In 2017, the blockade of Qatar Gulf states caused a plethora of effects on the country. This paper sought to examine the resulting threat effects of this blockade in terms of lowered self-esteem and well-being, and the potential buffering effects of an overarching identity. Using self-report questionnaire data from Qatari secondary school students, multiple moderated mediation models investigated the predictive effects of youngsters’ perceived threat, via self-esteem, on their well-being, and the mitigating roles herein of, respectively, national, Gulf region, and (...) Arab identity. Perceived threat was indeed related to lower well-being via lower self-esteem, and this relationship was equally strong for those low and high in social identity. In terms of the three facets of identity, the overarching Gulf identity seems the most predictive, and it even buffers the negative relationship between threat and reduced self-esteem. (shrink)

Taouk, Youssef; Ghosn, Margaret; Steel, Anthony; Butcher, Jude The Maronite Church, situated in the See of Antioch, had its origins in Syria, soon followed by its expansion to Lebanon. The Maronite Synod (2003-2006) distinguished aspects of the Maronite Catholic Church as: firstly, an Antiochene Syriac Church, with a special liturgical heritage; secondly, a Chalcedonian Church; thirdly, a Patriarchal Church with an ascetic and a monastic aspect; fourthly, a Church in full union with the Apostolic Roman See; fifthly, a Church (...) incarnated in her Lebanese and Eastern environment, and the Countries of Expansion. (shrink)

In “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism” (2007), “Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition” (2006), and Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001), Michael Huemer endorses the principle of phenomenal conservatism, according to which appearances or seemings constitute a fundamental source of (defeasible) justification for belief. He claims that those who deny phenomenal conservatism, including classical foundationalists, are in a self-defeating position, for their views cannot be both true and justified; that classical foundationalists have difficulty accommodating false introspective beliefs; and that phenomenal conservatism (...) is most faithful to the central internalist intuition. I argue that Huemer’s self-defeat argument fails, that classical foundationalism is able to accommodate fallible introspective beliefs, and that classical foundationalism captures a relatively clear internalist intuition. I also show that the motivation for phenomenal conservatism is less than clear. (shrink)

In Justification without Awareness (2006), Michael Bergmann presents a dilemma for internalism from which he claims there is “no escape”: The awareness allegedly required for justification is either strong awareness, which involves conceiving of some justification-contributor as relevant to the truth of a belief, or weak awareness, which does not. Bergmann argues that the former leads to an infinite regress of justifiers, while the latter conflicts with the “clearest and most compelling” motivation for endorsing internalism, namely, that for a belief (...) to be justified its truth must not be an accident from the subject’s perspective. Bergmann’s dilemma might initially seem to have the force of a knock-down argument against the classical foundationalist accounts he considers, if not against all forms of internalism. I argue, however, that the weak-awareness horn of Bergmann’s dilemma is unsuccessful. Classical foundationalists can hold on to the main motivation for internalism and avoid a vicious regress of justifiers. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish between different sorts of assessments of algorithmic systems, describe our process of assessing such systems for ethical risk, and share some key challenges and lessons for future algorithm assessments and audits. Given the distinctive nature and function of a third-party audit, and the uncertain and shifting regulatory landscape, we suggest that second-party assessments are currently the primary mechanisms for analyzing the social impacts of systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. We then discuss two kinds of as-sessments: (...) an ethical risk assessment and a narrower, technical algo-rithmic bias assessment. We explain how the two assessments depend on each other, highlight the importance of situating the algorithm within its particular socio-technical context, and discuss a number of lessons and challenges for algorithm assessments and, potentially, for algorithm audits. The discussion builds on our team’s experience of advising and conducting ethical risk assessments for clients across dif-ferent industries in the last four years. Our main goal is to reflect on the key factors that are potentially ethically relevant in the use of algo-rithms, and draw lessons for the nascent algorithm assessment and audit industry, in the hope of helping all parties minimize the risk of harm from their use. (shrink)

