinds: 1) social kinds whose existence does not depend on human beings having any beliefs or other propositional attitudes towards them ; 2) social kinds whose existence depends in part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them, though attitudes need not be manifested towards their particular instances ; 3) social kinds whose existence and that of their instances depend in (...) part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them . Although all three kinds of social kinds are mind-dependent, this does not make them ontologically subjective or preclude them from being natural kinds. Rather, what prevents the third kind of social kinds from being natural kinds is that their properties are conventionally rather than causally linked. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, (...) this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significance, I argue that they are not (...) confined to the human realm, but that they can also occur elsewhere. Hence, I conclude by arguing that interactive kinds pose a challenge to scientific realism about kinds by making it difficult to make a distinction between real and non-real kinds. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processes. The resulting account (...) of natural kinds as clusters of core causal properties that give rise to clusters of derivative properties enables us to distinguish genuine natural kinds from non-natural kinds. For instance, it enables us to say why some of the purely conventional categories derived from the social domain do not correspond to natural kinds, though other social categories may. (shrink)

In this interview, which took place in July 2020, Muhammad Asghari, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tabriz, asked eleven questions (via email ) to Professor Susan Haack, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. This American philosopher eagerly and patiently emailed me the answers to the questions. The questions in this interview are mainly about analytic philosophy and pragmatist philosophy.This interview was conducted via personal email between me and Professor Susan (...) Haack in July 2020. This interview, which Professor Hawk eagerly accepted, includes eleven questions about her biography and roles of various philosophers in her thought and finally about the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism on her thought. Of course, it goes without saying that the Haack's book Philosophy of Logic in Iran has been translated into Persian and he has published two articles in the quarterly journal of Philosophical Investigations (University of Tabriz) and I also have translated one of her articles into Persian. What was most interesting to me was the influence of pragmatism on Haack's thought that Charles Sanders Pierce, among classical American pragmatists, had as much influence on this philosopher's thought as John Dewey had in Rorty's thought. Here I thank Professor Susan Haack for answering my questions patiently and eagerly. (shrink)

This paper attempts to articulate a dispositional account of innateness that applies to cognitive capacities. After criticizing an alternative account of innateness proposed by Cowie (1999) and Samuels (2002), the dispositional account of innateness is explicated and defended against a number of objections. The dispositional account states that an innate cognitive capacity (output) is one that has a tendency to be triggered as a result of impoverished environmental conditions (input). Hence, the challenge is to demonstrate how the input can be (...) compared to the output and shown to be relatively impoverished. I argue that there are robust methods of comparing input to output without measuring them quantitatively. (shrink)

The current study investigates whether tournament incentives motivate chief executive officer to be socially responsible. Furthermore, it explores the role of sub-national institutional contingencies [i.e., state-owned enterprises vs. non-SOEs, foreign-owned entities vs. non-FOEs, cross-listed vs. non-cross-listed, developed region] in CEO tournament incentives and the corporate social responsibility performance relationship. Data were collected from all A-shared companies listed in the stock exchanges of China from 2014 to 2019. The study uses the baseline methodology of ordinary least squares and cluster OLS regression. (...) Moreover, firm-fixed effects regression, two-stage least squares regression, and propensity score matching deal with the endogeneity problem and check the robustness of the results. The results provide reliable evidence that tournament incentives motivate CEOs to be more socially responsible. On the other hand, sub-national institutional contingencies positively affect the association between CEO tournament incentives and CSRP. The findings have important implications for companies and regulators who wish to enhance CSP by providing incentives to top managers. (shrink)

This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The "triggering model" of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as biological models of innateness are (...) forced to do. Relativization can be avoided in the case of cognitive capacities precisely because informational content is involved. Even though one cannot measure output relative to input in a precise way, there are indirect and approximate ways of assessing the degree of innateness of a specific cognitive capacity. (shrink)

This paper discusses a philosophical issue in taxonomy. At least one philosopher has suggested thc taxonomic principle that scientific kinds are disjoint. An opposing position is dcfcndcd here by marshalling examples of nondisjoint categories which belong to different, cocxisting classification schcmcs. This dcnial of thc disjoinmcss principle can bc recast as thc claim that scientific classification is "int<-:rcst—rclativc". But why would anyone have held that scientific categories arc disjoint in the first place'? It is argued that this assumption is nccdcd (...) in one attempt t0 dcrivc csscntialism. This shows why the csscntialist and intc-:rcst—r<-zlativc approaches to classification arc in conflict. (shrink)

