Samir Okasha offers a critical study of agential thinking in biology, where evolved organisms are seen as agents pursuing a goal. He examines the justification for transposing concepts from rational humans to the biological world, and considers whether agential thinking is mere anthropomorphism or plays a more intellectual role in the science.

Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.

This is a conversation that took place at Dr. Vladimir Safatle’s São Paulo home on 16 February, 2019, during Dr. Samir Gandesha’s time as a Visiting Professor at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas -FFLCH-USP. It addresses the South American roots of the authoritarian Neoliberalism that has now become a truly global phenomenon.

Covering some of science's most divisive topics, such as philosophical issues in genetics and evolution, the philosophy of biology also encompasses more traditional philosophical questions, such as free will, essentialism, and nature vs nurture. Here, Samir Okasha outlines the core issues with which contemporary philosophy of biology is engaged.

Today, anxiety is usually thought of as a pathology, the most diagnosed and medicated of all psychological disorders. But anxiety isn't always or only a medical condition. Indeed, many philosophers argue that anxiety is a normal, even essential, part of being human, and that coming to terms with this fact is potentially transformative, allowing us to live more meaningful lives by giving us a richer understanding of ourselves. In Anxiety, Samir Chopra explores valuable insights about anxiety offered by ancient and (...) modern philosophies-Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Blending memoir and philosophy, he also tells how serious anxiety has affected his own life-and how philosophy has helped him cope with it. Chopra shows that many philosophers-including the Buddha, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger-view anxiety as an inevitable human response to existence: to be is to be anxious. Drawing on Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, Chopra examines how poverty and other material conditions can make anxiety worse, but he emphasizes that not even the rich can escape it. Nor can the medicated. Inseparable from the human condition, anxiety is indispensable for grasping it. Philosophy may not be able to cure anxiety but, by leading us to greater self-knowledge and self-acceptance, it may be able to make us less anxious about being anxious. Personal, poignant, and hopeful, Anxiety is a book for anyone who is curious about rethinking anxiety and learning why it might be a source not only of suffering but of insight. (shrink)

Resilience may be referred to as the capacity for positive adaptation and to quickly recover from difficulties and significant adversity. After examining operational definitions of related concepts, the article discusses resilience building exercises for functional fitness at the individual soldier level, to include among others, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement, emotional regulation exercises, mindfulness training, relaxation and grounding exercises and importance of maintaining discipline and routine in the military. Using an acronym CARRIES, the article examines efforts to enhance resilience building through empirically (...) validated cognitive, behavioural and intrapersonal skills originating from best practices learned in the military. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper explores the contrast between mentalistic and behaviouristic interpretations of decision theory. The former regards credences and utilities as psychologically real, while the latter regards them as mere representations of an agent's preferences. Philosophers typically adopt the former interpretation, economists the latter. It is argued that the mentalistic interpretation is preferable if our aim is to use decision theory for descriptive purposes, but if our aim is normative then the behaviouristic interpretation cannot be dispensed with.

Verse 4:34 of the Qur'an has historically been interpreted to give husbands authority over their wives. Even today, such as in a recent case in the United Arab Emirates, Islamic courts have held that the husband has some leeway in "disciplining" wives who act in a rebellious manner to their husbands. This article challenges this interpretation through a comprehensive legal analysis, taking into account the context under which the verse came about, including the societal norms and conditions of the time; (...) the Prophet Muhammad’s profound views against violence towards women; the values of marriage emphasized in the Qur’an; the Qur’an’s incremental approach to improving social behavior and practice; and the higher objectives of Islamic law. (shrink)

Nosso trabalho procura descrever a escola cinica atraves de seu fundador; Antistenes de Atenas (444-355) , analisando o comportamento do homem cinico e suas contradiçõess, sua busca pela virtude e pelo agir correto. Mostramos o caminho que o homem cinico deve percorrer para chegar a seu objetivo : a autarquia. Ao mesmo tempo, revelamos seu repúdio a toda cultura estabelecida e a sua relaçáo com o corpo e o prazer. O cínico deve distanciarse da cidade, das atividades mundanas e da (...) politica. (shrink)

This article studies the politics and ethics in Ibn Ṭufayl’s twelfth-century allegory, Risālat Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. I discuss this allegory alongside Ibn Sīnā’s own Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and Absāl and Salāmān, first, to show that their representations of politics are not reducible to epistemology, and second, to argue that Ibn Ṭufayl inverts the political principles depicted in Ibn Sīnā’s two tales. The paper focuses on how the characters in each allegory interact with one another, and it reconstructs the neglected politics (...) and ethics of the allegories’ seemingly minor characters. I argue that in Ibn Tufayl’s descriptions of Ḥayy’s failure to convert the neighboring islanders, the islanders consistently act in accordance with three political ideals: association, hospitality, and friendship. The islanders’ reactions to Ḥayy’s arrival and to his attempts to ‘educate’ them show each of these ideals broken down into an antinomy. Ibn Tufayl’s critique of these political ideals turns on their internal potential for self-subversion. (shrink)