This study explores gratitude as a multidimensional and work-specific construct. Utilizing a sample of 625 employees from a variety of positions in a medium-sized school district in the United States, we developed and evaluated a new measure, namely the Work Gratitude Scale, which encompasses recognized conative, cognitive, affective, and social aspects of gratitude. A systematic, six-phased approach through structural equation modeling was used to explore and confirm the factorial structure, internal consistency, measurement invariance, concurrent, convergent, and discriminant validity of the (...) WGS. The results supported a 10-item measure with three dimensions: “grateful appraisals”, “gratitude toward others”, and “intentional attitude of gratitude”. Thereafter, first-order, second-order, and bifactor confirmatory models were estimated and compared. Work gratitude was found to be best described by a second-order construct with three underlying first-order dimensions. Measurement invariance was supported in relation to gender. Concurrent validity was supported in relation to two existing dispositional gratitude scales, namely the Gratitude Questionnaire and the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Scale. Convergent validity was supported in relation to the Core Self-Evaluations Scale and the Psychological Capital Questionnaire. Discriminant validity was supported in relation to various demographic factors such as age, gender, occupation, and tenure. The findings support the WGS as a multidimensional measure that can be used in practice to measure overall work-related gratitude and to track the effectiveness of gratitude-related workplace interventions. (shrink)

The article studies the impact of Fintech on entrepreneurship in Arabic region by using Crowdfunding platforms as the field of study. The article focuses on Arabic Crowdfunding platforms. The population of (12) platforms consist of: individuals, entrepreneurs, investors, employees at Crowdfunding platforms. Descriptive and quantitative approach used in this article, and a questionnaire used as a tool to collect primary data. The results indicate an impact for Fintech on entrepreneurship in general and obvious obstacles to use it widely in Arabic (...) region cause of legislations or e-payments. The article recommended more awareness for innovative products and services such as Fintech, Crowdfunding and adopting the culture of e-business models. Also the article promoting the process of developing regulations that organize e-business models, especially Fintech and Crowdfunding, the use of modern communication technology to serve the development of society, more interest to innovation and creativity as a key factor for entrepreneurial success. (shrink)

What happens when a patient-interfacing conversational artificial intelligence system (CAI)—AI that combines natural language understanding, processing, and machine-learning models to autonomously...

According to foundationalism, some beliefs are justified but do not depend for their justification on any other beliefs. According to access internalism, a subject is justified in believing some proposition only if that subject is aware of or has access to some reason to think that the proposition is true or probable. In this paper I discusses a fundamental challenge to internalist foundationalism often referred to as the Sellarsian dilemma. I consider three attempts to respond to the dilemma – phenomenal (...) conservatism, BonJour’s classical foundationalism, and Fumerton’s classical foundationalism. I argue that, of these three, only the last seems to avoid getting impaled on one or the other horn of the dilemma. I end by responding to some concerns with Fumerton’s account. (shrink)

This paper deals with the problematic aspect of the reconstruction of binary relations: it includes all the questions raising the possibility or impossibility to determine a structure by gathering given substructures. It is the continuation of three studies: the first made by G. Lopez [9] in 1972 about the determination of a binary relation through the types of isomorphism of its restrictions, the second made by K. B. Reid and C. Thomassen [15] in 1976 about the strongly self-complementary tournaments , (...) the third made by C. Thomassen [16] in 1989 about the cycle space of a tournament. In the second section, we use the notion of class of difference to extend a study made in [16] to binary relations. Then, in the third section, we improve the result of this last study in the case of the tournaments. After noticing that the result of [15] inferred itself naturally from the approach developed in [9], we extend, in the fourth section, the study made in [15] to binary relations. (shrink)

Organisations are increasingly involved in what they call ‘ethical dilemmas’, that is, the conditions under which wrongdoing and righteous deeds must be defined once again because the line between right and wrong has blurred more than ever. In general, human beings have special moral characteristics in the individual and personality dimension that shape their thoughts, speech and behaviour. It is possible that the same people in the same position and organisation could be affected differently, and their ideas, speech and behaviour (...) affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation. Ethics can have positive or negative consequences at each organisational level. One of the effective factors on the occurrence of employees’ ethical behaviours is the role of spirituality in the work environment and humility of leaders. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of humility of Muslim leaders on the moral behaviours of followers and spirituality at work in Islamic society. The statistical population of the study was 370 Muslim employees of International Islamic University Malaysia. After distributing the questionnaires among the statistical population, 352 questionnaires were returned. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by the content validity method, and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha. In this research, the structural equation modeling approach and Amos software were used to analyse the data. All hypotheses were confirmed at a 95% significance level. The results showed that the humility of leaders has a positive and significant effect on spirituality in the workplace and work ethic of followers. Spirituality in the workplace has also a positive effect on employees’ work ethic.Contribution: It is recommended that the officials of organisations should pay attention to spirituality in the workplace and the humility of managers and supervisors towards employees in order to promote work ethics. Further, it can be concluded that organisations can increase the ethical behaviours of employees by promoting the components of organisational spirituality. (shrink)

