Fitrah and Its Bearing on the Principles of Psychology

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Yasien Mohamed
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Ethical Aspects ◽  
The West ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Contemporary Psychotherapy ◽  
Newborn Child ◽  
Islamic Psychology ◽  
Islamic Literature

There is not a newborn child who is not born in a state of fifrah. His parentsthen make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian, just as an animal is born intact.Do you observe any among them that are maimed (at birth)?’Though the discipline of psychology is a well-developed empiricalscience in the West today, few psychologists have dipped into the religiousand philosophical literature of the East. It is our intent here to discuss thepsychological discourse in classical Islamic literature, which offersinsights into human nature and the psychology of human behavior that arerelevant for contemporary psychotherapy. Such an undertaking will alsoreveal that the psychological facets of Islam are interwoven closely withits metaphysical, volitional, and ethical aspects. It would therefore beworthwhile to abstract psychological elements from the Islamic legacy,systematize them, and present the findings within an Islamic frameworkand in an idiom that would interest the modern psychologist.According to Isma‘il al Fmqi, the relevance of Islam to psychologyor any other discipline can be determined by discovering what the legacyof Islam has to say on the discipline in question? Although the discipline“Islamic psychology” does not exist within the Islamic legacy as weknow it in the West, there is no reason why such a discipline cannotdevelop. Contemporary efforts to bring about an Islamic psychology arefew and far between. We have yet to see an introduction to Islamic psychologysimilar to what we have seen in the cases of anthropology andsociology.’ Our contribution, therefore, consists of developing an introductionto Islamic psychology withfimh as our point of departure.At a time when psychology is struggling to emerge as an autonomousdiscipline by shedding its old links with philosophy, any attempt to go inthe opposite direction may seem retrogressive. However, today there is an ...

Human Nature from a Comparative Psychological Perspective

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 71-95
Author(s):  
Mustapha Achoui
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Islamic Psychology

This paper seeks to advance an understanding of Human Naturethrough Islamic Sources. The paper also seeks to adopt a self-consciouslycomparative approach to psychology, comparing Islamic perspectivewith Western views. The author explores Islamic views on thethree dimensions of psychology - the spiritual, the physiological andthe behavioral. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for atheoretical basis to define the psychological vision of human nature andto identify the subject matter of psychology within Islamic framework.Psychology cannot be separated from religious, philosophical andmoral issues, the paper insists, therefore it is important that they be integratedin the efforts to articulate Islamic psychology.

scholarly journals Review of The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1739-1841 [by Stephen Gaukroger]

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Abou-Nemeh
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Third ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Oxford University Press

This compelling and erudite book examines the emergence of the human sciences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explores the rise of sensibility in studies of human nature and behavior. The Natural and the Human is the third installment of Stephen Gaukroger’s massive project that investigates the ways in which scientific values were consolidated into a dominant program of inquiry and shaped notions of modernity in the West from the thirteenth century onward. (The first two volumes, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility, were published by Oxford University Press in 2006 and 2010, respectively.) <br>

scholarly journals La condición humana y el Estado en Hobbes

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor Sierra Salas
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Natural Condition ◽  
State Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Human Condition

Sobre la condición humana en la teoría del Estado de Hobbes. La necesidad de comprender la condición humana como razón de ser del Estado, se hace evidente a los largo de la obra política de Hobbes. Por eso, cabe notar cómo, paralelamente en los libros Elementos del Derecho Natural y Político, De Civey el Leviatán, el pensador inglés dedica parte de su estudio a la explicación de la naturaleza humana, y a la dramática condición de los hombres que habitan en medio de una situación de guerra permanente, surgida a partir del dominiode las pasiones naturales sobre el comportamiento humano. Así mismo, hace ver que la legitimación del Estado Civil y la justificación de elementos como el Derecho, la Ley, la soberanía, entre otros, surge de la necesidad de garantizarla paz y la seguridad a los hombres, lo cual significa sacarlos de su estado natural.Palabras clave: Hobbes, estado de naturaleza, Estado Civil.AbstractThe Human Condition in Hobbes’ State Theory. The need to understand the human condition as reason of being of the State becomes evident throughout Hobbes’s political work. For this reason, it is important to note how in the books, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, On the Citizen, and TheLeviathan, the English thinker dedicates part of his study to the explanation of human nature and to the dramatic condition of men who live in an environment of permanent war. This environment arises from the domain of natural passions that make up human behavior. Likewise, it is shown that the legitimacy of the Civil State and the justification of elements, such as rights, Law and sovereignty among others, arise from the need to guarantee peace and safety for humanbeings, which means removing them from their natural state.Key words: Hobbes, natural condition, Civil State.

