A study on the two concepts of spandrel and fitrah, which appear to have the same meaning but are interpreted differently due to differences in perspective. Both concepts recognise the existence of certain innate faculties in humans and posit that these faculties predispose humans to belief. Spandrel posits that these innate faculties are a by-product of adaptations that enable us to survive in the evolutionary process, whereas fitrah asserts that these faculties are bestowed by God. The impetus for this study (...) is the recognition that human beings are creatures of faith. The prevalence of belief in supernatural powers across all periods, geographical regions and cultures throughout human history, coupled with the existence of common features in all such beliefs despite formal differences, demonstrates the necessity for further research in this area. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ifá Defined Ifá Divination The Process of Divination.

Meaning and essence of philosophy -- On the existence of African philosophy -- Philosophy as wisdom: the Ifa example -- Ontology in Ifa corpus -- Epistemology in Ifa corpus -- Ethics in Ifa corpus -- Ifa and the problem of gerontocracy in Africa -- Ifa and the consequences of literacy -- Ifa and the development crisis in Africa.

While deconstructionism, one of the cardinal features of postmodern philosophy, was not popular until the preceding century in Western intellectual circles, the traditional Yorùbá are not new to the practice. This claim is especially striking once an inquiry into the procedural and epistemic underpinning of Ifá divination is attempted. If this holds, it is not unwise to query: Who are the Yorùbá? What kind of practice in Ifá divination is redolent of deconstructionism? Does deconstructionism among the traditional Yorùbá validate not (...) only the persistence but also the practice of postmodern philosophy among these people? Through the method of analysis and interpretation, this study posits that the Ifá divination process reeks of deconstructionism even before the term and idea became ubiquitous in concurrent academic circles. In addition, this study highlights that deconstruction in Ifá divination is not only for the attainment of new meaning, but also serves as groundwork for the guidance, counsel and resolution of challenges both at personal and social levels. (shrink)

Today there exists the colonial story that the institutional framework within which the African leaders and other elites in power were attempting to solve the problems of development in Africa was European in origin and, therefore, could not douse the enormity of the crisis of development. As part of the colonial story, some people have also blamed the crisis of development in Africa on slavery and colonialism which, in their view, had serious damaging effects on indigenous structures of economic, social, (...) and political organizations. There is also in contemporary Africa a resurgence of the view that African culture has been a stumbling block to development. Those who subscribe to this view are of the opinion that Africans refuse to adopt a rational approach to economic and sociopolitical organization which, to say the least, is in consonance with a complete lack of critical stance in respect of local values. This paper jettisons the cultural dimensions of development, stressing the indispensability of a people’s culture in any conceivable development process. It looks beyond the colonial story and predicates the crisis of development in Africa on the complicity of African leaders and lack of consensual value commitment on the part of the citizens. It shows how Ifá as a complete philosophy has the prospect of harmonizing the state and the citizen towards the realization of genuine and meaningful development in Africa. (shrink)

An essential part of the concept of knowledge is the belief that the basic premises for knowledge must be justified. This means that for a knowledgeclaim to be true, there is a need for its justification. In African epistemology, the justification of beliefs and epistemic claims has mostly been considered from an externalist perspective such that justification appears to be one dimensional. Since epistemic claims can be justified using either the internalist or externalist perspective, this paper aims at showing that (...) there are internalism and externalism in African epistemology and that Ifá divination system embodies both the internalist and externalist basis of justification in African epistemology. Keywords: Internalism, Externalism, African Epistemology, divination, Justification. (shrink)

Careful readings of Lycan (2001) renewed my interest in philosophical semantics. Real Conditionals engaged with actual language. The wide variety of ways English expresses conditionality was acknowledged and addressed. But the paraphrases into first-order logic seemed the wrong way to proceed. Individual words make systematic contributions to truth-conditions. A theory of “only if” should start with “only” and “if” and show how their contributions combine. So, “non-conditional conditionals,” where “then” must be absent, was the place to start a theory of (...) “if”-sentences. (shrink)

