Background: Arthritis is very common but is not well understood. Actually, “arthritis” is not a single disease; it is an informal way of referring to joint pain or joint disease. There are more than 100 different types of arthritis and related conditions. People of all ages, sexes and races can and do have arthritis, and it is the leading cause of disability in America. More than 50 million adults and 300,000 children have some type of arthritis. It is most common (...) among women and occurs more frequently as people get older. Common arthritis joint symptoms include swelling, pain, stiffness and decreased range of motion. Symptoms may come and go. They can be mild, moderate or severe. They may stay about the same for years, but may progress or get worse over time. Severe arthritis can result in chronic pain, inability to do daily activities and make it difficult to walk or climb stairs. Arthritis can cause permanent joint changes. These changes may be visible, such as knobby finger joints, but often the damage can only be seen on X-ray. Some types of arthritis also affect the heart, eyes, lungs, kidneys and skin as well as the joints. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Orthopedist in diagnosing Arthritis disease through its symptoms such as: pain on pressure in a joint , Inflammation indicated by joint swelling, Stiffness especially in the morning , Loss of flexibility of joint, Limited, joint movement, Deformity of the joints , Weight loss and fatigue , Non-specific fever and Crepitus. The proposed expert system presents an overview about Arthritis disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed Arthritis disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by Orthopedics students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for Orthopedist, patients with arthritis and newly graduated Orthopedics students. (shrink)

Background: Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home. Depression affects an estimated one in 15 adults (6.7%) in any given (...) year. And one in six people (16.6%) will experience depression at some time in their life. Depression can strike at any time, but on average, first appears during the late teens to mid-20s. Women are more likely than men to experience depression. Some studies show that one-third of women will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetime. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Psychologist in diagnosing depression disease through its symptoms such as: a loss of energy, a change in appetite, sleeping more or less, anxiety, reduced concentration, indecisiveness, restlessness, feelings of worthlessness, guilt or hopelessness and thoughts of self-harm or suicide. The proposed expert system presents an overview about depression disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed depression disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by psychologist students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for psychologist, patients with depression and newly graduated psychologist. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Kaʿbī al-Balkhī, a leading Muʿtazilī who flourished at the end of the Baghdādī school and at the beginning of the scholastic phase of Muʿtazilī history.

Özİrâde, Kelâm’da, ilimden sonra üzerinde en çok tartışılan konulardan biridir. İrâdenin mâhiyeti hakkında, Mu‘tezilî bilgin Ebû’l-Kāsım el-Kâ‘bî el-Belhî’nin görüşleri dikkate şayandır. Kâ‘bî, oluşturduğu epistemolojik sistemde, irâdeye alışılagelenden farklı bir anlam alanı açmaya çalışmaktadır. Kâ‘bî’ye göre irâde, fiilî bir sıfattır. Ona göre Allah’ın irâdesi hâdistir. İrâde, Tanrı hakkında kullanıldığında, Tevhîd ve tenzih kaygısına; insan hakkında kullanıldığında ise özgürlük, imtihan ve sorumluluk kaygısına dayalı bir şekilde ele alınmaktadır. Kâ‘bî, bu iki kullanım arasında dikkatli ve kesin bir ayrım yaratmaya özen göstermektedir. O, irâde (...) hakkındaki görüşleriyle, Mu‘tezilî düşünce içinde de farklılaşmıştır. Kâ‘bî’nin Nazzâm’ın görüşleriyle uyum gösteren irâde anlayışı, insana otonomi sağlaması açısından önemlidir. Kâ‘bî’ye göre, Allah li-zâtihî mürîd olmadığı gibi O’nun irâdesi, hakîkî anlamda da kullanılmamaktadır. Ona göre irâde, Allah ve insan arasında ortak bir lafız olmasına rağmen, Allah mecazî anlamda mürîddir. Kâ’bî, Allah açısından İlâhî irâdeyi yaratma (tekvîn) insan açısından ise Allah’ın emretmesi olarak ele alır. Bu bağlamda onun epistemolojisinde irâde, Allah-âlem ilişkisine güçlü bir zemin oluşturmaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Kelâm, Mu‘tezile, İlâhî İrâde, Ebû’l-Kāsım el-Belhî, el-Kâ‘bî, Nazzâm, Sıfatlar, Bağdat Mu‘tezilesiTHE WİLL ACCORDİNG TO ABŪ L-QĀSİM AL-KAʿBĪ AL-BALKHĪ AbstractAfter the problem of divine knowledge (‘ılm), divine will/volition (irāda) is one of the most debated issues in Kalām. In regard of divine will and volition Mu’tazilī scholar Abū al-Qāsim al-Ka’bī al-Balkhī’s opinions are of distinctive value. In his epistemology, al-Ka’bī tries to comprehend it in quite an unusual manner. For al-Ka’bī divine will (irāda) is one of the attributes of act. This means that divine will is an accident (hâdis). The term volition when used in relation to God it shall carry the apprehension of divine unity (tawhīd) and transcendence (tenzīh). Whereas in relation to man will implies freedom of action and responsibility of consequences thereby. al-Ka’bī put serious emphasis in differentiating meaning of volition in realm of man and of transcendence. Showing profound similarities with his prior Mu’tazilī al-Nazzam, al-Ka’bī undertakes the problem of divine volition in such a way that does not supersede both, realm of man and of transcendence. Showing similarities with the opinions of his prior Mu’tazilī al-Nazzām, his understanding on will is significant for attributing full authority to man. According to al-Ka’bī, transcendental being (Allah) does not have volition per se (لا هو مريد لذاته). His volition is not used in literal meaning of the word either. He believes that although volition is a common term between God and man, God wills (مرید) in truly metaphorical and figurative sense. al-Ka’bī states that the volition form God’s position is His creation (takwīn) whereas in regard of man, divine volition shall be understood as Allah’s orders. Within this context, term of volition in al-Ka’bī’s epistemology carries the ground for relational foundations of Allah and His creation.Keywords: Divine Will, Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī, al-Kaʿbī, God's Attributes, Mu‘tazila, Baghdādī School. (shrink)