There are many ways of construing the claim that some categories are more “natural" than others. One can ask whether a system of categories is innate or acquired by learning, whether it pertains to a natural phenomenon or to a social institution, whether it is lexicalized in natural language or requires a compound linguistic expression. This renders suspect any univocal answer to this question in any particular case. Yet another question one can ask, which some authors take to have a (...) bearing on the issue of the naturalness of categories, is whether a system of categories constitutes a unique way of organizing a particular set of entities or phenomena, or whether there are other legitimate classification schemes that can coexist with it. Another way of putting this is by asking whether systems of categories can cut across one another, and if so, under what circumstances. Some philosophers have claimed that crosscutting systems of categories cannot exist as genuine natural kinds. This paper examines that claim and puts forward some counterexamples, concluding that this notion of natural kind is not in tune with scientific classification and ought to be rejected in favor of an alternative. (shrink)

Synthesizing theories of ethical leadership, psychological climate, pro-environmental behavior, and gender, first, we proposed and tested a model linking supervisors’ ethical leadership and organizational environmental citizenship behavior via green psychological climate. Then we tested the moderating effect of gender on the indirect (via green psychological environment) relationship between supervisors’ ethical leadership and organizational environmental citizenship behavior. Time-lagged (three waves, two months apart) survey data were collected from 447 employees in various manufacturing and service sector firms operating in China. Data were (...) analyzed using structural equation modeling, bootstrapping, and multi-group technique to test the hypothesized relationships. The results showed a positive relationship between employee ratings of supervisors’ ethical leadership and organizational environmental citizenship behavior. Moreover, green psychological climate mediates the relationship between supervisors’ ethical leadership and organizational environmental citizenship behavior. Importantly, the multi-group analysis revealed that gender moderates the indirect relationship (via green psychological climate) between supervisors’ ethical leadership and organizational environmental citizenship behavior. The study carries useful practical implications for policymakers and managers concerned about environmental sustainability. (shrink)

Features new to the second edition include a foreword by Tynnetta Muhammad, wife and student of Elijah Muhammad; opening comments by world renowned mathematician Dr. Abdulalim Sahabazz; a new chapter co-authored with Dr. Dorothy Blake Fardan; plus guided questions and power point notes to stimulate discourse around Elijah Muhammad's educational ideas.

Functional reductionism concerning mental properties has recently been advocated by Jaegwon Kim in order to solve the problem of the 'causal exclusion' of the mental. Adopting a reductionist strategy first proposed by David Lewis, he regards psychological properties as being 'higher-order' properties functionally defined over 'lower-order' properties, which are causally efficacious. Though functional reductionism is compatible with the multiple realizability of psychological properties, it is blocked if psychological properties are subdivided or crosscut by neurophysiological properties. I argue that there is (...) recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience that shows that this is the case for the psychological property of fear. Though this may suggest that some psychological properties should be revised in order to conform to those of neurophysiology, the history of science demonstrates that this is not always the outcome, particularly with properties that play an important role in our folk theories and are central to human concerns. (shrink)

Data analytics, machine intelligence, and other cognitive algorithms have been employed in predicting various types of diseases in health care. The revolution of artificial neural networks in the medical discipline emerged for data-driven applications, particularly in the healthcare domain. It ranges from diagnosis of various diseases, medical image processing, decision support system, and disease prediction. The intention of conducting the research is to ascertain the impact of parameters on diabetes data to predict whether a particular patient has a disease or (...) not. This paper develops an improved ANN model trained using an artificial backpropagation scaled conjugate gradient neural network algorithm to predict diabetes effectively. For validating the performance of the proposed model, we conduct a large set of experiments on a Pima Indian Diabetes dataset using accuracy and mean squared error as evaluation metrics. We use different number of neurons in the hidden layer, ranging from 5 to 50, to train the ANN models. The experimental results show that the ABP-SCGNN model, containing 20 neurons, attains 93% accuracy on the validation set, which is higher than using the other ANNs models. This result confirms the model’s effectiveness and efficiency in predicting diabetes disease from the required data attributes. (shrink)