Bu çalışma, bireylerin New Age temelli spiritüel şifa yönelimlerini ölçmek amacıyla geliştirilen Spiritüel Şifa Yönelimleri Ölçeği’nin geçerlik ve güvenirlik analizlerini gerçekleştirmeyi amaçlamaktadır. New Age inanç ve uygulamalarının kuramsal ve pratik zeminini oluşturduğu bu yönelimler; öz-spiritüellik, alternatif şifa uygulamaları, parapsikolojik-kozmik inançlar, zihin ötesi deneyimler (örneğin telepati, trans, aile dizimi gibi) ve ritüelistik-duyusal pratikler (tütsü, mum, spiritüel müzikler vb.) gibi farklı içerik alanlarına sahiptir. Spiritüel şifa yönelimi, yapısı gereği bütüncül (holistik) bir nitelik taşımakta; çoğunlukla iç içe geçen, birbirini destekleyen ve aynı iyileşme/iyi (...) hissetme amacına hizmet eden çok çeşitli uygulamaları bünyesinde barındırmaktadır. Bu nedenle, her ne kadar farklı unsurları içerse de, bu yönelimin bütüncül bir yapı içinde ve şifa temelinde ele alınması kavramsal açıdan anlamlı ve yerinde bir yaklaşımdır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, doğrudan New Age inanç sistemine yönelimi ölçmek değil; bu düşünsel arka plandan beslenen ve bazı bireylerin günlük yaşamında yer bulan şifa odaklı spiritüel eğilimleri değerlendirmektir. Bu çalışmada 408 katılımcıdan elde edilen verilere Açımlayıcı Faktör Analizi (AFA) uygulanmış; bu analiz sonucunda ölçeğin 23 maddeden oluşan tek faktörlü bir yapıya sahip olduğu ve tüm maddelerin faktör yüklerinin 0,64 ile 0,91 arasında değiştiği belirlenmiştir. Madde-toplam korelasyonlarının 0,64’ün üzerinde olması ve iç tutarlılık katsayılarının Cronbach's Alpha = 0,97 ve McDonald's Omega = 0,98 düzeyinde bulunması, ölçeğin yüksek güvenirlik düzeyine işaret etmektedir. Bu yapı, 229 kişilik farklı bir örneklem üzerinde gerçekleştirilen Doğrulayıcı Faktör Analizi (DFA) ile test edilmiş; DFA bulguları, CFI = 0,996, TLI = 0,996, RMSEA = 0,012 ve SRMR = 0,060 gibi güçlü uyum indeksleriyle modelin veriyle yüksek düzeyde uyum sağladığını göstermiştir. Elde edilen bulgular, Spiritüel Şifa Yönelimleri Ölçeği’nin geçerli, güvenilir ve tek boyutlu bir ölçme aracı olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. (shrink)

The term conceptual simulation refers to a type of everyday reasoning strategy commonly called “what if” reasoning. It has been suggested in a number of contexts that this type of reasoning plays an important role in scientific discovery; however, little direct evidence exists to support this claim. This article proposes that conceptual simulation is likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty, and may be used to help scientists resolve that uncertainty. We conducted two studies to investigate the relationship (...) between conceptual simulation and informational uncertainty. Study 1 was an in vivo study of expert scientists; the results suggest that scientists do use conceptual simulation in situations of informational uncertainty, and that they use conceptual simulation to make inferences from their data using the analogical reasoning process of alignment by similarity detection. Study 2 experimentally manipulated experts' level of uncertainty and provides further support for the hypothesis that conceptual simulation is more likely to be used in situations of informational uncertainty. Finally, we discuss the relationship between conceptual simulation and other types of reasoning using qualitative mental models. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on the symmetric Sugeno integral introduced by Michel Grabisch, and an asymmetric generalization of it devoted to handling bipolar qualitative information. We extend to this framework the representation results for Sugeno integrals in terms of if–then selection and elimination rules. We also study various preferences orderings induced by bipolar integrals, and relate them to a former approach to handing bipolar qualitative preference information in the setting of possibility theory. We finally propose a counterpart of Grabisch’s symmetric Sugeno (...) integral in a qualitative bipolar scale where consecutive levels are assumed to be equidistant. (shrink)

