This article aims at highlighting the specificities of Gaston Bachelard’s «La poétique de la rêverie», seen as the pivot of Motesquieu’s imaginary creation in Persian Letters. The Same and the Other are two essential terms when trying to find the place imagology plays in an intercultural approach where France and Persia are associated with an enchanted exoticism. Criteria such as space, taste, the marvellous and verisimilitude will be examined in order to analyse the images vehiculated by the perceived society and (...) by the perceiving one and to evaluate Montesquieu’s genius for social irony. (shrink)

The concept of Substantial motion (حركت جوهرى) is fundamentally flawed and severely muddled. Aristotle and Mulla Sadra’s conception of motion, substance (جوهر) and substantial form صورت نوعيه)) were all based on a severe misunderstanding of nature as later was established by the scientists and philosophers that came after them. Here, by recalling the established facts of modern science, particularly the universally accepted scientific fact that, properties of objects are reducible to the motion of their electrons and there’s no such thing (...) as ‘substantial form’ much less substance, the author puts an end to a 400-year-old glorious error called ‘substantial motion’. Naturally any attempt to reconcile the paradigms of modern physics with Aristotle/Sadra paradigms of form/matter and substance/accidents, and to try to draw parallel between the two and revive their philosophy would be an exercise in futility. (shrink)

Ethics and basic moral principles according to Islam; collection of articles previously published in Tekad tabloid.

There are several types of behavioural evidence in favour of the notion that many animal species experience at least some simple levels of consciousness. Other than behavioural evidence, there are a number of anatomical and physiological criteria that help resolve the problem of animal consciousness, particularly when addressing the problem in lower vertebrates and invertebrates. In this paper, I review a number of such behavioural and brain- based evidence in the case of mammals, birds, and some invertebrate species. Cumulative evidence (...) strongly suggests that consciousness, of one form or another, is present in mammals and birds. Although supportive evidence is less strong in the case of invertebrates, it is more likely than not that they also experience some simple levels of consciousness. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 299-304.

In this book, the author develops a new form of structural realism and deals with the problem of representation. The work combines two distinguished developments of the Semantic View of Theories, namely Structural Realism, a flourishing theory from contemporary philosophy of science, and Ronald Giere and colleagues’ Cognitive Models of Science approach. Readers will see how replacing the model-theoretic structures that are at issue in SR with connectionist networks and activations patterns helps us to deal with the problem of representation. (...) The author suggests that cognitive structures are not only the precise formal tools for regimenting the structure of scientific theories but also the tools that the biological brain uses to capture the essential features of its environment. Therefore, replacing model-theoretic structures with cognitive structures allows us to account for the theories-reality relationship on the basis of the most reliable theories of neurology. This is how a new form of SR, called Cognitive Structural Realism is introduced through this book, which articulates and defends CSR, and shows how two diverging branches of SVT can be reconciled. This ground-breaking work will particularly appeal to people who work in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Free Energy Principle underlies a unifying framework that integrates theories of origins of life, cognition, and action. Recently, FEP has been developed into a Markovian monist perspective. The paper expresses scepticism about the validity of arguments for Markovian monism. The critique is based on the assumption that Markovian models are scientific models, and while we may defend ontological theories about the nature of scientific models, we could not read off metaphysical theses about the nature of target systems from our theories (...) of nature of scientific models. The paper draws attention to different ways of understanding Markovian models, as material entities, fictional entities, and mathematical structures. I argue that none of these interpretations contributes to the defence of a metaphysical stance. This is because scientific representation is a sophisticated process, and properties of Markovian models—such as the property of being neither physical nor mental—could not be projected onto their targets to determine the ontological properties of targets easily. (shrink)

This essay outlines the significance of understanding the relationship between Islam and science, particularly from the twentieth century onward. It mainly revolves around the viability of Darwin's evolutionary thought in the Muslim world, which is confronted by various groups of Muslim commentators and scholars. This study goes through various original sources, official documents, former unpublished theses, and Qur’ānic commentaries in Islamic languages from north Africa to the Malay‐Indonesian world to display the uninterrupted challenge of Muslims with European science in general (...) and European evolutionary thought in particular; an act which is not going to stop now, nor tomorrow. Finally, this essay aims to inform readers how a philosophical reading of Islam and science would be crucial before approving or rejecting any form of connection between the two, particularly in future. (shrink)