The Tyranny of Idealistic Certitude and Imagined Utopias

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-104
Author(s):  
Daniel Chirot
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Normal Human

This chapter argues that the more transformative the utopia, the more likely it was to meet inevitable, practical barriers. No utopia yet devised fully took into account the imperfections of normal human behavior. Rather than accepting the limitations of their utopian dreams, revolutionary leaders increasingly applied violence to reshape not only their societies but human nature itself. They died unrepentant, still certain they had been right. Within this backdrop, the chapter first turns to the confounding case of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. This revolution had many of the elements that produced so much violence and repression in previous examples. Yet the Mexican Revolution never became as radical as these others because it did not formulate a coherent utopian ideal. After considering this seeming exception, the chapter turns to the examples of tyrannical certitude—revolutionary regimes willing and able to commit bloody excesses in order to bring about their imagined utopias.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Howell
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary Ethics ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Individual Self

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

Scientific History and Experimental History

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Roth
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
Experimental History

The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny. But Edmund Russell in Evolutionary History and Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson in Natural Experiments of History demonstrate that historians can write interdisciplinary, comparative analyses using the strategies of nonexperimental natural science to search for deep patterns in human behavior and for correlates to those patterns that can lead to a better, though not infallible, understanding of historical causality.

Spiritual and Religious Sources of Indian Psychology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kiran Kumar Keshavamurthy Salagame
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Transpersonal Psychology ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
The West ◽  
Indian Psychology ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Modern Psychology ◽  
Western Psychology

Indian psychology is a nascent discipline, although it has a history that dates back many millennia. It differs from Western psychology both in its subject matter and its methodology. Whereas Western psychology at present is still anchored in a material worldview and governed by a reductionist paradigm, Indian psychology is founded on the primacy of consciousness as revealed by spiritual experiences and supported by logic and reasoning. Mainstream Western psychology has yet to recognize and accept the spiritual dimension of human nature, though transpersonal psychology emerged in the West fifty years ago. Indian psychology has the potential to enlarge the scope of modern psychology, and Indian psychological thought has universal significance.

scholarly journals John Locke’s Philosophy as a Teaching about Human and their Behavior

2021 ◽  
pp. 134-141
Author(s):  
M. B Shvetsova
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Main Components ◽  
Original Concept ◽  
Rational Component

Purpose. The article is aimed to outline Locke’s position on the basic principles of proper human behavior. Its implementation involves: a) review of the research literature concerning the place of anthropological motive in philosophizing and b) research of his interpretation of human nature and the role of the rational component. Theoretical basis. The author’s approach is based on the conceptual provisions of phenomenology and existentialism. Originality. The work considers the teaching of Locke as the author of the original concept of human nature, which is closely related to the understanding of ethical issues. It is proved that its meaningful development involves the identification of the main components of human nature in the process of determining the basic principles of personality behavior. The original conception of the thinker on the irrational component of human nature and the ways of its rationalization is analyzed. Conclusions. It is substantiated that Locke’s philosophical heritage is not reduced to depersonalized empiricism as epistemology, and his teaching about human is not limited to the abstract study of their rational component. The thinker connects the request of his own epoch with the new vision of human and the basic principles of their behavior on the basis of rationality. Locke is looking for the ways to master the irrational component of human nature and is convinced that in the era of the scientific revolution, the basis of human behavior should be rationality. Locke considers human freedom to be one of the key moments of human nature.

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