Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 371-373.

This volume provides a thorough investigation of the theological views of the Twelversh ite Ibn Ab Jumh r al-Ah s (d. after 906/1501) who combined traditional Mu tazilite thought with the philosophical tradition of Ibn S n, with the Illuminationist tradition and with speculative mysticism.

This volume represents the state of the art in research on the controversial Muslim legal scholar, theologian and man of letters Ibn azm of Cordoba (d. 456/1064), who is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of Islamic Spain.

Baṣran Muʿtazilite Theology: Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Khallād’s Kitāb al-Uṣūl and Its Reception. Edited by Camilla Adang; Wilferd Madelung; and Sabine Schmidtke. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 85. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. iv + 8 + 306. $170.

Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their (...) results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ. (shrink)

The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. Most twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy has focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that, unlike other (...) reference works, the Oxford Handbook has striven to give roughly equal weight to every century, from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook is also unique in that its 30 chapters are work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered, in particular taking advantage of recent new editions and translations that have renewed interest and debate around the Islamic philosophical canon. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy gives both the advanced student and active scholar in Islamic philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, a strong sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like and a deep view of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at stake. Most importantly, it provides an up-to-date portrait of contemporary scholarship on Islamic philosophy. (shrink)

The volume contains editions of the extant parts of two hitherto unknown theological works by the _Būyid_ vizier al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād. The manuscripts on which the edition is based come from Cairo Geniza store rooms.

Johnston famously argued that the colors are, more or less inclusively speaking, dispositions to cause color experiences by arguing that this view best accommodates his five proposed core beliefs about color. Since then, Campbell, Kalderon, Gert, Benbaji, and others, have all engaged with at least some of Johnston’s proposed core beliefs in one way or another. Which propositions are core beliefs is ultimately an empirical matter. We investigate whether Johnston’s proposed core beliefs are, in fact, believed by assessing the agreement/disagreement (...) of non-philosophers with them. Two experiments are run each with large sample sizes, the second designed to address criticisms of the first. We find that non-philosophers mostly agree with the proposed core beliefs, but that they agree with some more than others. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

We recently conducted an experiment to show that a lot of the empirically measured disagreement cited to support the premise that there is mass perceptual disagreement about the colors, a premise often cited by philosophers, is due to conceptual factors. Kuehni and Hardin object to how we measured disagreement and to various aspects of our experimental design. In this reply, we defend our study.

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain stimulation). (...) They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean-style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...) should. We test folk intuitions regarding the causal theory of perception by asking our participants to what extent they agree that they would ‘see’ an object in various Gricean scenarios. We find that the intuitions of the folk do not strongly support the causal condition; they at most strongly support a ‘no blocker’ condition. We argue that this is problematic for the claim that the causal condition is a conceptual truth. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia un corto tratado de polémica en contra del judaísmo escrito por el conocido erudito otomano Aḥmad Muṣṭafā Ṭāšhkubrīzāde. El autor utiliza los mismos argumentos que conocemos de la polémica religiosa medieval, tales como que la Torah, abrogada por el Islam, contenía referencias al Profeta Muḥammad a pesar de que su texto fue corrompido por los judíos. Además de la Biblia, Ṭāšhkubrīzāde cita una serie de fuentes judías tardías que añaden una importante dimensión a este trabajo. Después de (...) una breve introducción en que se discute la posibilidad de la deuda del autor respecto a la obra de Ibn Abī ‘Abd al-Dayyān, un converso del judaísmo al Islam, se presenta una edición y traducción del texto. (shrink)

Historically, Chinese educational philosophy has been dominated by Confucianism and, since 1949, by Marxism. However, rapid industrialization, ideological demands, and loyalty to traditions have now led to a situation where various Western philosophies have been adopted into vocational education in hopes of moving the country forward without challenging the status quo too vigorously. The result is that China presently has no clear philosophical foundation that can help the country make solid decisions on how vocational education shall contribute to economic growth (...) and social improvements. Awareness of one's philosophy, however, is important for vocational educators so that they can make well-founded decisions about their teaching. The authors hope that by presenting an overview of which philosophies have been adopted in the past and the influence they have had on practitioners and policymakers, scholars can engage in a debate on which vocational education philosophy can help train China's workforce most effectively and support continued economic growth. (shrink)

