Following the eclectic itineraries of ‘Near East’ expert, R. M. Graves, this article tells a story of an ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) of small and large legal decisions. Without reducing the human catastrophe of the event of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian forced exodus), it engages with it as a legal event that crosses (in this story at least) from Cairo to Jerusalem, from the League of Nations’ era (1920–1946) to the United Nations’ era (1945–), from the governance of labour and (...) gender, to labour partition, and finally to the governance of municipalities through law and expertise. Graves’ relationship to both Cairo and Jerusalem was materialized through different forms of affective legal governance. Graves, who in his own dichotomous words was ‘neither a Zionist nor an anti-Semite’, managed Jerusalem across national lines in the wake of the UN Partition Plan (1947), and as the old empire was withdrawing right before Jerusalem itself became a site of the catastrophe—right before the Nakba. (shrink)

In the Sophist, Plato presents the possibility of the separation of things in relation to each other based on the communion (koinōnia) of logos. In this study, I discuss the linguistic communion revealed in the dialogue by illuminating its three fundamental aspects: (1) Articulation of letters in names as communion on the syntactic level, (2) Predication of names in logoi as communion on the semantic level, (3) Homologoi of logoi as the ultimate communion of language. I thus conclude that these (...) three linguistic aspects are interdependent. (shrink)

_Dialogues for the Future_ provides a sneak peek at the long philosophic and intellectual journey of the renowned Arab scholar Taha Abderrahmane. This English translation allows English-speaking readers to engage with the open canvas of dialogue Taha has resiliently initiated.

Dialogues for the Future provides a sneak peek at the long philosophic journey of the renowned Arab scholar Taha Abderrahmane. The author looks at different thorny issues such as traditions, philosophy, ethics, globalization, and logic through a local prism that is not directedly tainted by the Western epistemic and ontological worldview. While seemingly addressing audiences with a background in the philosophy of language and Islamic philosophy, Taha's intellectual project tackles many questions that wider readerships might have about the (...) Muslims' and Arabs' contribution to knowledge in the past and present. The translator's introduction "on Dialogue, Ethics and Traditions" contextualizes Taha's book within the plethora of his academic work, allowing English-speaking readers to engage with the open canvas of dialogue Taha has resiliently initiated. (shrink)

The current study investigates Arabic orientational metaphors in Modern Standard Arabic. Specifically, it is a corpus-based study that tries to retrieve conceptual orientational metaphors ofup-down, front-back, right-left, andcentral-peripheralspatial orientation. The study assumes that every orientation can be described using a set of different lexemes, and these lexemes express different linguistic orientational metaphors with different levels of usage frequency. It is hypothesized that studying the relationships between these lexemes, their etymologies, and frequency can provide a detailed, integrative account of metaphorical aspects (...) and conceptual systems related to each spatial orientation. A bottom-up methodology to identify metaphorical usages of spatial lexemes was applied to theStanford Arabic Corpus. The results list the spatial linguistic metaphors comprising conceptual metaphors and show for each orientation that mapping orientations onto conceptual metaphors is a complicated process, which integrates linguistic and cognitive levels. The cognitive-perceptual and cultural implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Les Sphériques ont été écrites par Ménélaos sous la forme d’un traité d’apparence purement mathématique. Cependant, la matière qui y est développée dans les deuxième et troisième livres est étroitement liée à des problèmes rencontrés en astronomie: calcul des coordonnées équatoriales du Soleil, établissement de tables d’ascensions, étude du mouvement du Soleil dans la sphère oblique, levers simultanés. Ce lien, qui demeure implicite dans le texte, a été mis en évidence par deux mathématiciens et astronomes arabo-musulmans, qui ont exposé la (...) signification astronomique de certains théorèmes des Sphériques. Nous présenterons, commenterons et complèterons cette explicitation en classant les théorèmes concernés en trois groupes: sens de variation de certaines grandeurs sur la sphère, propositions de trigonométrie sphérique et applications, sens de variation de rapports entre certaines grandeurs sur la sphère. The Spherics were written by Menelaos in the form of a purely mathematical treatise. However, the material developed in the second and third book is closely linked to problems met in astronomy: computation of equatorial coordinates of the Sun, setting up of rising-time tables, study of the motion of the Sun in the sphaera obliqua, simultaneous risings. This link, which remains implicit in the text, was clearly displayed by two arabo-islamic mathematicians and astronomers, who expounded the astronomical meaning of some theorems of the Spherics. We describe, comment and complement their explanations, by classifying the implications of the theorems in three groups: direction of variation of some quantities on the sphere, spherical trigonometry and applications, direction of variation of ratios of some quantities on the sphere. (shrink)

The semiotic model that disregards the normative context represented by the protagonist examines how we can distinguish the three conceptions of heroism, namely hero, semi-hero, and anti-hero. What are the methodological criteria whereby we can follow the protagonist in the text from beginning to end? To answer them, this article tries to present a model made up of five stages/criteria which constitute a semiotic model by means of which the connection to heroism can be determined. These are: (1) motivation, (2) (...) will, (3) ability, (4) execution, and (5) outcome. These stages can be logically classified into three categories: 1) Pre-action (the first three stages), 2) Action (the fourth stage), 3) Post-action (the fifth stage). The model proposed here suits all types of narrative and drama and all performance and film production arts. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 435-455.