Let T and T1 be tournaments with n elements, E a basis for T, E′ a basis for T′, and k ≥ 3 an integer. The dual of T is the tournament T” of basis E defined by T = T for all x, y ε E. A hemimorphism from T onto T′ is an isomorphism from T onto T” or onto T. A k-hemimorphism from T onto T′ is a bijection f from E to E′ such that for any (...) subset X of E of order k the restrictions T/X and T1/f are hemimorphic. The set of hemimorphisms of T onto itself has group structure, this group is called the group of hemimorphisms of T. In this work, we study the restrictions to n – 2 elements of a tournament with n elements. In particular, we prove: Let k ≥ 3 be an integer, T a tournament with n elements, where n ≥ k + 5. Then the following statements are equivalent: All restrictions of T to subsets with n – 2 elements are k-hemimorphic. All restrictions of T to subsets with n – 2 elements are 3-hemimorphic. All restrictions of T to subsets with n – 2 elements are hemimorphic. All restrictions of T to subsets with n – 2 elements are isomorphic, Either T is a strict total order, or the group of hemimorphisms of T is 2-homogeneous. (shrink)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative phase in artificial intelligence (AI). Unlike conventional AI, LLMs excel in facilitating fluid human–computer d...

This article seeks to determine whether PT Freeport Indonesia, an operating subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold Inc., has acted in environmentally and socially responsible ways in the context of its operations in Papua, Indonesia, and how well it has responded to the legacy left by its less responsible operations from 1973 until the mid-1990s. This objective is achieved by examining the company's impact on the resources and assets with which it comes into contact as part of its operations, as (...) well as through a historical review of the province of Papua and its incorporation into Indonesia, Freeport's entry into Papua, and the company's engagement with international and Indonesian politics. (shrink)

Israel is a country of many cultures and languages and of several religions. The majority of the population adheres to the Jewish religion. The Moslem and the Christian religions come next in size, in that order. Similarly to many other countries in the region, religion fills a more central role in the public sphere of Israel than in most Western countries. It also influences the private sphere immensely, as for example in the matter of marriages and funerals which in most (...) cases are conducted by state employees who have been appointed by the religious establishments of each of the official religions. We are thus discussing religion in a context where it matters highly. Power, welfare and the very right to reside in the country are connected with religion. Symbols of statehood and collective identity are lent from religious texts, objects and rituals. The symbol of the state, the seven-armed golden candelabra, suggests the memory of the temples of Solomon and Herod where a similar one was standing. (shrink)