When researchers think about the interaction between language and emotion, they typically focus on descriptive emotion words. This review demonstrates that emotion can interact with language at many levels of structure, from the sound patterns of a language to its lexicon and grammar, and beyond to how it appears in conversation and discourse. Findings are considered from diverse subfields across the language sciences, including cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Taken together, it is clear that emotional expression is (...) finely tuned to language-specific structures. Future emotion research can better exploit cross-linguistic variation to unravel possible universal principles operating between language and emotion. (shrink)

Influenced by the flowering of positive psychology in the field of foreign language acquisition research in recent years, the present study aimed to explore the perceived functions of playfulness, as a personality construct, among English as a foreign language learners. To this aim, an initial sample of 38 EFL learners were selected randomly from the private language institutes of Mashhad, the second largest city in Iran. They were interviewed about any perceived functions of playfulness in the EFL learning context. A (...) qualitative content analysis of the collected data led to the extraction of four categories: Fun and laughter, creativity, mastery orientation, and cultivating relationships. A further in-depth analysis of the categories and comparison with the functions of adult playfulness in psychology revealed that these four categories can be subsumed under two of the four structural components of adult playfulness; namely, other-directed playfulness and intellectual playfulness. The ability of EFL learners to turn language learning situations, tasks, and environment into enjoyable ones via their playfulness can have implications for the quality of their interpersonal interactions in class and eventually their language proficiency. The findings of this study can pave the way for the translation of the adult playfulness construct from developmental and personality psychology and family relations into the second language acquisition domain and its conceptualization in future research in this domain. (shrink)

The background target of the research going into the present article is to forge an intellectual alliance between, on the one hand, active inference and the free-energy principle (FEP), and on the other, Charles S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics and pragmatism. In the present paper, the focus is on the allegiance between the nomenclatures of active and abductive inferences as the proper place to begin reaching at that wider target. The paper outlines the key conceptual elements involved in a naturalistic (...) rendering of Peirce’s late semiotic and logical notion of abductive reasoning. The target is a cognitive-biological model of abduction which preserves the functional integrity of an organism and fulfils the existential imperative for living beings’ evidence of existence. Such a model is an adaptation of Peirce’s late logical schema of abduction proposed in his largely unpublished works during the early 20th century. The proposed model is argued to be a feasible sketch also of recent breakthroughs in computational (sensu Bayesian) cognitive science. (shrink)

Probabilistic realism and syntactical positivism were two among outdated theories that Feigl criticised on account of their semantical poverty. In this paper, I argue that a refined version of probabilistic realism, which relies on what Feigl specified as the pragmatic description of the symbolic behaviour of scientists’ estimations and foresight, is defendable. This version of statistical realism does not need to make the plausibility of realist thesis dependent on the conventional acceptance of a constructed semantic metalanguage. I shall rely on (...) the Prediction Error Minimisation theory to support my probabilistic version of realism with a scientifically-informed and naturalistically plausible statistical account of the theories-world relationship which has a pragmatic ring to it. (shrink)

The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication. The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at (...) the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies ; an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research. Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels. (shrink)

Luciano Floridi’s informational structural realism takes a constructionist attitude towards the problems of epistemology and metaphysics, but the question of the nature of the semantical component of his view remains vexing. In this paper, I propose to dispense with the semantical component of ISR completely. I outline a Syntactical version of ISR. The unified entropy-based framework of information has been adopted as the groundwork of SISR. To establish its realist component, SISR should be able to dissolve the latching problem. We (...) have to be able to account for the informational structures–reality relationship in the absence of the standard semantical resources. The paper offers a pragmatic solution to the latching problem. I also take pains to account for the naturalistic plausibility of this solution by grounding it in the recent computational neuroscience of the predictive coding and the free energy principle. (shrink)

In this paper, inspired by the late twentieth century developments in philosophy of science, I propose an ontological scheme to accommodate the scientifically-informed anti-substantivalist views of the self. I call the position structural realist theory of the self. More specifically, I argue that SRS provides a middle ground for bringing a metaphysical reconciliation between the two recurring, and apparently competing forms of such anti-substantivalist views, i.e., eliminativism and pluralism. The notion of the structural self, as the underpinning pattern that is (...) the subject of the ontological commitments in SRS, is not as cumbersome as the orthodox substantivalist notion, and yet accounts for the relation of the different aspects and elements of the self by integrating them structurally into a central unifying pattern of selfhood. I use the experimental studies of Northoff et al. about the processing of the self-related stimuli in the cortical midline structure of the brain, to argue that the underlying pattern of the selfhood could be sought at the level of information processing. I also add a programmatic suggestion about how the different situated, experiential and extended aspects of the selfhood could be structurally incorporated into this underlying pattern. (shrink)