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida’s thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida’s well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply political (...) writings. (shrink)

Derrida lived almost his entire life attached to educational institutions, his work was received across the globe predominantly in the academy, and he was politically and philosophically preoccupied with issues related to teaching and educational institutions for a decade. The author uses these two events to organize his presentation of the main themes in Derrida's discussions of education. With two opponents, themselves opposed, Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique (GREPH) and Derrida thus had a double task – to prevent the (...) particular reforms from coming to pass, while developing alternative reforms in their place. The author examines Derrida's pursuit of this double task by focusing on his re‐articulation of three themes, each one central to the traditional view: the role of the teacher; the age of the student, and philosophy's relation to a national language. (shrink)

Corporations are facing a growing demand for the transparency of political contributions. In the United States, this demand has largely focused on the implementation of a mandatory disclosure law. It rests on the assumption that legal enforcement can make it easier to observe the ties between corporations and political parties. In this study, I challenge this assumption. I build my case by first developing a conceptual foundation of corporate political transparency. I argue that in the absence of economic benefits, legal (...) enforcement has a limited effect on CPT. Instead of encouraging transparency, mandatory disclosure can lead to the concealment of corporate political contributions. To develop a model of concealment, I borrow the characterizations of disguise from theatrical drama. Using the context of Indian firms, I show the limitation of mandatory disclosure and the efficacy of regulatory incentive. My study highlights the need for a broader debate on CPT to understand the relative implications of regulatory policies. (shrink)

We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered as adaptive units. We re-examine the conditions under (...) which the selection–optimization links hold at the group level. We focus on an important distinction between two ways of understanding the links, which have different implications regarding group adaptationism. We show how the formal Darwinism approach can be reconciled with G.C. Williams’ famous analysis of group adaptation, and we consider the relationships between group adaptation, the Price equation approach to multi-level selection, and the alternative approach based on contextual analysis. (shrink)

Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays ftz Evolution: Findings, hypotheses and speculations (response to DOI 10.1002/bies.201100019) AbstractOn the border of the homeotic function: Re‐evaluating the controversial role of cofactor‐recruiting motifs AbstractControl of DNA replication: A new facet of Hox proteins? AbstractClassification of sequence signatures: a guide to Hox protein function Abstract.

In recent decades, the trope that classical Muslim thinkers anticipated or influenced modern European thought has provided an easy endorsement of their contemporary relevance. This article studies how Arab editors and intellectuals, from 1882 to 1947, understood the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Ṭufayl, and Arabo-Islamic philosophy generally. This modern generation of Arab scholars also attached significance to classical Arabic texts as precursors to modern European thought. They invited readers to retrospectively identify with Ibn Ṭufayl and his treatise, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. (...) Comparisons of Ibn Ṭufayl to European thinkers, and re-presentations of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān as the precedent or genesis of European thought, facilitated these editors’ global imaginaries, anti-colonial projects and political fantasies. This article tracks these projects and fantasies through the afterlife of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān from early printings and generalist surveys to later editions and studies, as Ibn Ṭufayl’s significance became sutured into his imagined importance for Europe, and for going beyond Europe. (shrink)

In the year 1842, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) painted a set of four oil paintings entitled THE VOYAGE OF LIFE. As the title indicates, the artist likened life to a voyage. This voyage begins with man emerging as a child from a dark cave into the river of life in a spring setting. As this voyage through the river of life continues, man is seen passing through the stages of youth, manhood, & then finally old age. Likewise, the setting of nature (...) is seen correspondingly passing through the stages of summer, autumn, & then finally winter. Any voyage must have a starting point, destination & duration. Also any voyage is a continuation of some sort of existence, & there is a continuity of existence after the voyage is complete. What is this voyage? Why does it have to exist? What existed before this voyage? What will happen after the destination is reached? Why is it short for some, long for others? Why is it easier for some, harder for others? Daheshism deals with these issues & many others. Daheshism is a revolution in the human approach to philosophy, life & religion. It is a new garment for the body of traditional thought & belief. The aim of Daheshism is to provide a universal belief that encompasses all other beliefs. It accomplishes synthesis rather than fragmentation of religious beliefs & expansion rather than contraction of philosophical thought. To order: P.O. Box 16680-8680, Alexandria, VA 22302. Telephone: 703-845-8223, FAX 703-845-8224 or Baker & Taylor Books. (shrink)

Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace with other ideals, like justice, friendship, security, and law, does (...) little to distance peace from war? Although political theory has dealt extensively with most major concepts that today define "the political" it has paid relatively scant critical attention to peace, the very concept that is often said to be the major aim and ideal of humanity. In War for Peace, Murad Idris looks at the ways that peace has been treated across the writings of ten thinkers from ancient and modern political thought, from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb, to produce an original and striking account of what peace means and how it works. Idris argues that peace is parasitical in that the addition of other ideals into peace, such as law, security, and friendship, reduces it to consensus and actually facilitates war; it is provincial in that its universalized content reflects particularistic desires and fears, constructions of difference, and hierarchies within humanity; and it is polemical, in that its idealization is not only the product of antagonisms, but also enables hostility. War for Peace uncovers the basis of peace's moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present. This bold and ambitious book confronts readers with the impurity of peace as an ideal, and the pressing need to think beyond universal peace. (shrink)

Several authors have recently suggested that classic psychedelics might be safe and effective agents of moral enhancement. This raises the question: can we learn anything interesting about the nature of moral experience from a close examination of transformative psychedelic experiences? The interdisciplinary enterprise of philosophical psychopathology attempts to learn about the structure and function of the “ordinary” mind by studying the radically altered mind. By analogy, in this chapter we argue that we can gain knowledge about the everyday moral life (...) by studying extraordinary experiences of altered moral cognition and experience. We focus on a specific class of cases: experiences of forgiveness induced by psychedelics. We argue that close attention to such experiences reveals the importance of thought/emotion coherence and dissonance in the moral life and vindicates some heterodox ideas about moral phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)

Such obvious truth must be made even more obvious, and this is exactly what Samir Selmanovic is doing for all of us and for the future of humanity.

Evolutionary biology is striking for its ability to explain a large and diverse range of empirical phenomena on the basis of a few general theoretical principles. This article offers a philosophical perspective on the way that evolutionary biology has come to achieve such impressive generality, by focusing on “the strategy of endogenization”. This strategy involves devising evolutionary explanations for biological features that were originally part of the background conditions, or scaffolding, against which such explanations take place. Where successful, the strategy (...) moves biology a step closer to the ideal of explaining as much as possible from evolutionary first principles. The strategy of endogenization is illustrated through a series of biological examples, historical and recent, and its philosophical implications are explored. (shrink)

This essay explores the treatment of violence in Derrida's ethico-political work, stressing the underlying continuity of Derrida's thinking of politics, from his first reading of Levinas to one of the last notions he developed, autoimmunity. Haddad analyzes the use to which the idea of a “lesser violence” has been put, arguing that it is incompatible with Derrida's other claims.

Waldenfels’ phenomenological understanding of modernity is based on the understanding of “the foreign” as an essential definition of modernity. “The foreign” here is the characteristic of thinking explicated in cultural and social relationships, which should therefore be interpreted precisely in its phenomenal reality. Culture and politics in this context are more then a mere names for a collection of meanings and justifications of action. They become the expression of a meaningful context from which one can read-off the relation to “the (...) foreign” as the reference point for understanding the very meaning of modernity, its inner differentiation, the streams that determine it and the characteristics that are established in the individual determinants that denote its history. “The foreign” as a whole is grounded in corporality as the reality of its existence. Waldenfels maintains that modernity, taken as a whole, is understood in its orientation towards the foreign, in its relationship with the foreign that, eventually, results in the entire modernity being oriented towards the foreign. Modernity as such did not go astray, but it became oriented towards the foreign, it decided itself to accept some sort of “the foreign” as its identity, in which the philosophical discourse is established for its defence. The relationship towards corporality, postulated in this sense in modern theory, is a consequence of the relationship towards “the foreign”. That is why the problem of transformation of philosophy is not found in the new understanding of the mind, but in the discourse of new rationality, of phenomenological thinking of the particularity oriented towards the critique of the encompassing metaphysics of subjectivity and towards all sorts of rational assumptions bout the reality. Waldenfels’ interpretation of the modernity follows from the integrative insight into continuity of the thinking that determines it, and it is expressed by his summarisation of the crucial problems that determine its paths. It is in this sense that the phenomenological discourse is established, signifying the starting point of philosophical thinking at the turn of the century. (shrink)

On Averroes, 1126-1198; papers presented at a symposium, Cairo, 1994.

It is widely agreed that Hume’s description of human inductive reasoning is inadequate. But many philosophers think that this inadequacy in no way affects the force of Hume’s argument for the unjustifiability of inductive reasoning. I argue that this constellation of opinions contains a serious tension, given that Hume was not merely pointing out that induction is fallible. I then explore a recent diagnosis of where Hume’s sceptical argument goes wrong, due to Elliott Sober. Sober argues that Hume committed a (...) quantifier-shift fallacy, i.e. inferred a statement of ∃∀ form from one of V∀∃ form. The implications of this diagnosis for the traditional problem of induction are briefly examined. The author suggests that, were his philosophy received, we must alter from the foundation the greatest part of the sciences. Hume 1740. (shrink)

One of the exciting developments in political theory in the last decades is that the boundaries of the discipline gradually but vigorously expanded beyond “the West,” as evident in the rise of work that is often labeled “comparative.” Basic to this shift is the recognition that various thinkers, ideas, and contexts—usually marked as “non-Western”—have been peripheral to, and remain marginalized in, the discipline of political theory. However, the discipline’s framing of the “comparative” as the study of “non-Western political thought” tends (...) to take for granted the boundary between “West” and “non-West.” The primacy of this assumed correspondence between “comparative” and “non-Western” is most visible and problematic in the ongoing institutionalization of the “comparative turn.” I understand comparative political theory as an immanent critique of political theory: the discipline presents itself as global, but in practice it is too often confined to studying a few places, histories, and bodies of knowledge. The “comparative” calls for political theorists to more reliably study politics and power anywhere. To take “comparative” to mean the study of equivalent, coherent forms of “non-Western” otherness is to elide the historicity of “the Western” and the ways in which it has been made in relation to non-Europeans. (shrink)

In this paper I demonstrate that the analysis supporting Derrida’s identification of the desire for a pure, originary idiom in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III provides a framework with which we can understand the call for a new language in Monolingualism of the Other. While acknowledging how his interpretation of Heidegger provides important insights that guide Derrida’s later negotiation with the dual dangers of nationalism and colonialism, I argue that the proximity to Heidegger, manifest in Derrida’s articulation of (...) a desire for language in the singular, threatens to close down possibilities latent in the promising definition of deconstruction as plus d’une langue—both more than a language and no more of a language. (shrink)

The introduction of explicit notions of rejection, or disbelief, into logics for knowledge representation can be justified in a number of ways. Motivations range from the need for versions of negation weaker than classical negation, to the explicit recording of classic belief contraction operations in the area of belief change, and the additional levels of expressivity obtained from an extended version of belief change which includes disbelief contraction. In this paper we present four logics of disbelief which address some or (...) all of these intuitions. Soundness and completeness results are supplied and the logics are compared with respect to applicability and utility. (shrink)

The primary objective of this research is to establish the extent to which small and medium-sized businesses in the Ha’il region benefit from a significant competitive advantage brought about by an entrepreneurial mindset. To achieve these objectives, the study used a questionnaire to collect data. A total of 220 SMEs in the Ha’il region were surveyed. The participants completed an online self-administered survey and used the PLS-SEM technique. The researchers found a robust link between differentiation advantage and higher levels of (...) innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggression, and autonomy. In addition, the outcomes of the survey reveal that a greater cost advantage is substantially associated with vastly greater innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, and competitive aggression overall. However, cost advantage is not strongly correlated with autonomy. These findings are significant because they shed new light on how competitive advantages are formed through the entrepreneurial orientation of entrepreneurs in the Ha’il region. This is a significant theoretical contribution to the literature on entrepreneurial orientation, specifically in the context of SMEs. The findings may also be valuable in supporting SMEs in being successful by enhancing their competitiveness, as SMEs are key contributors to the development and growth of the economy. (shrink)

Thinking about how the law might decide whether to extend legal personhood to artificial agents provides a valuable testbed for philosophical theories of mind. Further, philosophical and legal theorising about personhood for artificial agents can be mutually informing. We investigate two case studies, drawing on legal discussions of the status of artificial agents. The first looks at the doctrinal difficulties presented by the contracts entered into by artificial agents. We conclude that it is not necessary or desirable to postulate artificial (...) agents as legal persons in order to account for such contracts. The second looks at the potential for according sophisticated artificial agents with legal personality with attendant constitutional protections similar to those accorded to humans. We investigate the validity of attributes that have been suggested as pointers of personhood, and conclude that they will take their place within a broader matrix of pragmatic, philosophical and extra-legal concepts. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se pretende comprender el horizonte en el que la sociedad contemporánea construye su sentido de la cotidianidad, a partir de la positividad y negatividad del aburrimiento. El método empleado será la propuesta interpretativa de Heidegger, orientado por el concepto de cotidianidad en dialogo con Han, en lo referente a la manifestación del aburrimiento en la vida cotidiana de los sujetos. En una primera instancia se abordan las determinaciones de la racionalidad instrumental y el neoliberalismo en la (...) construcción de sentido en la de la sociedad contemporánea. Posteriormente, en un segundo lugar, se comprende la imposibilidad dialéctica de la positividad del aburrimiento, para luego entender cómo la negatividad del aburrimiento posibilita desde la dialéctica una negación del discurso neoliberal. Esta comprensión resulta relevante al momento de plantear la negatividad del aburrimiento como una posibilidad de mundo. Se concluye, que el aburrimiento es una apertura a los modos en los que la sociedad contemporánea construye su cotidianidad. (shrink)