The argument of this paper hinges on Derrida's relation to Judaism as a religious heritage and/or as an essential experience. If he can be said to ‘appropriate his Jewish roots’ at all, as Colby Dickinson (2011) has recently proposed, this is not because Derrida concurs that all belief in an ultimate reality (‘as such’) must now be understood in merely conditional terms (‘as if’). Rather, it is because Derrida deconstructs the difference between the Jew and the non-Jew, along with the (...) differences between the ‘as if’ and the ‘as such’ and the performative and the constative, in his very demonstration of the impossibility of ‘being-jewish’. Dickinson thus misunderstands the way in which Derrida appropriates Kant's regulative ‘as if’, and thus misrepresents what is at stake in Derrida's ‘faith’ in ‘Jewishness’. What is at stake is what Derrida calls deconstructive responsibility, and it takes the form of a radical fidelity to the principle of reason (to an ‘unconditional theoreticism’). This responsibility, paradoxically, demands and impels the interrogation of critical thinking itself, with its principles, its essences and its identities. Accordingly, Derrida interrupts both the ‘as such’ and the ‘as if’ with the ‘if’ of a dangerous ‘perhaps’. (shrink)

Hans Vaihinger tried to explain how mathematical theories can be useful without being true or even coherent, arguing that mathematicians employ a special kind of fictional or “as if” reasoning that reliably extracts truths from absurdities. Moritz Pasch insisted that Vaihinger was wrong about the incoherence of core mathematical theories, but right about the utility of fictional discourse in mathematics. This essay explores this area of agreement between Pasch and Vaihinger. Pasch’s position raises questions about structuralist interpretations of mathematics.

This article discusses the role that algorithmic thinking and management play in health care and the kind of exclusions this might create. We argue that evidence‐based medicine relies on research and data to create pathways for patient journeys. Coupled with data‐based algorithmic prediction tools in health care, they establish what could be called health care algorithmics—a mode of management of healthcare that produces forms of algorithmic governmentality. Relying on a critical posthumanist perspective, we show how healthcare algorithmics is contingent on (...) the way authority over bodies is produced and how predictive health care algorithms can reproduce inequalities of the worlds from which they are made, centreing possible futures on existing normativities regulated through algorithmic biopower. In contrast to that, we explore posthuman speculative ethics as a way to challenge understanding of ‘ethics’ and ‘care’ in healthcare algorithmics. We suggest some possible avenues towards working speculative ethics into health care while still being critically attentive to algorithmic modes of management and prediction in health care. (shrink)

Trabajo que aborda, desde la perspectiva de la postsecularización, la realidad sociorreligiosa de Canarias, partiendo del estudio de la comunidad de practicantes de la Regla de Osha-Ifá. En esa línea, analiza cómo la visibilidad de los rituales y prácticas de esta religión en la esfera pública suponen un reto para el reconocimiento normativo de la pluralidad ¿Es la postsecularización un paradigma para una aproximación fructífera de las transformaciones sociorreligiosas que se dan en el contexto del archipiélago? En este sentido, se (...) busca reflexionar sobre el papel de las prácticas religiosas ligadas a la sanación y la medicina popular como un ámbito de conflicto entre la población local y estas comunidades. Conflicto del que se hacen eco los Medios de Comunicación tradicionales y las Redes Sociales digitales. Un universo que implica el uso de los recursos locales y se inserta en los debates sobre las relaciones ecológicas, interespecies y la espiritualidad. Se busca estudiar este proceso en constante movimiento, donde modernidad y religiosidad conviven y se nutren. Para ello, tanto la perspectiva procesual, donde la performatividad se convierte en el foco del análisis, como el planteamiento de la postsecularización y su necesidad de un diálogo entre lo teórico y lo empírico, permitirían avanzar en investigaciones capaces de un reconocimiento de otras formas contemporáneas de vivir y pesar lo sagrado y lo espiritual. (shrink)

In the field of African philosophy, there exists the belief among the modernists or professional philosophers that gerontocracy is coterminous with authoritarian traditions in traditional Africa which, supposedly, are responsible for the lack of sustained curiosity to look at issues from different perspectives. Drawing from the Ifá literary corpus as a store-house for Yorùbá philosophy, I argue in this paper that gerontocracy in Africa does not construe the idea that the elderly in Africa are rigid in thoughts or have immutable (...) authority which discourages independence of thought. I conclude that the position of the modernists on the supposed manifestation of authoritarianism in Africa derives its continuing force from a conception of philosophy which gives special overtones to the ideas of individuals as opposed to a collectivistic system of thought and the assumption that the multitude cannot produce philosophy. (shrink)

The systematic comparison of Avicenna’s Ilāhiyyāt of the Šifā' with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, accomplished for the first time in the present volume, provides a detailed account of Avicenna’s reworking of the epistemological profile and contents of the Metaphysics and a comprehensive investigation of this latter’s transmission in pre-Avicennian Greek and Arabic philosophy.

