Islam and politics in Iran; and on philosophy of political science.

This paper focuses on the influence of cultural familiarity on getting the most out of an e-negotiation for merger or acquisition based on subjective and objective negotiation behaviors. We examined if cultural awareness could increase the rate of negotiation self-efficacy, shorten the length of negotiation and optimize deal closure results. To do so, firstly we investigate the concept of e-negotiation and its development in the last two decades. Then a series of systematic reviews is performed on the parameters influencing the (...) success in offline and online merger or acquisition negotiations. We also considered the main traits of Western and Middle Eastern Arab cultures on negotiations. The results show that many of the requirements of successful collaboration, or negotiations, with Arab managers can currently happen only through face-to-face meetings. (shrink)

Pessimism may be one of the most evident features of Arabic contemporary poetry; specifically, when the poet belongs to the Romantic school since s/he has been living in an imaginary world far from reality. The fact is that the effects of pessimism in Arabic poetry have been observed since old times to the present, and Romantic poets have been impressed by changes in their personal and social conditions and then began complaining about the grief and pain of the time. Experiencing (...) a painful life, Naji took a pessimistic view toward life. This paper attempts to focus on Ebrahim Naji’s pessimism to see whether he is the same as older poets, or whether his pessimistic attitude is derived from Romantic values which have a deep relationship with the romantic trend impressed by the west and its literature. (shrink)

Background: Physical restraint is among the commonly used methods for ensuring patient safety in intensive care units. However, nurses usually experience ethical dilemmas over using physical restraint because they need to weigh patient autonomy against patient safety. Aim: The aim of this study was to explore factors behind ethical dilemmas for critical care nurses over using physical restraint for patients. Design: This is a qualitative study using conventional content analysis approach, as suggested by Graneheim and Lundman, to analyze the data. (...) Methods: Seventeen critical care nurses were purposefully recruited from the four intensive care units in Tehran, Iran. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and were concurrently analyzed through conventional content analysis as suggested by Graneheim and Lundman. Ethical consideration: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran with the code: IR.IUMS.REC.1397.795. Before interviews, participants were provided with explanations about the aim of the study, the confidentiality of the data, their freedom to participate, and the right to withdraw the study, and their free access to the study findings. Finally, their consents were obtained, and interviews were started. Results: Factors behind ethical dilemmas for critical care nurses over using physical restraint were categorized into three main categories, namely the outcomes of using physical restraint, the outcomes of not using physical restraint, and emotional distress for nurses. The outcomes of using physical restraint were categorized into the three subcategories of ensuring patient safety, physical damage to patients, and mental damage to the patient. The outcomes of not using physical restraint fell into two subcategories, namely the risks associated with not using physical restraint and legal problems for nurses. Finally, the two subcategories of the emotional distress for nurses main category were nurses’ negative feelings about restraint use and uncertainty over the decision on physical restraint use. Conclusion: Decision-making for restraint use is often associated with ethical dilemmas, because nurses need to weight the outcomes of its use against the outcomes of not using it and also consider patient safety and autonomy. Health authorities are recommended to develop clear evidence-based guidelines for restraint use and develop and implement educational and counseling programs for nurses on the principles of ethical nursing practice, patient rights, physical restraint guidelines and protocols, and management of emotional, ethical, and legal problems associated with physical restraint use. (shrink)

In spite of orientation of philosophy in the western philosophy after renaissance when the relation between religion and philosophy was weakened and broken, in the Islamic world in particular Iranian society the strong relation appeared between religion and philosophy. However this relationship alleviated diversity and audaciousness of philosophical thought, but it deepened and widened religious thoughts. In fact, entrance of philosophical discussions in the realm of religion causes the rational interpretation of religion and lessens fanaticism and dogmatism and it excludes (...) superstition from religious thoughts. Philosophers like Averroes, Avicenna and Mulla Sadra have discussed the interaction of religion and philosophy. Islamic philosophy is completely an intellectual knowledgewhich differs from theology is based on revelatory texts. The title of Islamic philosophy displays the relationship between religion and philosophy. (shrink)

What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal (...) theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few – fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research. This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally. (shrink)

The relationship between morality and law is one of the issues that has provoked considerable controversies. Among others, an important discussion is whether obeying “conventional morality” in public and/or private spheres should be legally enforced by legislators. In this paper, we will look at the controversies over the issue of the “legal enforcement of morality” in the well-known debate between Herbert Hart and Patrick Devlin. In light of Richard Hare's moral philosophy, we will begin by distinguishing three realms of morality. (...) We will then clarify Deviln's view on “conventional morality”, employing the terminology derived from Hare's moral philosophy. After elaborating the implications, consequences, and roots of “conventional morality” in Devlin's view, we will turn to the relation between law and “conventional morality”. Finally, we will criticize Devlin's approach and highlight our objections to his account. By showing the flaws of Devlin's conception of “conventional morality,” we will challenge her legal view of morals. (shrink)

Benchmarking is the major reason for the widespread use of DEA models for efficiency analysis. Determining the closest targets for DMUs, DEA models play a key role in benchmarking their best performance. In fact, these models help develop certain performance enhancement plans that need fewer attempts made by DMUs. Therefore, this study proposes a novel method based on the network DEA to determine the most appropriate target for every stage in addition to benchmarking the DMUs. The proposed model differs from (...) those proposed by other studies in the fact that all DEA models of benchmarking consider input and output values to be linear. However, in real-world problems, many DMU inputs and outputs have nonlinear values, something which was taken into account in the modeling process in this study. The proposed model was employed to benchmark cement factories listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. (shrink)

Considering the three intrinsic components of streamflow time series, the overall performance of the streamflow modeling tool is associated with the correct estimation of these components. In this study, a new hybrid method based on the wavelet transform as a multiresolution forecasting tool and exponential smoothing method, with two presented scenarios, was introduced. To this end, the performance of the proposed method was investigated versus four conventional methods of the autoregressive integrated moving average, ES ad-hoc, artificial neural network, and wavelet-ANN (...) for daily and monthly streamflow modeling of West Nishnabotna and Trinity River watersheds with different hydro-geomorphological conditions. In the presented WES technique, firstly, WT is employed for decomposing the observed signal to one approximation and more diverse components of subseries. Then, for the first scenario, only two subseries are introduced to the model as input parameters; however, for the second scenario, decomposed subseries are separately used as the inputs of ES models. The obtained results indicated that combining WT with the ES method and ANN led to more accurate modeling. The proposed methodology that used all decomposed subseries separately improved the efficiency of models up to 30% and 10% for the daily dataset and up to 88% and 57% for the monthly dataset, respectively, for the West Nishnabotna and Trinity Rivers. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

At the end of the twentieth century, the Ayatollah Marʿashī Najafī Library acquired a fourteenth-century manuscript of munshaʾāt previously held in a private collection. This composite multitext manuscript contains about two hundred letters sent by or to officials of the Rūm Saljūq sultanate in the thirteenth century. The letters include official and private correspondence as well as decrees of nomination. They are all in Persian. This article is a first study of the codicological features, structure, and contents of this manuscript. (...) It suggests a production process that unfolded in several stages over a period of seventy years, from the reign of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Kay-Khusraw II to the second decade of the fourteenth century. The Marʿashī manuscript expands considerably the volume of documents available on Saljūq Anatolia during the beginning of Mongol period. It is poised to become a major source on the political history of the period and will also help to understand the integration of Anatolia into the Persianate sphere. (shrink)