Polygamy, which was practiced without limitations in the past, had been restricted to four wives after the arrival of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. However, some scholars have different views on this issue, supposedly influenced by the literal and cultural background of patriarchal tradition on treating women as the object of polygamy. This article attempts to examine the construction of patriarchal interpretation in a gender-biased interpretation, its factors and its implications. This study adopts a qualitative approach and employs a content (...) analysis approach. Interviews with relevant scholars are also used to explore in-depth information regarding this subject. The object of research is based on a full set (30 juz /chapters) of 11 books of tafsir written in Indonesia. These books are Tafsir Al-Furqan, Tafsir Quran, Adz-Dzikra: Terjemah dan Tafsir al-Quran, Al-Quran dan Terjemahnya, Tafsir Quran Karim, Tafsir al-Azhar, Tafsir Rahmat, Tafsir al-Quran al-Majid an-Nur, Tafsir al-Mishbah, Al-Quran and its Exegesis of the Department of Religion, and Tafsir al-Hijri. This study found that women have been exploited through polygamy practices. Our findings show that biased gender interpretation, especially because of the patriarchal mindset, brought a greater impact on the Quranic interpretation. This study suggested that reinterpretation towards Quranic verses particularly dealing with gender issues needs to be strengthened in accordance with justice and humanistic values. Contribution: This article offered two approaches for the study of the Quran in order to establish gender equality and justice in marriage practice. Firstly, the adaptive and humanistic interpretations of the Quran need to be strengthened and should raise common consciousness in Muslim society. Secondly, there is a need to study the Quran in an integrative, holistic and hermeneutical understanding of the Quranic text. This method can explore the deepest meaning of the Quran so it can rise gender-sensitive, humanist and moderate interpretations. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the concept of sunna, and its great theoretical and historical complexity. The term “sunna” seems nowadays to be a label for the whole set of behaviors adopted by believers, from simple details of dress or diet to the most elaborate of ritual and cultural attitudes. The daily lifestyle of the prophet is invoked so as to imitate the way he washed, how he lay down to sleep, or “sat at table”, not to mention his ritual gestures (...) during prayer, what he preferred to eat after breaking fasts, his slightest movements over the nights and days of pilgrimage. The author intends to show on the contrary, through an unprecedented study, that the Islamic society of a very large city, that of 10th century Baghdad, was for a considerable period of time completely disengaged from such obsessive scrupulousness of religious observance. It gives large evidence of this phenomenon, and tries to outline the historical reasons how the sunna eventually evolved into a rule defining the coercive power of the Islamic faith. (shrink)

According to a recent wave of work by legal anti-positivists, legal norms are a subset of moral norms. This striking “one-system” view of law has rapidly become the dominant form of anti-positivism, but its implications have so far been little tested. This article argues that the one-system view leads systematically to untenable conclusions about what legal rights and obligations we have. For many clear legal norms, the view lacks the resources to explain the existence of corresponding moral norms. And its (...) criteria for distinguishing legal norms within morality imply an under- or over-inclusive set of legal norms. I stress the special difficulties that apply beyond obligations, in the case of privileges and powers, and I show that the view's problems do not only—or mainly—concern egregiously unjust law, or indeed morally defective law at all. I close with reflections on legal normativity and the prospects for different forms of anti-positivism. (shrink)

This paper presents a new boosting algorithm called NormalBoost which is capable of classifying a multi-dimensional binary class dataset. It adaptively combines several weak classifiers to form a strong classifier. Unlike many boosting algorithms which have high computation and memory complexities, NormalBoost is capable of classification with low complexity. Since NormalBoost assumes the dataset to be continuous, it is also noise resistant because it only deals with the means and standard deviations of each dimension. Experiments conducted to evaluate its performance (...) shows that NormalBoost performs almost the same as AdaBoost in the classification rate. However, NormalBoost performs 189 times faster than AdaBoost and employs a very little amount of memory when a dataset of 2 million samples with 50 dimensions is invoked. (shrink)

The summativists generally analyze group belief in terms of belief of the majority. The non-summativists counterargue that it is possible for a group to believe that p even if “none” of its members believes that p. In doing so, they usually appeal to hypothetical cases in which groups are “structured” groups like committees, research groups, governments, as opposed to “collective” groups like Finns, America, Catholic Church. In this paper, I raise the objection that non-summativist cases involve summativism. While most contemporary (...) objections to non-summativism tend to be rejectionists, i.e., showing that non-summativist cases involve group acceptance rather than group belief, my objection is newfangled in that it grants non-summativist cases group belief but shows that group belief in such cases is majority belief. (shrink)

Every word of the Qur'an ensures the understanding of the divine will. The foundation signs in it were created for this purpose. Just like the punctuation marks that ensure the correct understanding of a Turkish sentence, the foundation marks in the Qur'an have assumed the same function. The signs of foundation, which give the opportunity to breathe by interrupting the recitation at the places where the mana is completed, and the signs of ibtida, which provides the recitation starting from the (...) appropriate place for the integrity of the meaning, have a significant importance in the authentic interpretation of the Qur'an. The scholar, who wrote very important works related to the field and brought an independent topic under the name of "Secâvend" to the science of recitation, undoubtedly Muhammad b. Tayfur es-Secavendi. According to him, it is considered obligatory to dwell on the foundation denoted by the remzi (م) in the mushafs. Because when vasl is performed in these places, the nature and meaning of the verse changes. Based on these reasons, a foundation is different from other types of foundations. In this study, the signs of the need for foundation were examined within the framework of the verse integrity, and it was analyzed why Secavendi considered it necessary to make a foundation, taking into account the possible meanings that may occur in the case of vasl. (shrink)