The last article of this three-part series on the Qurʾān and science discusses the creation and development of the scientific miraculousness of the Qurʾān, which claims that the Qurʾān contains scientific findings and has particular scientific features, such as harmonious numerical analogies and formulae, that confirm the divine origin of the text. It became a political-theological tool used by Muslim preachers and activists across the globe. Unlike scientific interpreters of the Qurʾān, advocates of scientific miraculousness were concerned with not only (...) uniting Muslims and proving God's authority over the universe but also promoting the Qurʾān as a mine of modern science, archaeology, and history, the authenticity of which is unchallengeable. (shrink)

The second installment in a three‐part series on the Qurʾān and science, this article provides a systematic discussion of the scientific interpretation of the Qurʾān both inside and outside the Muslim world. This discussion reveals how Muslims’ interactions with Euro‐Americans have kept discourse on the Qurʾān and science alive. It also demonstrates how Muslims promoted this exegetical genre transregionally from the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

This book presents a unified account of the self, based on a network of knowledge sourced from several scientific accounts of selfhood. Beni constructs his ontological account of the self from the common structure that underpins the theoretical diversity that is manifested in rival and sometimes incompatible scientific accounts of the self and its aspects. The enterprise is inspired by recent structural realist theories in the philosophy of science, specifying the basic structure of the self, and explaining how representational, phenomenal, (...) and social aspects of the self are embodied within this structure. (shrink)

As the first installment in a three‐part series on the Qurʾān and science, this article begins with the author's personal and scholarly experiences to demonstrate the importance of the twin trends of Qurʾānic scientific interpretation and Qurʾānic scientific miraculousness, including how both serve as Muslims theological tools. It then touches upon the close relationship between theology and scientific knowledge in the history of Islam. The main focus concerns how science is situated and defined in Islamic literature, with particular references to (...) traditional Muslim commentaries and treatises. It also concerns the way Muslim exegetical figures and traditionalists are encouraged or discouraged from taking science into account based on the Qurʾān and prophetic traditions. (shrink)

During the last two decades, many thinkers on Iranian cinema have had many things to say about censorship, especially the issue of the veil imposed on women’s gender by the authorities in Iran. In this paper, I will describe Hamid Dabashi’s narrative as related to the concept of “truth” to show further that the veil issue has reached a new phase in Iran. Although much of what Dabashi defines as the absented body of women in his article “Body less faces: (...) Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an ‘Islamic cinema’” may still hold, I believe his over-arching narrative doesn’t contribute enough to our understanding of the new relations among the authorities and actresses’ Fashion styles on red carpets. This paper’s method is connected with cultural and visual studies through Roland Barthes’ semiotics. I first focus on Hamid Dabashi’s conception of “truth” and how he believes “truth” is related to Islamic ideology and embodied in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema to further (through analysing photos of Iranian actresses’ clothing who attend festivals) conclude that Iranian women try to adopt new resistances in choosing their costumes compared to the early two decades of post-revolutionary Iran. The presence of Iranian women in festivals especially regarding what they wear has established a new interwoven relationship with authorities which has somewhat not been surveyed properly. By surveying the photos of their fashion and style I conclude that they are in constant negotiation with authorities through what they rebelliously wear. (shrink)

We generalize the double negation construction of Boolean algebras in Heyting algebras to a double negation construction of the same in Visser algebras. This result allows us to generalize Glivenko’s theorem from intuitionistic propositional logic and Heyting algebras to Visser’s basic propositional logic and Visser algebras.

Richard Levins’s (Am Sci 54(4):421–431, 1966) paper sets a landmark for the significance of scientific model-making in biology. Colombo and Palacios (Biol Philos 36(5):1–26. 10.1007/s10539-021-09818-x, 2021) have recently built their critique of the explanatory power of the Free Energy Principle on Levins’s insight into the relationship between generality, realism, and precision. This paper addresses the issue of the plausibility of biological explanations that are grounded in the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and deals with the question of the realist fortitude of (...) FEP’s theoretical framework. It indicates that what is required for establishing the plausibility of the explanation of a target system given a model of that system is the dosage or the harmony between the generality and accuracy of explanatory models. This would also provide a basis for seeing how scientific realism could be a viable option with respect to FEP. (shrink)

The question of judgment has become one of the central problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores Hannah Arendt's decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendt's work pinpoints the key antinomy within political judgment itself, (...) that between the viewpoints of the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by highlighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendt's account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend Arendt's contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory. Key Words: action • aesthetics • community • freedom • history • judgment • reflection. (shrink)

We study the linear Lindenbaum algebra of Basic Propositional Calculus, called linear basic algebra.

