Islamism, Islamic Modernism and the Search for Modern Authenticity in an Imaginary Past

How to be authentically modern? This was the pervasive question behind the ideological elaborations of numerous religious and nationalist movements toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of them attempted to find the answer in an imaginary past. This article claims that Islamist movements are not an exception, but rather an affirmation of this rule. The orientation towards a “golden age” of Islam and its allegedly authentic Islamic way of life has been a crucial feature of Islamist thought across all national, sectarian and ideological divides. The article traces this invocation of the past historically back to the construction of specifically Islamic forms of modernity by representatives of Islamic modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Interpreting their modernist thought in the context of more global nineteenth-century concepts and narratives, the article argues from a comparative perspective that Islamic modernism laid the foundations for the ways in which Islamist thinkers have constructed both individual and collective forms of Muslim identities.

Allosteric stabilization of calcium and lipid binding engages three synaptotagmins in fast exocytosis

The release of neurotransmitters from presynaptic terminals is a strongly Ca2+-dependent process controlled by synaptotagmins, especially by their C2B domains. Biochemical measurements have reported Ca2+ affinities of synaptotagmin too low to account for synaptic function. However, binding of the C2B domain to the membrane phospholipid PI(4,5)P2 increases the Ca2+ affinity and vice versa, indicating a positive allosteric stabilization of simultaneous binding. Here, we construct a mathematical model of the release-triggering mechanism of synaptotagmin based on measured Ca2+/PI(4,5)P2 affinities and reported protein copy numbers. The model reproduced the kinetics of synaptic transmission observed at the calyx of Held over the full range of Ca2+ stimuli, with each C2B domain crosslinking Ca2+ and PI(4,5)P2 lowering the energy barrier for fusion by 4.85 kBT. The allosteric stabilization of simultaneous Ca2+ and PI(4,5)P2 binding was crucial to form multiple crosslinks which enabled fast fusion rates. Only three crosslinking C2B domains were needed to reproduce physiological responses, but high copy numbers per vesicle sped up the collision-limited formation of crosslinks. In silico evaluation of theoretical mutants revealed that affection of the allosteric properties might be a determinant of the severity of synaptotagmin mutations and may underlie dominant-negative, disease-causing effects. We conclude that allostericity is a crucial feature of synaptotagmin action.

NOMEN PROPRIUM UND METONYMIE

When language change phenomena have repercussions in various social areas at the same time, they are worth an analysis. One of the well documented occurrences of this kind is the discursive history of the metonymic proper name Bologna as a designation of an education reform. As Johannes Angermüller und Ronny Scholz stated in their remarkable study (2013), its mere introduction had made some political processes easier. In this paper the question is put whether some distinctions of the notable metonymy theory by Peter Koch (2004) are able to deliver categories to clarify this phenomenon. In doing so, I point out some deficiencies of Kochs approach concerning his conception of metonymy as such and demonstrate that these are to be ascribed to its “cognitive” frame and that the remedy lies implicitly in an elementary consideration by Saussure and in an explicit passage by Husserl whom Koch himself invokes. As a result of this, I come to the conclusion that Saussure and, particularly, Husserl could have elucidated the most crucial feature of the metonymic proper name more appropriately.

Emotion Recognition from Realistic Dynamic Emotional Expressions Cohere with Established Emotion Recognition Tests: A Proof-of-Concept Validation of the Emotional Accuracy Test

Individual differences in understanding other people’s emotions have typically been studied with recognition tests using prototypical emotional expressions. These tests have been criticized for the use of posed, prototypical displays, raising the question of whether such tests tell us anything about the ability to understand spontaneous, non-prototypical emotional expressions. Here, we employ the Emotional Accuracy Test (EAT), which uses natural emotional expressions and defines the recognition as the match between the emotion ratings of a target and a perceiver. In two preregistered studies (Ntotal = 231), we compared the performance on the EAT with two well-established tests of emotion recognition ability: the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT) and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). We found significant overlap (r > 0.20) between individuals’ performance in recognizing spontaneous emotions in naturalistic settings (EAT) and posed (or enacted) non-verbal measures of emotion recognition (GERT, RMET), even when controlling for individual differences in verbal IQ. On average, however, participants reported enjoying the EAT more than the other tasks. Thus, the current research provides a proof-of-concept validation of the EAT as a useful measure for testing the understanding of others’ emotions, a crucial feature of emotional intelligence. Further, our findings indicate that emotion recognition tests using prototypical expressions are valid proxies for measuring the understanding of others’ emotions in more realistic everyday contexts.

Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan en experimenten in de klassieke genetica

Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan and experiments in classical geneticsIn the middle of the 19th century, Gregor Mendel performed a series of crosses with pea plants to investigate how hybrids are formed. Decades later, Thomas Hunt Morgan finalized the theory of classical genetics. An important aspect of Mendel’s and Morgan’s scientific approach is that they worked in a systematic, experimental fashion. But how did these experiments proceed? What is the relation between these experiments and Mendel’s and Morgan’s explanatory theories? What was their evidential value? Using present-day insights in the nature of experimentation I will show that the answer to these questions is fascinating but not obvious. Crossings in classical genetics lacked a crucial feature of traditional experiments for causal discovery: manipulation of the purported causes. Hence they were not traditional, ‘manipulative’ experiments, but ‘selective experiments’.

Are Modules Innate?

It should by now be clear that modules are sensitive with respect to such experiences as learning, injury, and sensory deprivation, regardless of how young or mature the organism happens to be. And yet this is not the full story. The brain’s plasticity is definitely constrained. While plasticity is an intrinsic and crucial feature of the nervous system, it is important to emphasize that the brain is not open-endedly plastic. Furthermore, a brain region can be innate in a relatively strong sense and yet fail to reach the threshold characteristics of a genuine module. A bias, after all, is not a specialization.

Large-scale fabrication of durable and self-healing super-hydrophobic coating with high thermal stability and long-term corrosion resistance

Durability is a crucial feature to expand the application field of artificial superhydrophobic coatings. Herein, a kind of durable superhydrophobic coating is prepared by a simple and cheap method using...

Benefits of HyFlex learning in creating a positive students’ experience

During the COVID-19 pandemic HyFlex teaching/learning has increasingly grown into a crucial feature of education. My strong conviction is the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and online education has eventually become an integral component of the present-day education. Despite the drawbacks, there are some obvious benefits to leveraging a HyFlex course model. It allows students more flexibility than ever before, meaning they can adjust and adapt as needed to accommodate their schedules (in our case, being in Ukraine or abroad). It also gives students access to a greater breadth of learning materials than they would otherwise receive. It is worth mentioning that after Covid-19 the world and education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms. This resulted in the largest “online movement” in the history of education. Importantly, research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information and less time-consuming, means the changes Coronavirus have caused will be here to stay.

Tiantai Buddhist Elaborations on the Hidden and Visible

A crucial feature of Tiantai (天台) Buddhist thought certainly is its elaboration on the hidden and visible, called “root and traces” (ben ji 本跡), as the concept of non-duality (bu er 不二) of these opposites is part of what constitutes the highest level of Buddhist doctrine in Tiantai doxography, called “round/ perfect teaching” (yuanjiao 圓教). Such elaboration is inextricably bound up with paradoxical discourse, which functions as a linguistic strategy in Tiantai practice of liberating the mind from its self-induced deceptions. Observation of paradoxes in the elaboration on the hidden and visible could be called practice qua doctrinal exegesis, because Tiantai masters try to integrate self-referential observation in mind-contemplation (guanxin 觀心) with interpretation of sūtra and śāstra. For Tiantai Buddhists, the ultimate meaning of the Buddhadharma (fofa 佛法) itself is independent from speech and script and only accessible to the liberated mind, yet it cannot fully be comprehended and displayed apart from the transmission of the canonical word. To observe the paradox in non-duality of the hidden and visible is what triggers practice qua doctrinal exegesis and entails liberation (jietuo 解脫) according to the “round/ perfect teaching.” The article traces the formation of paradoxical discourse in Chinese Madhyamaka, particularly referencing the Tiantai elaboration on the hidden and visible and its diverse sources of inspiration, which includes both Chinese indigenous traditions of thought (Daoism and Xuanxue) and translated sūtra and śāstra literature from India.