Muslim communities in the village facing the COVID-19 Pandemic attempts to find refuge from the plague and hope for survival. However, this led to more caution, which may lead to xenophobia. Via ethnography, this study unmasks the xenophobic attitude. This research discusses the root causes of panic in the community so that remedies can be implemented. The research attempts to explain, from a socio-anthropological viewpoint, how people and religious groups in the village perceive the pandemic of COVID-19 based on their (...) belief in their faith and in the science. The research takes place in Cigagak village, an area of approximately 7000 m2 on the outskirts of Bandung of West Java of Indonesia. This study examines the selected respondents from about 190 inhabitants who had close ties to managing places of worship and public places. This study utilises a collaborative self-ethnographic method and qualitative analysis. The influence of COVID-19 has moved to new exclusive and disintegrating practices from the inclusion-cohesive religious tradition. Therefore, this study tries to find out ways on how to reduce exclusive perception and religious practices to a minimum level and how to disappear xenophobia. Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, inclusive awareness and actions were re-established, and even social cohesiveness was fostered. This study concludes that in its deep conviction nature, theology can change exclusive behaviour to be inclusive if it is based on the religious principles that are raised in response to human events. In this case, the Muslim community in a village can change the fear of COVID-19 pandemic to be a reducer of the panic based on the support of the religious doctrines.Contribution: This article used a collaborative self-ethnography with a religious socio-anthropological viewpoint. This study could help to solve social problems through theological convergence in Islamic milieu, especially that of the government’s formal Islamic organisation and organic Islamic leaders of the society. (shrink)

I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only (...) be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory. (shrink)

Prior research suggests that Corporate Environmental Performance enables businesses to build strong corporate image and reputation, thus leading to improved firm financial performance. However, studies relating to the relationship between CEP and firm risk are scarce. This research intends to bridge the gap in the literature by examining whether CEP helps firms to reduce their financial risk. Results of the Ordinary Least Squares regression with fixed effects provide strong evidence that environmental performance is negatively associated with firm volatility and firm (...) downside risk. The results are robust after controlling for moderating effects such as financial, institutional and environmental management. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption in cognitive science that there is anintrinsic link between the phenomena of innateness and domain specificity. Many authors seem to hold that given the properties of these two phenomena, it follows that innate mental states are domain-specific, or that domain-specific states are innate. My aim in this paper is to argue that there are no convincing grounds for asserting either claim. After introducing the notions of innateness and domain specificity, I consider some possible arguments for (...) the conclusion that innate cognitive states are domain-specific, or vice versa. Having shown that these arguments do not succeed, I attempt to explicate what I take to be the connection between innateness and domain specificity. I argue that it is simply easier to determine whether and to what extent domain-specific cognitive capacities are innate. That is,the relation between innateness and domain specificity is evidential or epistemic, rather than intrinsic. (shrink)

Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context (...) of the study of cognition. Even though the causal connections between these cognitive properties are not always strict, they are robust enough to warrant considering innateness to be a natural kind as used in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one (...) adopts a naturalist stance in philosophy, that is when one looks closely at scientific practice and takes it as a guide for identifying natural kinds and investigating their general features. This Element surveys existing philosophical accounts of natural kinds, defends a naturalist alternative, and applies it to case studies in a diverse set of sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Consumers occasionally buy commodity products without much thought but purchase high involvement products or services after rigorous information collection and detailed comparisons of the different options. At the core, research on consumer behavior comprises studies on the cognitive processes involved in consumer purchasing decisions and the way buying decisions are made. The discipline of consumer research and marketing has remained dominated by positivist, empiricist, and realist philosophies. Since consumer behaviour is a social phenomenon, the researchers have used logical positivist and (...) interpretivist philosophies to study and develop various theories about consumer behaviour. However, both of these philosophies have inherent limitations to capture the complete knowledge of consumer reality. Pragmatist philosophy is capable of providing solutions to real-life problems by starting with research question and exploring the issues from multiple perspectives. It is, therefore, suggested to explore the various aspects of consumer behaviour research from a pragmatist perspective and contribute more effective information to the body of knowledge in this discipline. (shrink)

This study examines the R&D investment behaviour of different types of family-controlled firms with the moderating role of ownership discrepancy between cash-flow rights and excess voting rights by using the sufficiency conditions’ theoretical framework of ability and willingness developed by De Massis. It uses data from family firms that have issued A-shares from 2008 to 2018. They used pooled OLS regression for data analysis and Tobit regression for robustness checks. This study classifies family firm types into two categories, namely, the (...) lone-controller family firms (LCFFs) and the multi-controller family firms (MCFFs), with each being further classified as “excess” or “no excess” voting rights. Both LCFFs without excess voting rights and MCFFs with excess voting rights have the “ability” and “willingness” toward R&D investment. LCFFs with excess voting rights and MCFFs without excess voting rights only have the ability but low willingness to invest in R&D. The study also establishes that Chinese family-controlled firms are heterogeneous toward risky investment. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to differentiate Chinese family firms by their unique ownership structure characteristics in investigating the effect of the family firm structure on R&D investment. The study is a novel attempt to test the willingness and ability framework of LCFFs and MCFFs. Previous studies based on agency theory have tacitly assumed that ability and willingness exist in family-controlled firms. However, this study challenges this implicit assumption. (shrink)