Executive functions measures of 27 asthmatic children, with general learning difficulties, were tested by using the Wisconsin card sorting test (WCST), and were compared to the performances of 30 non-asthmatic children with general learning difficulties. The results revealed that the asthmatic group has poor performance through all the WCST psychometric parameters and especially the perseverative errors one. The results were discussed in light of the postulation that poor executive functions could be associated with the learning difficulties of asthmatic children. Neurophysiological (...) framework has been suggested to explain the etiology of poor executive functions among children with moderate into severe asthma. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 305-324.

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic thought, by giving (...) special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic thought, by giving (...) special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

On important Islamic religious concepts and terminologies.

Against Nihilism compares the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on key topics such as criminality, Christianity and the figure of the Outsider to reveal the urgency and contemporary resonance of their shared struggle against nihilism.

The subject of the study is the consideration of modern trends in the study of fine art, in particular Russian portrait and narrative painting of the beginning of the XXI century. The object is scientific works related to various fields of the humanities, namely: art history, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, etc. Using their material, it is possible to show not only the difference in approaches to understanding the essence and role of the image of a modern person in the (...) art process, but also to demonstrate the specifics of the artistic interpretation of this figurative system in the context of art criticism, cultural and philosophical issues. Such a study allows us to systematize existing ideas about the peculiarities of the development of anthropological subjects in the mainstream of contemporary fine art in modern Russia, to identify the main directions. The main methodological basis of the study was a systematic approach that allowed us to consider contemporary Russian art as a single system. This helped to compare the approaches of modern researchers analyzing the place and role of the human image in it. Through the postmodern paradigm of perception and interpretation of anthropological topics, to identify the essential features of the ideas of Russian scientists. Methods of art historical analysis were also used. The starting point of the research is that at the moment in Russian science there is a body of art history and cultural studies devoted to the development of contemporary art in the country. However, there are no works summarizing the existing experience of scientists and defining the main directions of scientific thought. In light of this, the scientific novelty of the article lies in expanding the understanding of the methodological apparatus necessary for the analysis of the anthropological trend in the visual arts of our time, which is a promising path for future research in this area. The most demanded conceptual philosophical and historical-cultural foundations for the analysis and solution of practical problems in the field of contemporary art in relation to the representation of the human image are identified. Empirical research material has been collected and analyzed. (shrink)

Temporal epistemic logics are known, from results of Halpern and Vardi, to have a wide range of complexities of the satisfiability problem: from PSPACE, through non-elementary, to highly undecidable. These complexities depend on the choice of some key parameters specifying, inter alia, possible interactions between time and knowledge, such as synchrony and agents' abilities for learning and recall. In this work we develop practically implementable tableau-based decision procedures for deciding satisfiability in single-agent synchronous temporal-epistemic logics with interactions between time and (...) knowledge. We discuss some complications that occur, even in the single-agent case, when interactions between time and knowledge are assumed and show how the method of incremental tableaux can be adapted to work in EXPSPACE, respectively 2EXPTIME, for these logics, thereby also matching the upper bounds obtained for them by Halpern and Vardi. (shrink)

ObjectiveWe aimed to provide an overview of the psychological status and behavioral consequences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in Libya.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted among the Libyan population through May and June 2020 in more than 20 cities. The survey comprised basic demographic data of the participants and anxiety symptoms measured using the seven-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale with ≥15 as the cut-off score for clinically significant anxiety symptoms. Additionally, a survey regarding the lockdown effect was administered, which (...) consisted of several parts, to measure the lockdown status.ResultsA total of 8084 responses were recorded, of which, 5090 were women and 2994 were men. The mean age for study participants was 27.2 years. Among the participants, 1145 reached the cut-off score to detect anxiety symptoms; however, of the study variables, only five were predictors of clinically significant anxiety: age, gender, marital status, work status, being a financial supporter for the family, and being infected with COVID-19. Women had 1.19 times higher odds to exhibit anxiety symptoms than men. Increasing age was significantly associated with reduced likelihood of exhibiting anxiety symptoms, whereas being married was significantly associated with higher likelihood of anxiety symptoms, compared to not being married. Being suspended from work was associated with an increase in the likelihood of anxiety symptoms. However, we found that being infected with COVID-19 was associated with a 9.59 times higher risk of exhibiting severe anxiety symptoms. Among the study participants, 1451 reported a physical and/or verbal abuse episode from family members, 958 reported abuse outside the family, and 641 reported abuse from enforcers, during the lockdown.ConclusionOur study provided an overview of the psychological and behavioral status, among those who resided in Libya during the civil war and COVID-19 pandemic. The study demonstrates a concerningly high level of clinically significant anxiety during lockdown among the Libyan population during Libya’s lockdown period. (shrink)