Improbable simulations, or spontaneous thoughts that consist of events that are unlikely to occur in waking life, are presumably common experiences during both periods of waking and dreaming. Yet, despite anecdotes of involuntarily simulating experiences like driving off the road, throwing your cellphone off a bridge, or screaming in a crowded room, the empirical work on this topic has been quite limited. Here we attempt to shed some foundational light on such improbable simulations by exploring their perceived occurrence and relation (...) to sense of agency and intolerance of uncertainty throughout the sleep/wake cycle. Participants (N=100) indicated their perceived frequency and affective valence of improbable simulations related to certain themes (personal, social, and nature) across waking and dreaming states. Although participants perceived experiencing improbable simulations more often while awake, the common themes and valence of improbable simulations did not differ across periods of waking and dreaming - that is, participants were most likely to simulate personal events in both states, and social simulations were the most positive theme in both states. Critically, all themes in waking were positively correlated with intolerance of uncertainty, a characteristic of various anxiety disorders, while this relationship was only observed for personal simulations in dreaming states. However, no such relation was observed for sense of agency for any theme across waking and dreaming states. Our findings thus provide insights on the general nature of improbable simulations across both wake and sleep, as well as their relation to anxiety characteristics. (shrink)

Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their models, but only act as if they do. Whether or not the problem (...) of intractability is solved by recourse to ‘as if’ explanations critically depends, inter alia, on the semantics of the ‘as if’ connective. We examine the five most sensible explications in the literature, and conclude that none of them circumvents the problem. As a result, rational ‘as if’ explanations must obey the minimal computational constraint of tractability. (shrink)

This paper addresses the rift between the teacher’s sense of self as a causal agent and the experience of being in lack of control in the classroom, by way of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ It is argued that understanding agential control in terms of a valuable educational fiction—a practical (ethical) fiction in Vaihinger’s vocabulary—can offer a way of bridging this rift and can help teachers make sense of the tension between their felt need to strive for control and (...) their experience of suffering from lack of control. A fiction, it is argued, is different from an illusion in that fictions can be affirmed without being believed. Unlike illusions, valuable fictions can be recognized as fictions and still retain some of their affective power over us, thereby allowing us to act ‘as if.’ In education, this is helpful as it means that we can make use of valuable fictions without assuming that these have to be protected from the critical gaze of non-believers. In fact, we can openly acknowledge that we rely on fictions as this is part and parcel of being a human being with a limited cognitive ability. (shrink)

This paper is about what we may provisionally call “indicative” conditionals. It aims to describe one use of the word ‘if’, by giving the truth conditions of sentences using ‘if’ in the way in question. Here are some sentences that, on their natural interpretations, illustrate the target use.

The plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ in cognitive science is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Some have argued that intractability is a pseudoproblem, however, because cognizers do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by rational models; rather, they only behave as if they do. Whether or not the problem of intractability is dissolved by this gambit critically depends, inter alia, on the semantics of the ‘as if’ connective. First, this paper examines the five most sensible explications (...) in the literature, and concludes that none of them actually circumvents the problem. Hence, rational ‘as if’ explanations must obey the minimal computational constraint of tractability. Second, this paper describes how rational explanations could satisfy the tractability constraint. Our approach suggests a computationally unproblematic interpretation of ‘as if’ that is compatible with the original conception of rational analysis. (shrink)

