Women Were Created with the Exact Same Spiritual and Intellectual Capacity as Men, So of Course They Can Lead

There is no justification whatsoever on a Qur’anic basis for preventing women from filling any leadership role, whether as religious leaders or imams or judges or heads of state. A large number of verses addressing men and women make it clear that both bear equal responsibility for building their societies. Moreover many Qur’anic verses addressing women’s issues came as a response to one or more woman’s activism at the time. Objectors to women’s leadership usually push back against women’s advancement primarily by citing supposed hadith denouncing women as such, and on some topics they appear to be virtually grasping at straws. A particularly strange yet common objection claims that the Prophet had said that no nation that entrusts its affairs to a woman can succeed, yet the historical evidence from his time and medieval jurist support for women as leaders tell a different story.

Purposiveness, Intelligibility and Kant's Scepticism: Reconsidering Ng's Account of Hegel's Response to Kant

Hegel's integration of the concept of Life in the Logic has long been disputed and rejected by many scholars. The most common objection was that it seemed counterintuitive to integrate an empirical phenomenon such as Life into a Logic that, in fact, ought to present an immanent development of pure concepts. Hegel was often accused of bringing empirical considerations into his Logic in order to develop his logical account of Life. Consequently, there has been a great discussion about the question as to whether a Logic is an appropriate place for this concept—a discussion that did not occur with respect to other categories in Hegel's Logic. Now, in contemporary literature on Hegel, there is a surge of genuine interest in Hegel's logical account of Life, accompanied by the insight that the concept of Life plays an important and indispensable role in Hegel's philosophy. However, what this role is precisely is a controversial issue.

Can Local Comparative Judgements Justify Moderate Perfectionism?

A common objection to political liberalism is that since reasonable citizens agree that some ways of life are worse than others – for instance that the life of a drug addict is less worthwhile than the life of a person who spends her time with family and philosophy – political liberals must concede that the state can sometimes permissibly use perfectionist reasons. I argue in this paper that this challenge is mistaken, because the comparison only tells us something about relative, not absolute, value. And because the real question concerns what the right justificatory constituency looks like, not what counts as reasonable in some other sense, the implication is that perfectionists and political liberals could construct equally plausible idealised constituencies. This stalemate gives us reason to develop arguments in favour of our preferred justificatory constituency. We cannot view local comparative judgements in isolation.

Beneficence, Numbers, and the Procreation Asymmetry

According to the Weak Procreation Asymmetry, there are weighty reasons not to create miserable people and only weaker reasons to create happy people. This view has several advantages over the Strong Procreation Asymmetry, which holds that there are no reasons to create happy people. Nonetheless, it faces a serious problem: according to some critics, it suggests that our reasons to create lives are as strong as our reasons to save lives. In response, this essay draws on the intuition that we have reason to maximize the number of lives saved, even when doing so would not secure a greater benefit. Numbers are not comparably relevant, however, to choices involving the creation of people. Taken together, these judgments show that there is typically an “extra” consideration that favors saving lives over creating lives. They thereby help to defuse a common objection to the Weak Procreation Asymmetry.

Subjective Character as the Origo a Quo of Phenomenal Consciousness

This article contributes to the debate on self-consciousness, inner awareness, and subjective character. Philosophers puzzle over whether subjective character has a monadic or a relational form. But the present article deploys formal ontology to show that this is a false dichotomy. From this vantage, a common objection to non-relational views is deflated. The common objection is that one-level, non-relational views are either unexplanatory or smuggle in resources from higher-order and/or relational views. The author uses an argument from formal ontology to suggest that such objections stem from a category error. The result is that first-order non-relational views need not lapse into higher order or relational views – subjective character can be a structured and intrinsic feature involved in the ontological constitution of mental acts. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the need to conceive of subjective character as the source of intentionality, and not the result of a prior intentional relation.

Irrationality

This chapter replies to one common objection to desire-as-belief: that it makes poor sense of practical irrationality such as akrasia. This objection to desire-as-belief is closely related to two others: the worry that we sometimes desire to do things without believing we have reason to pursue them, and the worry that we sometimes believe we have reason to pursue things without desiring to do them. The chapter offers a series of complementary responses to these objections: that our beliefs can be irrational, that some of what we say about our desires is misleading, and that we might fail to be motivated by our desires. Between these factors, it is doubtful that such objections succeed. The chapter finishes with a brief aside on second-order desires, and concludes that they are of little relevance to the occurrence of akrasia.

Principals’ Perceptions of Deteriorating Quality of Education at Secondary School Certificate Level in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

This descriptive study was carried out in six different districts of KP province of Pakistan and they were Mansehra, Malakand, Kohat, Dera Ismail Khan, Charsadda, and Bannu. There was the common objection that the quality of education has declined at various stages of education. This study focused on the analysis of the main causes of deterioration of quality at the Secondary School Level in the province of KP, Pakistan. These major causes of deterioration of excellence in education were revealed by a review of the study. Some key factors, considered to be the foundation of quality education, were highlighted. The methodology of the study was properly described. The researcher himself visited the sampled institutions and administered the questionnaire to the respondents to collect the data. Out of six different districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 440 Principals of Government Boys' Secondary Schools were selected as the population of this study. The sample contained 132 principals (30%). The tool of the study included a structured interview containing six open-ended items. Both qualitative and quantitative treatment was given to the analysis of data and presented in graphical and tabular forms. The study uncovered major causes of deterioration about quality at the secondary level, which is an ineffective system of monitoring and accountability, flawed examination system, insufficient infrastructural facilities, congested classrooms, lack of competent and trained teaching faculty, un-warranted political involvement, outdated teaching methods, and inadequate latest teaching facilities. The study also suggested various teaching strategies, which are suitable for various types of learners and could be applied in classrooms.

Is Davidson's Theory of Action Consistent?

A theory of human action should provide an account of the connection between reason and action when an agent acts for a reason, and it should provide an account of the explanatory force of explanations of actions. On the causal theory of action, the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and explanations of actions are modeled on ordinary causal explanations, where events are explained by citing other events as their causes. A once common objection to the causal theory had it that reasons cannot be causes, since explanations of actions do not fit reason and action into a nomic nexus expressed by laws or law-like generalizations. Against this train of thought, Donald Davidson defends a version of the causal theory by arguing that the view that the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and the view that explanations of actions do not fit reasons and actions into a nomic nexus are compatible. Davidson's theory generated a small industry of criticism focusing on the implications of his version of the causal theory for the nature of the causal connection between reasons and actions.

Is Davidson's Theory of Action Consistent?

A theory of human action should provide an account of the connection between reason and action when an agent acts for a reason, and it should provide an account of the explanatory force of explanations of actions. On the causal theory of action, the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and explanations of actions are modeled on ordinary causal explanations, where events are explained by citing other events as their causes. A once common objection to the causal theory had it that reasons cannot be causes, since explanations of actions do not fit reason and action into a nomic nexus expressed by laws or law-like generalizations. Against this train of thought, Donald Davidson defends a version of the causal theory by arguing that the view that the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and the view that explanations of actions do not fit reasons and actions into a nomic nexus are compatible. Davidson's theory generated a small industry of criticism focusing on the implications of his version of the causal theory for the nature of the causal connection between reasons and actions.

The Concept of Feasibility: A Multivocal Account

A common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible.