The standard model of precedential constraint holds that a court is equally free to modify a precedent of its own and a precedent of a superior court—overruling aside, it does not differentiate horizontal and vertical precedents. This paper shows that no model can capture the U.S. doctrine of precedent without making that distinction. A precise model is then developed that does just that. This requires situating precedent cases in a formal representation of a hierarchical legal structure, and adjusting the constraint (...) that a precedent imposes based on the relationship of the precedent court and the instant court. The paper closes with suggestions for further improvements of the model. (shrink)

Öz: Bu çalışmama İslam’da bireyin kamuya karşı sorumluluk alanı ile bağlantılı bir ilkesini; “Emr-i bi’l- Ma’ruf ve Nehyi Ani’l-Münker”i İslam İnanç Ekolleri içerisinde nasıl algılandığını ve nasıl uygulandığını ele alacaktır. Bundaki amacım birey- kamu ilişkisinde, bireyin özgürlük alanlarının ihmal edildiği yönündeki varsayımımdır. Bu girişten sonra, çalışmada İslam inanç ekollerinin konuya ilişkin yaklaşımları ve bu yaklaşımlarına kaynak teşkil eden metinlere yer verilecektir. Çalışmamızda ekollerin kronolojik tarihlerini göz önünde bulunduran bir sıralama takip edeceğiz. Bundaki amacımız özellikle “Emr-i bi’l- Ma’ruf ve Nehyi Ani’l- (...) Münker” ilkesinin ekollerde ele alınışının erken dönem İslam Siyasal Tarihi ile önemli oranda bir ilişkisi olduğu anlayışımız sebebiyledir. İslam siyaset kuramının birlikte yaşam, özgürlük ve adalet iddia ve idealleri çerçevesinde konuya İslam teolojik mezhepleri yakın ilgi göstermişlerdir. Ekollerin “Emr-i bi’l-Ma’ruf ve Nehyi Ani’l-Münker” ilkesine yoğun ilgilerine karşın, farklı yaklaşımlar gösterdikleri de söylenebilir. İslam geleneği içerisinde bu kurucu ilke birey özgürlüğü ve kamu düzeni arasındaki gerilimler nedeniyle politik yorumları da beraberinde getirmiştir. “Haricî” ekoller her bir Müslüman için gereken bir sorumluluk olarak yorumlamış ve “ayn-i vacib” olduğunu dile getirmişlerdir. Diğer ekoller ise bu ilkeyi ” kifa-i bir vucûb” olarak kabul etmişlerdir. Diğer yandan Mu’tezile ekolü bu ilkeyi usulu’l-hamse’ den biri olarak kabul etmiştir. İslam siyaset geleneğinin önemli bileşenlerinden olan ilke mezhepler arasında farklı uygulamalara konu olmuştur. (shrink)

Carnap’s seminal ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ makes important use of the notion of a framework and the related distinction between internal and external questions. But what exactly is a framework? And what role does the internal/external distinction play in Carnap’s metaontology? In an influential series of papers, Matti Eklund has recently defended a bracingly straightforward interpretation: A Carnapian framework, Eklund says, is just a natural language. To ask an internal question, then, is just to ask a question in, say, English. (...) To try to ask an external question is to try, absurdly, to ask a question in no language at all. Finding that so trivial an I/e distinction can’t help to explain Carnap’s deflationary metaontology, Eklund is led to attribute to Carnap a view he calls ontological pluralism. In this paper, I show that Eklund misreads Carnap, and I argue that this misreading obscures fundamental features of Carnap’s philosophy. I then defend an account of frameworks as what Carnap called semantical systems, and I place this account in the context of Carnap’s philosophical program of explication. Finally, I discuss the role that frameworks and the I/e distinction play in ESO, showing that ESO provides no reason to attribute the doctrine of ontological pluralism to Carnap. (shrink)

The thesis presented in the present article is not the widely-accepted one according to which Mu‘tazilite thought indirectly influenced the birth and development of Arab rhetoric as an intellectual trend at the time that witnessed the constitution of this discipline of Arab language sciences, but the more specific thesis that it was primarily in Mu‘tazilite thought that the foundations of balāġa as a technical discipline were truly elaborated. To argue this thesis, we shall proceed in two stages. In the first, (...) we shall try to identify the indirect Mu‘tazilite sources of balāġa ; that is, the theses and overall positions of this movement, an echo of which may be found in constitutive elements of the discipline. In the second, we will try to identify some of the direct Mu‘tazilite sources of balāġa on the basis of Mu‘tazilite studies directly devoted to the status of the Koranic text, and the concepts elaborated to account for it. (shrink)

Computational techniques comparing co-occurrences of city names in texts allow the relative longitudes and latitudes of cities to be estimated algorithmically. However, these techniques have not been applied to estimate the provenance of artifacts with unknown origins. Here, we estimate the geographic origin of artifacts from the Indus Valley Civilization, applying methods commonly used in cognitive science to the Indus script. We show that these methods can accurately predict the relative locations of archeological sites on the basis of artifacts of (...) known provenance, and we further apply these techniques to determine the most probable excavation sites of four sealings of unknown provenance. These findings suggest that inscription statistics reflect historical interactions among locations in the Indus Valley region, and they illustrate how computational methods can help localize inscribed archeological artifacts of unknown origin. The success of this method offers opportunities for the cognitive sciences in general and for computational anthropology specifically. (shrink)

The current paper synthesizes theory and data from the field of life history (LH) evolution to advance a new developmental theory of variation in human LH strategies. The theory posits that clusters of correlated LH traits (e.g., timing of puberty, age at sexual debut and first birth, parental investment strategies) lie on a slow-to-fast continuum; that harshness (externally caused levels of morbidity-mortality) and unpredictability (spatial-temporal variation in harshness) are the most fundamental environmental influences on the evolution and development of LH (...) strategies; and that these influences depend on population densities and related levels of intraspecific competition and resource scarcity, on age schedules of mortality, on the sensitivity of morbidity-mortality to the organism’s resource-allocation decisions, and on the extent to which environmental fluctuations affect individuals versus populations over short versus long timescales. These interrelated factors operate at evolutionary and developmental levels and should be distinguished because they exert distinctive effects on LH traits and are hierarchically operative in terms of primacy of influence. Although converging lines of evidence support core assumptions of the theory, many questions remain unanswered. This review demonstrates the value of applying a multilevel evolutionary-developmental approach to the analysis of a central feature of human phenotypic variation: LH strategy. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

Hans-Georg GADAMER, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze ; Pascal MICHON, Poétique d’une anti-anthropologie: l’herméneutique deGadamer ; Robert J. DOSTAL, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer ; Denis SERON, Le problème de la métaphysique. Recherches sur l’interprétation heideggerienne de Platon et d’Aristote ; Henry MALDINEY, Ouvrir le rien. L’art nu ; Dominique JANICAUD, Heidegger en France, I. Récit; II. Entretiens ; Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Fenomenologia percepţiei ; Trish GLAZEBROOK, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science ; Richard WOLIN, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas (...) and Herbert Marcuse ; Ivo DEGENNARO, Logos – Heidegger liest Heraklit ; O. K. WIEGAND, R. J. DOSTAL, L. EMBREE, J. KOCKELMANS and J. N. MOHANTY, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic ; James FAULCONER and Mark WRATHALL, Appropriating Heidegger. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

Guidelines for an ideal Islamic society and the responsibilities of Muslim according to Islamic teachings.

Critical study of preaching and sermons by Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn ibn Ḥasan Khvārazmī on sufism.