Griffiths and Machery (2008) have argued that innateness is a folk notion that obstructs inquiry and has no place in contemporary science. They support their view by criticizing the canalization account of innateness (Ariew, 1999, 2006). In response, I argue that the criticisms they raise for the canalization account can be avoided by another recent account of innateness, the triggering account, which provides an analysis of the concept as it applies to cognitive capacities (Khalidi, 2002, 2007; Stich, 1975). I also (...) claim that they have not demonstrated that the folk notion of innateness is unsuitable for rehabilitation in a science of cognition. I conclude that they have not made the case that the notion of innateness ought to be eliminated from a scientific account of the mind. (shrink)

During the COVID-19 outbreak, educational institutions were closed, and students worldwide were confined to their homes. In an educational environment, students depend on collaborative learning to improve their learning performance. This study aimed to increase the understanding of social media adoption among students during the COVID-19 pandemic for the purpose of CL. Social media provides a learning platform that enables students to easily communicate with their peers and subject specialists, and is conducive to students' CL. This study addresses the key (...) concept of CL during the COVID-19 pandemic by assessing social media use among students in higher education. The relationship between social media use and students' performance is crucial to understanding the role of social media during a pandemic. This study is based on constructivism theory and the technology acceptance model. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the conceptual model using SmartPLS. The research findings indicate that social media plays an important role during the pandemic because it provides opportunities for students to enhance CL under the aforementioned situations. This study makes noteworthy theoretical and practical contributions. (shrink)

Nature-inspired optimization techniques are useful tools in electrical engineering problems to minimize or maximize an objective function. In this paper, we use the firefly algorithm to improve the optimal solution for the problem of directional overcurrent relays (DOCRs). It is a complex and highly nonlinear constrained optimization problem. In this problem, we have two types of design variables, which are variables for plug settings (PSs) and the time dial settings (TDSs) for each relay in the circuit. The objective function is (...) to minimize the total operating time of all the basic relays to avoid unnecessary delays. We have considered four models in this paper which are IEEE (3-bus, 4-bus, 6-bus, and 8-bus) models. From the numerical results, it is obvious that the firefly algorithm with certain parameter settings performs better than the other state-of-the-art algorithms. (shrink)

Two main theories of concepts have emerged in the recent psychological literature: the Prototype Theory (which considers concepts to be self-contained lists of features) and the Theory Theory (which conceives of them as being embedded within larger theoretical networks). Experiments supporting the first theory usually differ substantially from those supporting the second, which suggests that these the· ories may be operating at different levels of explanation and dealing with different entities. A convergence is proposed between the Theory Theory and the (...) intentional stance in the philosophy of language and mind. From this stance, concepts should not be thought of as concrete physical entities. (shrink)

The search for the “furniture of the mind” has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali (...) Khalidi presents a naturalistic account of “real kinds” to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories. (shrink)

Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms and briefly survey some previous philosophical discussions of these kinds. Then I will take a closer look at a few case studies involving different types of etiological kinds. Finally, I will try to understand the rationale for classifying on the basis of etiology, putting forward reasons for classifying phenomena on the basis of (...) diachronic features, thereby making a provisional case for considering at least some etiological kinds to be natural kinds. (shrink)

This research focuses on the employee loyalty aspect of private hospitals in Pakistan during the COVID-19 pandemic, seriously impacted by strict work demand and work-family conflict. To manage this issue, social rewards and psychological rewards played a role as a mediator. The study uses a causal research design with a correlational study design in a non-contrived environment. Minimal researcher interference has been assured. AMOS 24 has been used to deal with the mediation in study design with bootstrap methodology. The study (...) was conducted on 250 nurses of different private hospitals across Punjab province using a proportionate stratified sampling technique. A finding of this study suggests that nurses remain loyal to their organizations despite having uncompromising work demands and facing work-family conflict when they are provided with social and psychological rewards on their job by their organizations. (shrink)

Asking whether the sexes are natural kinds amounts to asking whether the categories, female and male, identify real divisions in nature, like the distinctions between biological species, or whether they mark merely artificial or arbitrary distinctions. The distinction between females and males in the animal kingdom is based on the relative size of the gametes they produce, with females producing larger gametes (ova) and males producing smaller gametes (sperm). This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small (...) gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between sex and gender: while the difference between the sexes is biologically grounded, the difference between genders is socially based. Since gender depends in part on the perception of sex, whether or not gender is real or not does not depend on whether sex is, since social reality is constituted in part by our perceptions. The claim that sexes are natural kinds in the animal kingdom does not imply that the biological differences among female and male humans do and should have social consequences. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a record global crisis, particularly and extremely, for the service sectors. Due to extensive security measures, many service sector employees have to work remotely to maintain services. Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, this research investigates the impact of servant leadership on the task performance of employees in virtual working environments during the COVID-19 crisis. Our theoretical model was tested using data collected from 335 individual employees in the education sector of Pakistan. SPSS version (...) 26.0 was applied to find the hypothesized relationship between the study variables. To find the indirect mediating effect, we applied Model 4; for moderation, we applied Model 1; and for the moderation and mediation effect, we applied Model 7 of the Process Macro model of Hayes. The results of the study revealed that servant leadership is positively related to task performance in a virtual environment during crises. Furthermore, psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between servant leadership and task performance. Perceived supervisor support positively moderates the relationship between servant leadership and task performance. Moreover, the indirect effect of servant leadership on task performance via psychological empowerment is moderated by perceived supervisor support. The results provided guidance to the educational sector on how to lead effectively in times of crisis when service sector employees work predominantly in virtual environments. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Discussions about politics and human power, including discussions about the concept of the state, have been a discussion that has been going on since Greek times until the time of the growth of Islamic philosophy. The overemphasis on the power of reason led early modern Western societies to reject religion in all political discourse. At this stage, all views of man, power, the constitution, and the state eventually ceased to be associated with God. On the other hand, especially among Muslims, (...) religion is still connected with discussions of politics and human power. This paper will reveal how secularization in political thought grew and developed through principles such as the state of nature and the social contract. Then, based on the thought of one of the influential Muslim scholars, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, the author tries to provide a critique of the views of Western thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other philosophers, by presenting the concept of the ideal state form derived from the concept of tamaddun formulated by Al-Attas. This research is literature review research using the descriptive method. The findings of this research show that secularization is a product purely born by Western secular thinkers and not taken from any religious teachings, so Western political concepts cannot always be applied, especially in Muslim societies. (shrink)

This study investigates the problem of the natural universal in the works of Mullā Ṣadrā. The problem of universals made its way into Arabic/Islamic philosophy via its Greek sources, and was transformed into the problem of natural universals by Avicenna. Weighing in on this problem, Ṣadrā reinterprets the nature of natural universals against the backdrop of his doctrine of “the primacy of being.” As he argues, a natural universal or quiddity qua quiddity is an “accidental being” that requireswujūdfor its existentiation. (...) Thus, Ṣadrā re-envisions the status of natural universals by stripping them of their disputed status as independently existing entities.RésuméDans cette étude je me propose de réfléchir sur le problème de l'universel naturel dans l’œuvre de Mullā Ṣadrā. Le problème des universaux s'est introduit dans la philosophie arabe et musulmaneviales sources grecques et s'est trouvé transformé en celui des “universaux naturels” aux mains d'Avicenne. En contribuant à son tour à l’évolution de ce problème, Ṣadrā réinterpréta le statut des universaux naturels à partir de sa propre doctrine de la “primauté de l’être”. Selon lui, un universel naturel ou “quiddité en tant que quiddité” est un “être par accident” qui requiertwujūdpour son existentiation. Ainsi, Ṣadrā re-envisage le statut des universaux naturels en les privant de leur statut contesté en tant qu'entités “indépendantes existantes”. (shrink)

Along with “paradigm” and “scientific revolution,” “incommensurability” is one of the three most influential expressions associated with the “new philosophy of science” first articulated in the early 1960s by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. But, despite the fact that it has been widely discussed, opinions still differ widely as to the content and significance of the claim of incommensurability.