Color relationalism holds that the colors are constituted by relations to subjects. The introspective rejoinder against this view claims that it is opposed to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. The rejoinder seems to be correct about how colors appear when looking at how participants respond to an item about the metaphysical nature of color but not when looking at an item about the ascription of colors. The present article expands the properties investigated to sound and taste and inspects the mentioned asymmetry, (...) with a particular focus on the principle of charity. Using a metaphysical item, we find that color and sound are no different from shape, our control for a clearly anti-relational property. Taste, on the other hand, is no different from likability, our control for a clearly relational property. Importantly, we find that the disparity between metaphysical and ascription items is due to participants using a principle of charity to interpret disagreement cases such that both parties can be correct. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

Are the following propositions true of the colors: No object can be more than one determinable or determinate color all over at the same time (Incompatibility); the colors of objects are mind-independent (Objectivism); and most human observers usually perceive the colors of objects veridically in typical conditions (Veridicality)? One reason to think not is that the empirical literature appears to support the proposition that there is mass perceptual disagreement about the colors of objects amongst human observers in typical conditions (P-Disagreement). (...) In this article, we defend Incompatibility, Objectivism, and Veridicality by calling into question whether the empirical literature really supports P-Disagreement. (shrink)

This work presents the concepts of translation and conservative translation between logics. By using algebraic semantics we introduce several conservative translations involving the classical propositional calculus and the many-valued calculi of Post and Lukasiewicz.

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)

RésuméLa croyance que l'on est (ou pas) dans un état de douleur est singulière en ceci qu'elle semble pouvoir être qualifiée d'infaillibilité ou d'incorrigibilité logique, de même que le cogito. Mais comment se peut-il que l'existence d'une croyance (vraie) et l'existence du fait qui est l'objet de cette croyance puisssent constituer la même existence? Je propose ici une réponse à cette question. Parfois, une croyance peut être un désir.

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Pairwise classifiers, which identify whether two examples belong to the same class or not, are important components in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering applications. Existing methods for learning pairwise classifiers from labeled training data are based on string edit distance or common features between two examples. However, if two examples from the same class have few common features, these methods have difficulties (...) in finding these pairs and achieving high recall. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different citations refer to the same person or not. Since similarities between examples from the same class become close to zero, classifiers fail to distinguish positive pairs from negative pairs. One approach to avoiding the problem of zero similarities is using conjunctions of different features across examples, but implementing this idea straightforwardly makes the computational cost prohibitive for practical problems. Using a kernel on pair instances, our method can use feature conjunctions across examples without actually doing feature mappings, which are computationally expensive. The kernel is a tensor product of two inner products on the original feature space. The corresponding feature mapping generates conjunctions of features only across the two different examples while that of the conventional polynomial kernel also generates conjunctions of features from the same example, which are irrelevant to pairwise classification and cause deterioration of accuracy. Our experiments on the author matching problem show that this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods at medium recall levels. (shrink)

This is a study of a crucial and controversial topic in metaphysics and the philosophy of science: the status of the laws of nature. D. M. Armstrong works out clearly and in comprehensive detail a largely original view that laws are relations between properties or universals. The theory is continuous with the views on universals and more generally with the scientific realism that Professor Armstrong has advanced in earlier publications. He begins here by mounting an attack on the orthodox and (...) sceptical view deriving from Hume that laws assert no more than a regularity of coincidence between instances of properties. In doing so he presents what may become the definitive statement of the case against this position. Professor Armstrong then goes on to establish his own theory in a systematic manner defending it against the most likely objections, and extending both it and the related theory of universals to cover functional and statistical laws. This treatment of the subject is refreshingly concise and vivid: it will both stimulate vigorous professional debate and make an excellent student text. (shrink)

This volume provides a thorough investigation of the theological views of the Twelvershī‘ite Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsā’ī who combined traditional Mu‘tazilite thought with the philosophical tradition of Ibn Sīnā, with the Illuminationist tradition and with speculative mysticism.