En su gran texto dedicado al amor — el capítulo 178 de _Las Iluminaciones de La Meca_—, Ibn ʿArabī comenta siete cualidades (_ṣ__ifāt_) que, según el Corán, suscitan el amor de Dios hacia los seres humanos. A lo largo de nuestro trabajo analizaremos el comentario akbarí y mostraremos cómo la clave para actualizar dichas cualidades consiste en_ hacer del propio ser un regalo de __amor_. O lo que es lo mismo: realizar un movimiento análogo al de Dios en cuanto que (...) El Omni-Compasivo (_al-Ra__ḥ__mān_), Quien a cada instante, de modo incondicional y sin esperar nada a cambio, asiste amorosamente a todas y cada una de Sus criaturas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacrificial "As-If" and Avuncular HilarityLiving by MéconnaissanceWiel Eggen (bio)INTRODUCTION: THE CURIOUS QUESTIONAt my departure for anthropological fieldwork in the Central African Republic (RCA), just after Girard's seminal work La Violence et le sacré had come to upset my structuralist tutors in Paris, I was given a list of penetrating questions to probe in the field, since my research was to be conducted in an area known for its a-cephalous (...) traditions with little or no political or religious centralization.1 The prime critique concerned Girard's apparent return to a bluntly utilitarian vision of myth and religion as the mental framework of society's ritual foundations, in line with Durkheim's functionalist analysis of archaic religion, which was finely reworded in Lord Raglan's recent preface to a cluster of Hocart's articles titled The Life-Giving Myth.2 The approach had come to dominate, as a way of unraveling outdated transcendentalist claims, and also underpinned Freudian and Marxist attacks on religion. After Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had given the lie to any claims of access to transcendent realms, the deontological view of religion as society's functionalist toolbox for orderly [End Page 69] conduct became dominant. But, inspired also by such "masters of suspicion" in human sciences, structuralism had set out even beyond that utilitarian perspective. In a decisive bolt of relativism, it took myths to be a mere mental ordering of daily observations into a logical frame, independent of any ritual or social utility. So, how could Girard once again declare social control via rituals to be religion's true aim, allot a prime role to sacrificial rites, and, most alarmingly, thereby raise the suspicion of aiming to rehabilitate Christian dogmas?I was urged to go and check this theory on sacrifices, scapegoating, social rivalry, and on the shaping of archaic society, its forms of authority, and even sacred kingship. Reflecting on the questions, though, I noted that they overlooked a critical point in Girard's hypothesis, which I read as reverse functionalism. In fact, Girard viewed religion's social function and the issuing cultural regulations as rooted in a radical "lie," or in what he labels méconnaissance. Worded in evolutionary terms, he hypothesized not so much a kind of Darwinian utilitarian adaptation, but rather the alternative of "exaptation," or what has been called an oblique functionalism.After I had learned enough of the Banda language to start my research, though, my schedules were thrown in disarray on my first evening in the village that was to be my starting point. It presented me with a curious quandary. The village of Wademi, some 25 km north of Ippy, in the sparsely populated wooded savannah, was home to two exogamous patrilineal clans that straddle a little river and sit on a dirt road constructed by the colonial power for the collection of cotton. To oversee this two-clan unit a chief had been appointed with the title of makonji, a loanword from the national Sango language. This gentle, friendly man had offered to host me in his own cemented house and organized a welcome for me in the customary way of staging a pleasant storytelling session, punctuated with joyous songs and dances, lasting well into the night. Most of the stories and songs figured Tere, the famous trickster figure, who resembles Ture in neighboring Azande-land, well documented by E. Evans-Pritchard.3 The enjoyable, moonlit session was shot through with outbursts of laughter. It brought the two clans together, including the women and children. Before turning in, the makonji's junior son, who had been assigned my assistant and interpreter, came to convey his father's sincere but puzzling query, whether Tere actually was the same as Jesus Christ. Actually, his French name in Banda phonetics implied so: Christ Jésu = Tre se te jesu; and "Jesu Christ = Jesu Tre."4 Taken by surprise and much in need of some rest after a rather demanding day, I politely asked to let the issue rest till the morning.This question was all the more disturbing, as Christians were wont to call Jesus the Lord, and relate this to chieftaincy... (shrink)

Avicenna’s ground-breaking view of logic as both a tool for other sciences and a science in its own right has already attracted scholars’ attention and has been studied in several different respects. The present paper aims to address a specific issue entailed by considering logic as a science in its own right: that is, assessing the relation in which logic as a science stands to the other sciences, and particularly to metaphysics and psychology. The inquiry will focus on a fundamental, (...) yet tricky, passage of chapter I.4 of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Madḫal, the opening work of his most comprehensive philosophical summa, the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ (Book of Healing). Due to the obscurity of some of Avicenna’s references, chapter I.4 “on the subject-matter of logic” has stimulated numerous attempts at interpretation from the Middle Ages to today. In this paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of the chapter in light of Avicenna’s definition of the epistemological status of science in Burhān II.7. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that any good account of the logical form of thought experiments should contain a conditional. Moreover, there are some reasons to think it should be a counterfactual conditional. First, I defend Williamson’s account of the logical form of thought experiments against a competing account offered by Ichikawa and Jarvis. The two accounts have a similar structure, but Williamson’s posits a counterfactual conditional where Ichikawa and Jarvis’ posits a strict conditional. Williamson’s motivation is related (...) to the problem of deviant realizations, and Ichikawa and Jarvis propose to take care of this problem by enriching the content of the thought experiment in the way we enrich the content of a text of fiction. However, this sort of enrichment is also compatible with Williamson’s account. I then consider a different view, defended by Malmgren, on which a complex possibility claim exhausts our reasoning on typical thought experiments. I argue that this account, leaving out a conditional, fails to represent an important part of our reasoning with thought experiments. This is brought out by reflection on the relationship between thought experiments and similar actual cases and by reflection on the requirement, formulated by Malmgren herself, that our reasoning should have an adequate level of generality. (shrink)