Substituted judgment assumes adequate knowledge of patient’s mind-set. However, surrogates’ prediction of individual healthcare decisions is often inadequate and may be based on shared background rather than patient-specific knowledge. It is not known whether surrogate’s prediction of patient’s integrative life-story narrative is better. Respondents in 90 family pairs rank-ordered 47 end-of-life statements as life-story narrative measure and completed instruments on decision-control preference and healthcare-outcomes acceptability as control measures, from respondent’s view and predicted pair’s view. They also scored their confidence in (...) surrogate’s decision-making and familiarity with pair’s healthcare-preferences. Life-story narratives’ prediction was examined by calculating correlation of statements’ ranking scores between respondent-personal and respondent-surrogate Q-sorts and between respondent-surrogate and pair-personal Q-sorts before and after controlling for correlation with respondent-personal scores, and by comparing percentages of respondent-surrogate Q-sorts co-loading with pair-personal vs. respondent-personal Q-sorts. Accuracy in predicting decision-control preference and healthcare-outcomes acceptability was determined by percent concordance. Results were compared among subgroups defined by intra-pair relationship, surrogate’s decision-making confidence, and healthcare-preferences familiarity. Mean age was 35.4 years, 69% were females, and 73 and 80% reported ≥ very good health and life-quality, respectively. Mean surrogate’s decision-making confidence score was 3.35 and 75% were ≥ familiar with pair’s healthcare-preferences. Mean projection, simulation, and adjusted-simulation correlations were 0.68, 0.42, and 0.26, respectively. Out of 180 respondent-surrogate Q-sorts, 24, 9, and 32% co-loaded with respondent-personal, pair-personal, or both Q-sorts, respectively. Accuracy in predicting decision-control preference and healthcare-outcomes acceptability was 47 and 52%, respectively. Surrogate’s decision-making confidence score correlated with adjusted-simulation’s correlation score. There were significant differences among the husband-wife, parent-child, and sibling-sibling subgroups in percentage of respondent-surrogate Q-sorts co-loading with pair-personal Q-sorts and percent agreement on healthcare-outcomes acceptability. Despite high self-reported surrogate’s decision-making confidence and healthcare-preferences familiarity, family surrogates are variably inadequate in simulating life-story narratives. Simulation accuracy may not follow the next-of-kin concept and is 38% based on shared background. (shrink)

With the growing call for private sector actors to address global challenges, it is necessary to first assess whether regions with the greatest needs are accessing corporate philanthropy. In this paper, we ask whether corporate philanthropy is reaching those with the greatest health-care needs. Drawing on economic geography and corporate homophily, we argue that corporate philanthropy tends to exacerbate health inequality as grants are destined for counties with fewer health problems. We test and find support for this hypothesis using data (...) on health grants made by US corporate foundations and county-level health data. Our results that corporate health grants are less likely to go to counties which have a lower proportion of medical service providers and insured citizens suggest that corporate foundations are unwittingly complicit in worsening the resource gap between small, poor, rural counties and large, wealthy, urban counties. From an ethical perspective, we provide some guidance as to how this may be corrected. (shrink)

The Arabic philosophical fable _Hayy Ibn Yaqzan _is a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy. Ibn Tufayl, the Andalusian philosopher, tells of a child raised by a doe on an equatorial island who grows up to discover the truth about the world and his own place in it, unaided—but also unimpeded—by society, language, or tradition. Hayy’s discoveries about God, nature, and man challenge the values of the culture in which the tale was written as well as those of every contemporary society. (...) Goodman’s commentary places _Hayy Ibn Yaqzan _in its historical and philosophical context. The volume features a new preface and index, and an updated bibliography. “One of the most remarkable books of the Middle Ages.”—_Times Literary Supplement_ “An enchanting and puzzling story.... The book transcends all historical and cultural environments to settle upon the questions of human life that perpetually intrigue men.”—_Middle East__ Journal_ “Goodman has done a service to the modern English reader by providing a readable translation of a philosophically significant allegory.”—_Philosophy East and West_ “Add[s] bright new pieces to an Islamic mosaic whose general shape is already known.”—_American Historical Review_. (shrink)

This essay will explore some of al-Farabi’s paradoxical remarks on the nature and status of the democratic city (al-madinah al-jama'iyyah). In describing this type of non-virtuous city, Farabi departs significantly from Plato, according the democratic city a superior standing and casting it in a more positive light. Even though at one point Farabi follows Plato in considering the timocratic city to be the best of the imperfect cities, at another point he implies that the democratic city occupies this position. Since (...) Farabi’s discussion of imperfect cities is derived from Plato’s Republic and follows it in many important respects, I will argue that his departure from Plato in this context is significant and points to some revealing differences between the two philosophers. In order to demonstrate this, I will first set up a comparison between Plato’s conception of the democratic city and Farabi’s. Then I will propose three explanations for the greater appreciation that Farabi seems to have for democracy, as well as for the apparent contradiction in Farabi’s verdict concerning the second best city. (shrink)