The “problem of memory” in epistemology is concerned with whether and how we could have knowledge, or at least justification, for trusting our apparent memories. I defend an inductive solution—more precisely, an abductive solution—to the problem. A natural worry is that any such solution would be circular, for it would have to depend on memory. I argue that belief in the reliability of memory can be justified from the armchair, without relying on memory. The justification is, roughly, that my having (...) the sort of experience that my apparent memory should lead me to expect is best explained by the hypothesis that my memories are reliable. My solution is inspired by Harrod’s (1942) inductive solution. Coburn (1960) argued that Harrod’s solution contains a fatal flaw. I show that my solution is not vulnerable to Coburn’s objection, and respond to a number of other, recent and likely objections. (shrink)

One of the critical crises observed in human society, especially in the so-called advanced and industrial societies, is the spiritual crisis. Spirituality in various types of cultural and religious concepts is considered a spiritual path one in which can achieve something like a high level of consciousness, wisdom or union with God. In addition, self-esteem is a sense of worth. This feeling comes from the sum of our thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences throughout life. Dignity also means honour and pride, (...) which has been mentioned many times in the Qur'an. In contrast to dignity, there is humiliation, which means lack of dignity in which one simply accepts defeat. Religious teachings, especially Islamic teachings, do not summarise dignity as wealth, luxury and the enjoyment of material possibilities, but interprets dignity as spirituality, and liberation from the shackles of worldliness, which give Muslims a moral identity. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of moral identity between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem of Muslims. The statistical population includes 834 Muslim employees working in 20 branches of one Iranian university. Necessary data were collected by standard questionnaires. Pearson's correlation coefficient and regression analysis in SPSS software (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) were used to analyse the data. According to the results of the analysis, there is a positive relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem of Muslims. There is also a positive relationship between moral identity and self-esteem. Furthermore, moral identity plays a mediating role in the relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem, and it strengthens this relationship. CONTRIBUTION: The present study proves the mediating role of ethical identity on the relationship between spiritual intelligence and self-esteem in an Islamic society. (shrink)

I criticize two ways of interpreting Kant's claim that property rights are merely ‘provisional’ in the state of nature.Weak provisionalityholds that in the state of nature agents can make rightful claims to property. What is lacking is the institutional context necessary to render their claims secure. By contrast,strong provisionalityholds that making property claims in the state of nature wrongs others. I argue for a third view,anticipatory provisionality, according to which state of nature property claims do not wrong others, but anticipate (...) a condition in which the authority to make such claims can no longer be unilaterally determined. (shrink)

İslam’da Ahlak ve Ahlak Ekolleri adlı bu eser önsöz ve iki bölümden müteşekkildir. Yazar bu eserinde insanın temel niteliği olarak ele aldığı ahlakın İslam dinindeki yeri ve önemini, süreç içerisinde oluşan ekolleri, bireysel ve toplumsal açıdan konumunu ve değerini ortaya koymaya çalışmaktadır. Hassaten İslam düşünce tarihindeki sufilerin ahlak görüşleri iktibas edilerek hazırlanan bu eser, bu alanda çalışmalar yapacak kimseler için ele aldığı konular açısından okunmaya değer bir yapıt olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır.

Let equation image denote the inverse limit of all finite cyclic groups. Let F, G and H be abelian groups with H ≤ G. Let FβH denote the abelian group , where +βis defined by +β = + β — β) for a certain β : F → G linear mod H meaning that β = 0 and β + β — β ∈ H for all a, b in F. In this paper we show that the following hold: The (...) additive group of any nonstandard model ℤ* of the ring ℤ is isomorphic to βH for a certain β : ℤ*+/H → equation image linear mod H. equation image is isomorphic to βH for some β : equation image/H →ℚ linear mod H, though equation image is not the additive group of any model of Th and the exact sequence H → equation image → equation image/H is not splitting. (shrink)