Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our (...) relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective. (shrink)

It has generally been assumed that Anselm was the originator of the ontological argument. Notwithstanding the fact that it has received much criticism, Malcolm defends its so-called second version. In this paper we shall examine some features of ibn Sina’s notion of the Necessary Existent which show that prior to Anselm, ibn Sina formulated a version of this argument which corresponds in some senses to Malcolm’s version, and that a close examination of ibn Sina’s peculiar version enables us to criticize (...) Malcolm’s version as it has not been done heretofore. (shrink)

This book explores, through their Neoplatonism, the philosophies of four cultures: North African, Moorish Spanish, Greek, and Islamic. Originating in North Africa, Neoplatonism became the framework for philosophical reflection in these diverse cultural settings. Neoplatonic themes like emanationism are found in all of them, despite the difficulty of reconciling such philosophical ideas with religious orthodoxy. The wide appeal of Neoplatonism, perhaps, is due to its development of the mystical dimension of Platonism. From this perspective, this volume presents eternally recurring Neoplatonic (...) themes like the monistic vision of the entire universe descending from a single principle, and a potentiality of a mystical ascent— a return to the origin. In addition, this book investigates the questions of self knowledge, the relation between the universal and the particular soul, and the transformation of spiritual substance into bodily substance in these cultures. These studies offer a rich and varied perspective of these cultures themselves, revealing the spirit of each in its adaptation to Neoplatonism. (shrink)

This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged . Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once . Moreover, mind attribution to an individual varied with the perception that the individual was a group member. Participants attributed more mind to an individual that appeared distinct or (...) distant from other group members than to an individual that was perceived to be similar or proximal to a cohesive group . This effect occurred for both human and nonhuman targets, and was driven by the perception of the target as an entitative group member rather than by the knowledge that the target was an entitative group member. (shrink)

We compare the predictions of two important proposals made by De Neys to findings in the anchoring effect literature. Evidence for an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic supports his proposal that system 1 and system 2 are non-exclusive. The relationship between psychophysical noise and anchoring effects, however, challenges his proposal that epistemic uncertainty determines the involvement of system 2 corrective processes in judgment.

Psychological ownership may be judged differently or similarly for self and others. Potential differences in how ownership is evaluated by actors and observers raise important questions about the concept of ownership (what is Mine, Ours, and Theirs) and how to resolve conflicting perceptions.

Although the beliefs that Sufis have introduced and promoted in the Islamic world seem to have had far-reaching influence on the way Muslims think and act, neither theorizing nor empirical research in the psychological literature has as yet focused on such beliefs and their impact on Islamic societies. Furthermore, although intellectual controversies about the functionality of Sufi beliefs abound, there is no instrument to address the existing issues empirically. The purpose of the three studies presented here is to identify major (...) domains of Sufi belief, to describe the development and factor structure of a scale used to assess them, and to test the internal consistency, temporal stability, and the convergent validity of this scale's scores in three samples of Iranian Shi'ite university students. The combined findings from the three studies reported here provide initial evidence that the Sufi Beliefs Scale is reliable, valid, and can be used in further studies. (shrink)

Religiosity has been linked with prosocial behavior and a preference for religious ingroups over outgroups. Yet, there are important differences in religious people’s beliefs, values, and practices. Fundamental and quest orientation toward religion may differentially predict intergroup bias in prosociality. Also, individualizing and binding moral foundations may have diverse effects on ingroup and outgroup bias in helping, as moral foundations theory suggests that individualizing and binding foundations differ in how much they focus on ingroup and outgroup moral considerations. In this (...) study, we examined the relationship between religious dimensions, moral foundations, prosocial behavior, and intergroup bias in helping. We found evidence for the effect of individualizing foundations, religious fundamentalism, and quest religion above and beyond demographics and other religious dimensions on intergroup bias in helping. Furthermore, there were independent positive effects of individualizing foundations, religious activity, and age, and independent negative effects of female gender and religious fundamentalism on prosocial behavior. This study provides a more nuanced understanding of the relations between religion, prosociality, and moral intuitions in a Muslim context. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyse the concept of atmosphere in the philosophical system of Hermann Schmitz, the founder of New Phenomenology, as a fundamental concept for understanding his philosophical system; he uses this concept to transcend the duality of subject-object as well as to show the hidden realities and the foundations of lived experience of reality, by looking at how phenomenological analysis is revealed. Beside being used in sciences such as physics, meteorology, and psychology, the term also refers to the (...) atmosphere as a concrete phenomenon; it is also an evidence of his understanding the phenomenology and reformulating it. This paper aims to show the connection between the concept of the felt-body (Leib), as the theoretical core of his work, and space and emotion as other key concepts in his philosophical system, by using the structural analysis of the concept and the phenomen of atmosphere.The result of the analysis in this paper shows the special place of the concept of atmosphere in Schmitz's philosophical system and its prominent role in establishing his method of New Phenomenology. (shrink)

The concept of space has always been a fundamental theme and issue since the beginning of philosophy and abstract thinking in ancient Greece, and has been fundamentally change due to cultural-historical changes of spatiality throughout the history of knowledge. At the beginning of philosophy, there was a metaphysical question about the beginning or the first cause of all things, to which the concept of space, as a fundamental concept, is the answer. The main lines of philosophical discourse in ancient Greece, (...) which flowed in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, were conceived in the context of Euclid's geometry and Ptolemy's worldview. In the modern era, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant tried to conceptually influence space with Copernican rotation and Newtonian physics. Finally, spatial imagery is challenged by the application of physiological problems through non-Euclidean geometry, and especially through phenomenology. Hence, the opening of phenomenological concepts in philosophy and other disciplines that focus on the concept of space could be of interest to researchers in the foundations of phenomenology. Therefore, the aspect of effort in this article is the descriptive analytical development of the opinions of three expert phenomenologists on space. These three philosophers base their theories on a critique of the way of speaking on space. This approach taken by Descartes and Newton has been completed in recent times. In this article, we discuss the philosophical foundations of these philosophers. We discuss the space with each of these three philosophers in terms of a key concept in their philosophical system. Therefore, for Cassirer, we discuss the concept of symbolic spaces, for Heidegger, the concept of being-in-the-world, and for Schmitz, the concept of surfaceless space and felt-bodily space. (shrink)