Second-order uncertainty, also known as model uncertainty and Knightian uncertainty, arises when decision-makers can (partly) model the parameters of their decision problems. It is widely believed that subjective probability, and more generally Bayesian theory, are ill-suited to represent a number of interesting second-order uncertainty features, especially “ignorance” and “ambiguity”. This failure is sometimes taken as an argument for the rejection of the whole Bayesian approach, triggering a Bayes vs anti-Bayes debate which is in many ways analogous to what the classical (...) vs non-classical debate used to be in logic. This paper attempts to unfold this analogy and suggests that the development of non-standard logics offers very useful lessons on the contextualisation of justified norms of rationality. By putting those lessons to work I will flesh out an epistemological framework suitable for extending the expressive power of standard Bayesian norms of rationality to second- order uncertainty in a way which is both formally and foundationally conservative. Contents. (shrink)

What is difficult to imagine is also surprising to perceive. This indicates that active visual imagery is an integral part of active visual perception. Erroneous mental transformations provide clues to prior assumptions in visual imagery, just as visual illusions provide clues to perceptual assumptions. Visual imagery and perception share generic assumptions about invariants in images of rigid objects.

We argue in favour of identifying one aspect of rational choice with the tendency to conform to the choice you expect another like-minded, but non-communicating, agent to make and study this idea in the very basic case where the choice is from a non-empty subset K of 2 A and no further structure or knowledge of A is assumed.

A personalized recommender system is broadly accepted as a helpful tool to handle the information overload issue while recommending a related piece of information. This work proposes a hybrid personalized recommender system based on affinity propagation, namely, APHPRS. Affinity propagation is a semisupervised machine learning algorithm used to cluster items based on similarities among them. In our approach, we first calculate the cluster quality and density and then combine their outputs to generate a new ranking score among clusters for the (...) personalized recommendation. In the first phase, user preferences are collected and normalized as items rating matrix. This generated matrix is then clustered offline using affinity propagation and kept in a database for future recommendations. In the second phase, online recommendations are generated by applying the offline model. Negative Euclidian similarity and the quality of clusters are used together to select the best clusters for recommendations. The proposed APHPRS system alleviates problems such as sparsity and cold-start problems. The use of affinity propagation and the hybrid recommendation technique used in the proposed approach helps in improving results against sparsity. Experiments reveal that the proposed APHPRS performs better than most of the existing recommender systems. (shrink)

Data mining’s primary clustering method has several uses, including gene analysis. A set of unlabeled data is divided into clusters using data features in a clustering study, which is an unsupervised learning problem. Data in a cluster are more comparable to one another than to those in other groups. However, the number of clusters has a direct impact on how well the K-means algorithm performs. In order to find the best solutions for these real-world optimization issues, it is necessary to (...) use techniques that properly explore the search spaces. In this research, an enhancement of K-means clustering is proposed by applying an equilibrium optimization approach. The suggested approach adjusts the number of clusters while simultaneously choosing the best attributes to find the optimal answer. The findings establish the usefulness of the suggested method in comparison to existing algorithms in terms of intra-cluster distances and Rand index based on five datasets. Through the results shown and a comparison of the proposed method with the rest of the traditional methods, it was found that the proposal is better in terms of the internal dimension of the elements within the same cluster, as well as the Rand index. In conclusion, the suggested technique can be successfully employed for data clustering and can offer significant support. (shrink)

Predicting the future state of a system has always been a natural motivation for science and practical applications. Such a topic, beyond its obvious technical and societal relevance, is also interesting from a conceptual point of view. This owes to the fact that forecasting lends itself to two equally radical, yet opposite methodologies. A reductionist one, based on first principles, and the naïve-inductivist one, based only on data. This latter view has recently gained some attention in response to the availability (...) of unprecedented amounts of data and increasingly sophisticated algorithmic analytic techniques. The purpose of this note is to assess critically the role of big data in reshaping the key aspects of forecasting and in particular the claim that bigger data leads to better predictions. Drawing on the representative example of weather forecasts we argue that this is not generally the case. We conclude by suggesting that a clever and context-dependent compromise between modelling and quantitative analysis stands out as the best forecasting strategy, as anticipated nearly a century ago by Richardson and von Neumann. (shrink)

This article shows how Arab students at an Arab college in Israel, majoring in teaching of mathematics, English, and science, rely on metaphor as an important rhetorical tool for the advancement of their ideological positions and for criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, which discriminates against and disenfranchises Arab Israelis. The underlying hypothesis of the article is that the way Arab students in Israel use metaphor in their writing has unique rhetorical aspects that help to sharpen their message (...) in pursuit of the broader goal of emphasizing Arab Israelis’ suffering and changing for the better the Israeli government’s discriminatory patterns of action against them. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of an experiment on mutual versus common knowledge of advice in a two-player weak-link game with random matching. Our experimental subjects play in pairs for thirteen rounds. After a brief learning phase common to all treatments, we vary the knowledge levels associated with external advice given in the form of a suggestion to pick the strategy supporting the payoff-dominant equilibrium. Our results are somewhat surprising and can be summarized as follows: in all our treatments both (...) the choice of the efficiency-inducing action and the percentage of efficient equilibrium play are higher with respect to the control treatment, revealing that even a condition as weak as mutual knowledge of level 1 is sufficient to significantly increase the salience of the efficient equilibrium with respect to the absence of advice. Furthermore, and contrary to our hypothesis, mutual knowledge of level 2 induces, under suitable conditions, successful coordination more frequently than common knowledge. (shrink)

Plato held that God's Knowledge of things consists of self-subsistent external forms, i.e. the same Ideas. This view has been criticized by Mulla Sadra and other thinkers. Ibn Sina maintains that since God Possesses the Knowledge of His Essence, which is the perfect cause of things, He Has also the knowledge of things as well. This Knowledge is a universal in nature one in the sense that it does not change with the change of the known. The philosophers succeeding Ibn-Sina (...) criticized him on the grounds that his theory necessitates the imperfection of God's Essence.It also requires His Knowledge to be of the acquired type. Shaykh Ishraq holds that the Almighty Has the knowledge of all things, including all immaterial abstract entities and material objects by their objective existence.Ibn Sina has also been the target of other objections. For example, his ideas as to the presence of material things before the Almighty is criticized on the ground that materiality and presence cannot come together. Mulla Sadra demonstrates God's differentiated Knowledge on the basis of the principle of ' the truth in its simplicity contains all things' and argues that the Almighty Necessary's knowledge of all things is realized at the level of His Essence before the existence of objects. 'Allamah Tabataba'i demonstrates the same issue on the basis of God's ontological Absoluteness, which is required for the necessity of essential existence. (shrink)

The Commensurability of existence with knowledge is one of the teachings of the Transcendent Philosophy the logical consequence of which is that each existent enjoys a kind of sensation and perception, whether it is an inanimate body or vegetative being. This view can be considered a philosophical outcome of the principiality of existence, gradation of existence, and simplicity of existence; however, it seems that this theory is in clear opposition to the principle of the immateriality of knowledge and perception acknowledged (...) by Mulla Sadra. As a result, one might ask if believing in a kind of perception in bodies indicates the material nature of perception. Otherwise, how does a purely material existent possess knowledge and perception? In this paper, the writers have tried to provide a philosophical analysis of the principle of the immateriality of knowledge and the principle of the commensurability of existence with knowledge and explored their consistency with each other. (shrink)

We illustrate how a variety of logical methods and techniques provide useful, though currently underappreciated, tools in the foundations and applications of reasoning under uncertainty. The field is vast spanning logic, artificial intelligence, statistics, and decision theory. Rather than (hopelessly) attempting a comprehensive survey, we focus on a handful of telling examples. While most of our attention will be devoted to frameworks in which uncertainty is quantified probabilistically, we will also touch upon generalisations of probability measures of uncertainty, which have (...) attracted a significant interest in the past few decades. (shrink)

In the Indian context; contributed articles.

This paper introduces a logical analysis of convex combinations within the framework of Łukasiewicz real-valued logic. This provides a natural link between the fields of many-valued logics and decision theory under uncertainty, where the notion of convexity plays a central role. We set out to explore such a link by defining convex operators on MV-algebras, which are the equivalent algebraic semantics of Łukasiewicz logic. This gives us a formal language to reason about the expected value of bounded random variables. As (...) an illustration of the applicability of our framework we present a logical version of the Anscombe–Aumann representation result. (shrink)

This paper sheds new light on the subtle relation between probability and logic by (i) providing a logical development of Bruno de Finetti's conception of events and (ii) suggesting that the subjective nature of de Finetti's interpretation of probability emerges in a clearer form against such a logical background. By making explicit the epistemic structure which underlies what we call Choice-based probability we show that whilst all rational degrees of belief must be probabilities, the converse doesn't hold: some probability values (...) don't represent decision-relevant quantifications of uncertainty. (shrink)

Betting methods, of which de Finetti's Dutch Book is by far the most well-known, are uncertainty modelling devices which accomplish a twofold aim. Whilst providing an interpretation of the relevant measure of uncertainty, they also provide a formal definition of coherence. The main purpose of this paper is to put forward a betting method for belief functions on MV-algebras of many-valued events which allows us to isolate the corresponding coherence criterion, which we term coherence in the aggregate. Our framework generalises (...) the classical Dutch Book method. (shrink)

El ms. árabe num. 1.077 de El Escorial contiene una obra de Abū Isḥāq al-Garnāṭī, cuyo último capítulo lo constituye la enumeración de veintidós normas jurídicas, en cuatro de las cuales los andalusíes no siguieron la doctrina de Mālik, y en las dieciocho restantes se apartaron de la de Ibn al-Qāsim. Ese mismo texto aparece también al final de K. al-Mufīd del cordobés Ibn Hišām. En este artículo su autor, tras definir el concepto de ‛amal local, plantea la cuestión de (...) la autoría del citado texto, ofrece una edición crítica y traducción del mismo a partir de las dos fuentes mencionadas y hace un estudio diacrónico de la aplicación en al-Andalus de esas controvertidas normas. Dicho estudio muestra que tales diferencias con respecto a Mālik o Ibn al-Qāsim no siempre se mantuvieron, sino que caracterizaron más bien el fiqh «temprano» andalusí. (shrink)

El ms. árabe num. 1.077 de El Escorial contiene una obra de Abū Isḥāq al-Garnāṭī, cuyo último capítulo lo constituye la enumeración de veintidós normas jurídicas, en cuatro de las cuales los andalusíes no siguieron la doctrina de Mālik, y en las dieciocho restantes se apartaron de la de Ibn al-Qāsim. Ese mismo texto aparece también al final de K. al-Mufīd del cordobés Ibn Hišām. En este artículo su autor, tras definir el concepto de ‛amal local, plantea la cuestión de (...) la autoría del citado texto, ofrece una edición crítica y traducción del mismo a partir de las dos fuentes mencionadas y hace un estudio diacrónico de la aplicación en al-Andalus de esas controvertidas normas. Dicho estudio muestra que tales diferencias con respecto a Mālik o Ibn al-Qāsim no siempre se mantuvieron, sino que caracterizaron más bien el fiqh «temprano» andalusí. (shrink)

Some theologians in the process of explaining the creation of contingent world, in addition to non-existence in time, have denied the causal relationship between the creator and the created and explained their relation in terms of creative agent. On the contrary, many philosophers believe in the pre-existence of created beings and emphasize on the principle of causality and on the necessary creation and some of them believe that there must be a kind of cognation between the creator and the creatures. (...) So in explaining the relation between the creatures and the creator three ideas have been offered in general: total difference, sameness, and cognation. The purpose of this article is to examine the necessity of cognation between the cause and the effect in Islamic philosophy. After analyzing and explaining the theory of cognation and examining its objections, the author has come to the conclusion that the necessity of cognation, according to philosophical ontology, is self-evident. (shrink)