The paper surveys Floridi’s attempt for laying down informational structural realism. After considering a number of reactions to the pars destruens of Floridi’s attack on the digital ontology, I show that Floridi’s enterprise for enriching the ISR by borrowing elements from the ontic form of structural realism is blighted by a haunting inconsistency. ISR has been originally developed by Floridi as a restricted and level dependent form of structural realism which remains mainly bonded within the borders of a Kantian perspective. (...) I argue that this perspective doesn’t mesh nicely with the ontic interpretation that Floridi attached to the ISR. I substantiate this claim through the assessment of Floridi’s strategy for reconciling the epistemic and ontic forms of the SR, as well as by close examination of his use of method of levels of abstraction and his notion of semantic information. My proposal is that the ISR could be defended best against the mentioned and similar objections by being interpreted as an extension of the epistemic SR. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLadyman and Ross’s account of the metaphysical component of ontic structural realism was associated with a unificationist view of the connection between fundamental physics and special sciences. The aim of the present article is to assess the sense of unification that is at issue in Ladyman and Ross’s definition of metaphysics. Given the ontic core of Ladyman and Ross’s version of structural realism, it should be assumed that the unifying endeavour is worthwhile only if the connective links that underpin unification (...) are metaphysically significant. Ladyman and Ross employed information-theoretic notions, e.g. ‘projectibility’, to account for the significance of real patterns, which underpin unification. I build upon McAllister’s engagements with the same topic, to argue that these notions fail to accomplish this objective. (shrink)

Estimation of discharge flowing through rivers is an important aspect of water resource planning and management. The most common way to address this concern is to develop stage-discharge relationships at various river sections. Various computational techniques have been applied to develop discharge ratings and improve the accuracy of estimated discharges. In this regard, the present study explores the application of the novel hybrid multigene genetic programming-generalized reduced gradient technique for estimating river discharges for steady as well as unsteady flows. It (...) also compares the MGGP-GRG performance with those of the commonly used optimization techniques. As a result, the rating curves of eight different rivers were developed using the conventional method, evolutionary algorithm, the modified honey bee mating optimization algorithm, artificial neural network, MGGP, and the hybrid MGGP-GRG technique. The comparison was conducted on the basis of several widely used performance evaluation criteria. It was observed that no model outperformed others for all datasets and metrics considered, which demonstrates that the best method may be different from one case to another one. Nevertheless, the ranking analysis indicates that the hybrid MGGP-GRG model overall performs the best in developing stage-discharge relationships for both single-value and loop rating curves. For instance, the hybrid MGGP-GRG technique improved sum of square of errors obtained by the conventional method between 4.5% and 99% for six out of eight datasets. Furthermore, EA, the MHBMO algorithm, and artificial intelligence models performed satisfactorily in some of the cases, while the idea of combining MGGP with GRG reveals that this hybrid method improved the performance of MGGP in this specific application. Unlike the black box nature of ANN, MGGP offers explicit equations for stream rating curves, which may be counted as one of the advantages of this AI model. (shrink)

The paper proposes a way to naturalise Charles S. Peirce’s conception of the scientific method, which he specified in terms of abduction, deduction and induction. The focus is on the central issue of the economy of research in abduction and self-correction by error reduction in induction. We show how Peirce’s logic of science receives support from modern breakthroughs in computational neuroscience, and more specifically from Karl Friston’s statements of active inference and the Free Energy Principle, namely the account of how (...) organisms’ capacity to decrease the discrepancy between the expected value and actual outcomes entails the minimisation of errors in their hypotheses about the world. A scientific account of organisms’ capacity to choose policies and form expectations is aligned with Peirce’s theories of abduction and induction, and especially with the economy of research. The upshot is the recovery of Peirce’s theory of the logic of science in the context of active inquiry. (shrink)

We study the variety of Löb algebras , the algebraic structures associated with formal propositional calculus. Among other things, we prove a completeness theorem for formal propositional logic with respect to the variety of Löb algebras. We show that the variety of Löb algebras has the weak amalgamation property. Some interesting subclasses of the variety of Löb algebras, e.g. linear, faithful and strongly linear Löb algebras are introduced.