This paper argues that the principles of spiritual traditions provide normative ‘standards of goodness’ within which practitioners evaluate meaningful work. Our comparative study of practitioners in the Buddhist and Quaker traditions provide a fine-grained analysis to illuminate, that meaningfulness is deeply connected to particular tradition-specific philosophical and theological ideas. In the Buddhist tradition, meaningfulness is temporal and rooted in Buddhist principles of non-attachment, impermanence and depending-arising, whereas in the Quaker tradition, the Quaker testimonies and theological ideas frame meaningfulness as eternal. (...) Surprisingly, we find that when faced with unethical choices and clashes between organizational normativity and spiritual normativity, Buddhist practitioners acknowledge the temporal character of meaningfulness and compromise their moral values, whereas in contrast, Quaker practitioners morally disengage from meaningless work. Our study highlights how normative commitments in different spiritual traditions can influence different levels of adaptability in finding work meaningful and stresses the central importance of normative commitments in meaningful work. Our study concludes with practical implications and future pathways for inter-disciplinary research. (shrink)

As a transitional economy, Vietnam has undergone tremendous changes over recent decades within a ‘fusion’ context that blends both traditional and modern values from its complex history. However, few studies have explored how contemporary issues in the context of Vietnam have brought both obstacles and skillful initiatives to managerial approaches to doing business. We draw on the concepts of social trust and institutional theory to explore how informal institutions such as religious forces can contribute to the development of individual trust (...) and whether individuals are willing to extend trust beyond familial networks. We contribute to the notion of a moral conception of trust by exploring how Buddhism in particular has initiated distinctive managerial approaches in the context of Vietnam, in response to dilemmas of social trust. Our findings highlight that as an informal institution, engaged Buddhism yields significant impact on the formation of social trust. We carried out in-depth interviews in Vietnam with 33 organizational leaders who were Buddhist practitioners, using thematic analysis to elucidate our findings and arguments. The study reveals how the incorporation of Buddhist principles has fostered context-sensitive, non-extreme, and reflexive managerial approaches to enhance morality as a response to social trust issues. (shrink)

In this paper we consider distributive modal logic, a setting in which we may add modalities, such as classical types of modalities as well as weak forms of negation, to the fragment of classical propositional logic given by conjunction, disjunction, true, and false. For these logics we define both algebraic semantics, in the form of distributive modal algebras, and relational semantics, in the form of ordered Kripke structures. The main contributions of this paper lie in extending the notion of Sahlqvist (...) axioms to our generalized setting and proving both a correspondence and a canonicity result for distributive modal logics axiomatized by Sahlqvist axioms. Our proof of the correspondence result relies on a reduction to the classical case, but our canonicity proof departs from the traditional style and uses the newly extended algebraic theory of canonical extensions. (shrink)

This study explores the role of an informal institution—engaged Buddhism—in leadership responses to issues of bribery at the firm level in the context of Vietnam. In-depth interviews were carried out in Vietnam with 26 organizational leaders who were Buddhist practitioners. The leaders expressed a Buddhist-enacted utilitarian approach based on three context-associated mechanisms: karmic consequences, community and social well-being, and total detachment. These mechanisms manifest in leadership approaches based on the Middle Way, Skillful Means, and Emptiness. They are involved in forming (...) leaders’ perceptions about bribery issues and their enacting of contextual approaches to balance organizational means and ends in tackling ethical issues associated with bribery. The study also sheds light on moral struggles involved in the process of shaping and enacting a Buddhist-enacted utilitarian approach. (shrink)

In late March of 2020, a new hashtag, #FilmYourHospital, made its first appearance on social media. The hashtag encouraged people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos of empty hospitals to help “prove” that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax. Using techniques from Social Network Analysis, this case study examines how this conspiracy theory propagated on Twitter and whether the hashtag virality was aided by the use of automation or coordination among Twitter users. We found that while (...) much of the content came from users with limited reach, the oxygen that fueled this conspiracy in its early days came from a handful of prominent conservative politicians and far right political activists on Twitter. These power users used this hashtag to build awareness about the campaign and to encourage their followers to break quarantine and film what is happening at their local hospitals. After the initial boost by a few prominent accounts, the campaign was mostly sustained by pro-Trump accounts, followed by a secondary wave of propagation outside the U.S. The rise of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy from a single tweet demonstrates the ongoing challenge of addressing false, viral information during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the spread of misinformation can be potentially mitigated by fact-checking and directing people to credible sources of information from public health agencies, false and misleading claims that are driven by politics and supported by strong convictions and not science are much harder to root out. (shrink)

Algebraic work [9] shows that the deep theory of possible world semantics is available in the more general setting of substructural logics, at least in an algebraic guise. The question is whether it is also available in a relational form.This article seeks to set the stage for answering this question. Guided by the algebraic theory, but purely relationally we introduce a new type of frames. These structures generalize Kripke structures but are two-sorted, containing both worlds and co-worlds. These latter points (...) may be viewed as modelling irreducible increases in information where worlds model irreducible decreases in information. Based on these structures, a purely model theoretic and uniform account of completeness for the implication-fusion fragment of various substructural logics is given. Completeness is obtained via a generalization of the standard canonical model construction in combination with correspondence results. (shrink)