Whilst the ‘local culture’ of experimental natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England drew on ‘resources’ supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Robert Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. My concern in this essay is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I will try to understand how Boyle and Co. used (...) and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, truth and lies, authenticity and performance, we can, I believe, fruitfully complicate our understandings of both the social history of truth, and the social history of our ‘post-truth’ predicament. (shrink)

In this study, the effect of the preposition lām on the meaning of words from the if‘āl form derived from the stem “e-m-n” and its reflection on the Qur’an translations are discussed. Words derived from this stem, which has a widespread use, are used in the Qur’an without prepositions, as well as with the prepositions bā or lām. The words of the chapter if‘āl derived from the root in question are used with the preposition lām in twenty verses. As a (...) matter of fact, the prepositions bā and lām are used together in the 61st verse of the surah al-Tawbah. This is an indication of a difference in meaning between the two uses. Words from the if‘āl chapter used with the preposition lām have been explained by exegetes as “to obey”, “to be subject to”, “to approve”, “to accept”, “to confess”, “to submit”, “to believe in the truth of the word spoken” and “to believe because of what is said”. The words from the if‘āl form used with the preposition lām are generally translated as “to believe/trust” and “faith in” in translations. The word “believe” is used in most places in the sense of “having faith”. This causes the meaning of words used with the preposition lâm to narrow or shift. Since it would be beyond the limits of this article to evaluate all the meâls prepared in Turkish, examples of the translation will be limited to Elmalılı Muhammad Hamdi Yazır’s “Hak Dini Kur’an Dili”; Hayrettin Karaman et al.’s “Kur’an Yolu Meâli” and Ahmet Tekin’s “Kur’ân’ın Anlaşılmasına Doğru Tefsîrî Meal.” The fact that Yazır and Karaman paid attention to this subtlety of meaning mentioned in some examples and translated the verses, while Tekin tried to reflect the difference in meaning between the uses of bā and lām in the translation of the verses, has been effective in our choice. (shrink)

The view that the ordinary conditional ‘if p then q’ has the same meaning as the material conditional of standard truth‐functional logic confronts the more intuitive view that it imports, as part of its meaning, some ground‐consequent relation between antecedent and consequent clauses. Grice's powerful defence of the former position demonstrates that the operation of certain effective general principles of assertive discourse would normally ensure that the truth‐functional conditional carried a non‐conventional consequentialist implication. A defence of the contrary view rests (...) on the fact that ‘p, so q’, which incontestably carries a consequentialist implication as part of its meaning, differs from ‘if p then q’ only in that the former conjoins asserted, the latter unasserted, propositions. There is plenty of occasion for the use of both ‘so’ and ‘if’. The balance of argument favours the consequentialist position. (shrink)

Eva Schaper; XII—The Kantian “As-If” and its Relevance for Aesthetics, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 219–234.

This article takes its inspiration from Jacques Derrida to consider how deconstructionism can be done inadvertently. This possibility is underscored when one considers how a very significant phrase in Ifá texts— “A díá fún...” has been construed away from its transliteration as “Ifá divination was performed for...” by each of Oluwole and Karenga. Oluwole justifies her “deconstruction” on the grounds that such transliteration does not capture the philosophic cogs gravid within Ifá verses. Karenga, through his Kawaida methodology, “improvises” to suit (...) the ethical inferences he seeks to deduce out of the corpus. On this showing, this research infers that each of these scholars have engaged in a reflective activity that passes, on Derrida’s reading, as deconstruction, unbeknownst to them. Would they admit that their intellectual drudgeries amount to postmodern philosophy? This is the primary research question that this disquisition interrogates. (shrink)