The most important constituent elements of Suhrawardi's Illuminationist Philosophy are Iran and Shi'ism. There is a hot debate among those who study him as to whether his philosophy follows his political thought, or whether his politics is rooted in his Illuminationist philosophy. The truth is that Suhrawardi is the only Islamic philosopher who has developed an objective and synthetic philosophy which cannot be understood without perceiving his political thoughts. In this paper, the writer has tried to show that Suhrawardi's political (...) thought is influenced by his Illuminationist philosophy; however, one must admit that these two fields are so tightly intertwined in his synthetic philosophy that it is extremely difficult to draw a distinct borderline between them.The questions that might arise at this point are: why did Suhrawardi turn to Illuminationist philosophy? Was it because of his political thoughts? The course of his journeys from Zanjan to Maraghah, Isfahan, Mardin, Diyar Bakr, and Halab reveal the existence of some Batini and gnostic tendencies in Suhrawardi. Is this accidental? We should not ignore the fact that he wrote his Hikmat al-ishraq and developed his political philosophy between 578-587 AH in lands dominated by Batini thoughts.However, the degree of Illuminationist Philosophy's influence on Suhrawardi's politics, or vise versa, has attracted the attention of the scholars who study this philosopher, and each has viewed this issue from a different perspective. Suhrawardi maintains that the end of his political-Illuminationist design is reaching a luminous period and society which is far from darkness and has no meaning without a philosopher possessing a dhawqi and discourive wisdom. Unlike Farabi, he does not unite politics with the city and its types and says no word about virtues, administration, and justice. His political method is based on Illuminationist philosophy, "divine administration", connection to the "Unseen World", and "inspirations from the superior world". Therefore, the only true politics in his philosophy is one which is governed by "God's command", and in which the 'Divine order" is dominant.Suhrawardi's political philosophy is completely different from Greek philosophy and is based on Islamic and Iranian thoughts and principles, i.e. prophethood, the miracles and charismatic acts of the prophets and the members of the Prophet's Household, and the glory and nobility or Iranian Kings. Therefore, he is the founder of Islamic-Iranian politics among Islamic philosophers. (shrink)

The school of Shiraz deserves to be studied for several reasons. It links the School of Maraghah and the School of Isfahan. Moreover, it has revived the Ishraqi tradition and the Iranian-Islamic identity in philosophy. In contrast to some orientalists who believe that Islamic philosophy died with Ibn Rushd, the School of Shiraz managed to continue this philosophical tradition and introduce a number of prominent philosophers in the intellectual history of Iran to the world.One of the distinctive characteristics of this (...) school which has not been studied as it should have is the Illuminationist tendencies of some of its important philosophers such as Jalal al-Din Dawani and Qiyath al-Din Dashtaki. Both of them had reacted to the grand book of Hayakil al-nur and wrote commentaries on it following two different approaches. This work is one of the important books of Suhrawardi on Iranian-Illuminationist philosophy which connects him to the Shi'ite-Isma'ilite's point of view. During the period of decline after the 6th century 'Allamah Dawani and the Dashtaki family paid attention to this work as the reviver of Iranian-Illuminationist philosophy and identity and extended Suhrawardi's important ideas which had been presented in three fields of Illuminationist philosophy, the theory of Imamat, and Iranian identity. This paper is a study of Suhrawardi's Hayakil al-nur and its commentary by 'Allamah Dawani. (shrink)

The concern to grant meaning to life is rooted in two basic aspects of man's existence: awareness and free will. When questioning the meaning of life, the word meaning refers to three concepts: purpose of life, value of life, and the function of life. The word "life" refers to human life as distinct from animal life. The meaning of life has been expressed based on various theories and approaches from among which the two groups of naturalist and God-oriented theories are (...) considered to be the most important ones. Islamic philosophers, particularly Mulla Sadra, explain the meaning of life following a God-oriented approach. In this approach, God is the basis and the necessary condition of life's meaningfullness. Accordingly and based on the principle of the trans-substantial motion in Mulla Sadra, the human soul can attain the meaning and perfection of life. In his philosophy, God is the only origin of meaning and, unlike some naturalists, he believes that no natural condition and incident can contradict this source and origin of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to provide an answer to the question of the meaning of life and introducing God as the only basis and source of meaning in Mulla Sadra's philosophy. (shrink)