This paper addresses the project of philosophical autobiography, using two different perspectives. On the one hand, the societal, economic, and family contexts of William James are addressed, and connected a modern academic context of business ethics research, marketing and purchasing decision making, and the continuing financial crisis. The concepts of “stream of consciousness” and “acting as-if” are connected to recent literature on William James. On the other hand, the significance of family context, and the possible connection between the William James (...) family and the author, is addressed through shared family narratives interspersed throughout the paper. (shrink)

Zeynelabidin bin Halil’s treatise “_Şifa el-fuad_” (The Heart’s Cure) was composed in 1627 in Ottoman Turkish. It reflects the medical knowledge circulating among the ruling class of the Ottoman Empire at that time. A copy of the manuscript is currently preserved in the collection of the Oriental Department at the Bulgarian National Library St. St. Cyril and Methodius (Sofia, Bulgaria). The dating of the copy is based on paleographic data (type of paper, watermarks, writing style), suggesting it was completed in (...) the first half of the eighteenth century. The treatise contains various recommendations for maintaining and preserving the physical health, along with numerous herbal and mineral remedies for facilitating recovery from illness. It also discusses beneficial foods. The manuscript consists of a brief introduction, 17 chapters, and a conclusion. This paper focuses on the fourteenth chapter, which explores the properties of precious stones and their purported benefits for the human body. The section provides remedies derived from gemstones for alleviating symptoms or health conditions, some of which are intertwined with superstitions. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relationship between neutralization and “as if” consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular, from its convergence in intuitions concerning phantasy. Starting from a critique of a line of interpretation that, in its attempt to approach phenomenologically to an “aesthetic consciousness”, homologates the neutrality modification with the Epoché, the article seeks to expose the methodological function that the modalization of belief fulfills in the project of Ideas I, as well as highlighting the growing importance that phantasy (...) and the “as if” consciousness will acquire in the subsequent development of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Nine manuscripts preserving Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ share a set of identical marginal glosses to the section of Logic. One of these manuscripts reports, at the end of each of the glosses, a certificate of transmission ascribing them to the theologian and philosopher Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606H/1210), which provides some material evidence of the existence of a flourishing exegetical activity on the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ during the twelfth-thirteenth century, in spite of the apparent lack of commentaries on the text in that (...) period. The present paper provides an edition of the so far unknown ḥāšiyāt to Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ by al-Rāzī, with an attempt at reconstructing their tradition and contextualizing them within al-Rāzī’s exegetical and teaching activity. (shrink)

Este artigo está inserido na área de concentração de educação intercultural, etnofilosofia e estudos de gênero, com ênfase nas pressuposições teóricas pós-identitárias advindas com os estudos queer. Assim, o presente artigo tem como objetivo geral promover um estudo histórico-descritivo sobre a efabulação e o enclausuramento do espírito “queer” na comunidade religiosa yorùbá em territorialidades nigerianas, bem como, se propõem a revistar as representações sociais dos modelos heteronormativos de depredação, de submissão e de abjeção de indivíduos de orientação sexual ou de (...) identidade sexual não heterossexual nas práticas e iniciações religiosas de sacerdócio do Ifá no Brasil. A análise que se segue busca demonstrar, através de fragmentos históricos, como se deu a construção do moralismo e da discriminação LGBTfóbica pelo cristianismo e pelo islão nas comunidades étnicas de matriz ancestral yorùbá em tempos de colonização e pós-colonização na Nigéria. Além da revisão de literatura, trabalhamos com o método de abordagem de pesquisa qualitativa sobre o DAFA - análise de documentos e análise de discursos, complementando estes com alguns nuances da pesquisa etnográfica de natureza virtual. A cultura e a matriz ancestral africana yorùbá é algo muito distante, apesar de estar, ao mesmo tempo, tão próxima, dentro da cultura religiosa afrodescendente brasileira. Muito se tem sido debatido, ressignificado, reconstruído e analisado dentro do Brasil sobre a realidade e a história da cultura africana e afrodescendente. Todavia, este artigo demonstra a possibilidade de reinventarmos o que ainda não foi pensado, de quebrarmos as nossas próprias barreiras e de nos aproximarmos, nós afrodescendentes, de nossas origens, de nossa cultura griot, de nossas pretagogias, de nossos Arché, de nosso Àşé, ou seja, de toda uma cosmovisão que nos separam do espírito da pureza, e respectivamente, que nos distanciam de Eèlà. (shrink)