عالمية الدعوة القرآنية للسلام وسبل تقريبها: قراءة في التفسير المنهاجي للإمام عبد السلام ياسين

The problem statement of this research is about Imam Yassine’s thought in his reading of Islamic past and present and Western intellectual trends, and about his long experience in the field of Da’wah, as Imam Yassine urged Muslims to be capable of handling the mission of the holy Quran. It becomes more complicated with Al-Tafsir al-Minhaji as an approach to interpret the holy Quran and ease it for Muslim youth understanding in Imam Yassine’s books about thought, education, Da’wah, mysticism and civilization. This research aims to explain how Al-Tafsir al-Minhaji concerns about the method of practicing Quranic interpretation in Da’wah for Muslim Ummah renaissance. The research also aims to highlight that achieving global peace is one of main Quranic objective that Muslim thinkers are paying a great attention to its role in dialogue between variant sectarianists and theologians. Researchers followed the descriptive and inductive methods to explore Yassine’s views about peace, civilization and argumentation. Some findings of this research: Imam Yassine confirms the necessity of coincidence between the Quranic objectives and political objectives; and calls for dialogue based on Quranic objectives and its component of wisdom and dynamic argumentation, which leads to peace. To understand the fluctuation of history in the light of Quranic exegesis, Imam Yassine scrutinized the Quranic objectives of peaceful coexistence and cultural exchange.

The Dialogue Between Believers and Atheists: the Platonic Model in the Laws

This paper examines the question concerning the right model of epistemically rational dialogue. First of all, the main, though not undisputed, principles of rational dialogue are defined according to the contemporary field of the epistemology of disagreement. It then explains why even these principles are not sufficient for making the disagreement between believers and atheists not only a rational discourse but also a fruitful dialogue. This paper defends a thesis that the latter aim can be achieved with a proper model of dialogue, which is found in Plato’s Laws – one of the first discussions between the believers and the atheists in the Western intellectual tradition. This model not only includes the contemporary principles of rational argument but also provides some new guidelines for the solution of problems that lead the believers and the atheists to the communicational dead end.

Introducing Solid Fluids

This issue opens an inquiry into the tension between solidity and fluidity. This tension is ingrained in the Western intellectual tradition and informs theoretical debates across the sciences and humanities. In physics, solid is one phase of matter, alongside liquid, gas and plasma. This, however, assumes all matter to be particulate. Reversing the relation between statics and dynamics, we argue to the contrary, that matter exists as continuous flux. It is both solid and fluid. What difference would it make were we to start from our inescapable participation in a world of solid fluids? Is solid fluidity a condition of being in the midst of things, or of intermediacy on a solid-fluid continuum? Does the world appear fluid in the process of its formation, but solid when you look back on things already formed? Here we open new paths for theorizing matter and meaning at a time of ecological crisis.

From geographical pluralism to discourse pluralism

Like other pluralists, geographical pluralists oppose Western intellectual hegemony and advocate the diversity of sociological knowledge. Such appeals are reasonable and justified, but they give up the universality of knowledge while pursuing the diversity of knowledge, implicitly creating the danger of fragmenting knowledge. On the contrary, from the standpoint of discourse constructivism, a discourse pluralism can be constructed to enable us to not only deconstruct the intellectual hegemony of Western sociology but also pursue universal sociological knowledge.

Edgework: Viewing curiosity as fundamentally relational

Most theories of curiosity emphasize the acquisition of information. Such conceptualizations focus on the actions of the knower in seeking units of knowledge. Each unit is valued as an unknown and appropriated in becoming known. Yet, recent advances across a range of disciplines from philosophy to cognitive science suggest that it may be time to complement the acquisitional theory of curiosity with a connectional theory of curiosity. This alternative perspective focuses on the actions of the knower in seeking relations among informational units, laying down lines of intersection, and thereby building a scaffold or network of knowledge. Intuitively, curiosity becomes edgework. In this chapter, we dwell on the notion of edgework, wrestle with its relation to prior accounts, and exercise its unique features to craft alternative reasons for curiosity's value to humanity. To begin, we engage in a philosophical discussion of the evidence for connectional curiosity across the last two millennia in the Western intellectual tradition. We then move to a contemporary operationalization of connectional curiosity in the mathematical language of network science. To make our discussion more concrete, we walk through a case study of humans browsing Wikipedia. The groundwork laid, we turn to the practical question of how (if at all) the paradigm of curiosity as edgework manifests in the contemporary lives of humans today. Does such a conceptualization help us to better understand the relations between curiosity and mental health? Might the edgework paradigm explain the drive to build specific structures of knowledge? Would the account help us to encode, test, and validate existing theories of curiosity, or propose new ones? Could it clarify why and how our culture values curiosity, in its multiple manifestations, plethora of practices, and kindred kinds in many bodies? In considering interdisciplinary answers to these questions, we find that the notion of edgework offers a fresh, flexible, and explanatory account of curiosity. More broadly, it uncovers new opportunities to use the lens of science to examine, probe, and interrogate this important dimension of the human experience.

BIOPOLITICS AS AN ASPECT OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN NON-LIBERAL POLITICAL REGIMES (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE PRC)

The article focuses on the potential applicability of biopolitics to modern elements of public administration in non-liberal political regimes on the example of China. M. Foucault's biopolitics is a rather difficult concept to use for the analysis of modern countries of the East due to the initial connection of the concept to the Western intellectual tradition. Based on analysis of the various researches in biopolitics, we propose to look further into strategies for expanding the concept to determine the most suitable for the study of public administration in non-liberal political regimes on the example of the PRC. It is noted that modern China, being an example of a non-liberal political regime, has signs of biopolitical state governance. It is concluded that biopolitics as a technology of power over the population is not an exclusive part of liberal governance.

“Bitter Shade”

This chapter assesses a mimetic relationship between objects and their shadows, between things and their signs. It focuses on Pakistani farmers' concept of sayah, which loosely translates as “shade.” The roots of the concept of shade in Western intellectual traditions extends back to Plato's parable of the cave, the lesson of which pivots on the difference between shadows and reality. The difference between object and shadow has figured prominently in the subsequent historical development of diverse fields ranging from astronomy to child psychology. Pakistani farmers conceive of tree shade not as an absence of something, light, but rather as the presence of something — having size, density, temperature, and taste. Knowledge of all of these dimensions of shade is used to manage tree–crop interaction, based on humoral principles balancing properties of hot and cold, wet and dry, bitter and sweet. The relation between shadow and tree is mimetic and approximate: it is the character of the tree that is important to interaction with proximate crops; the appearance of the shadow alone can be deceiving. Ultimately, the difference between shadow and object is another means of attaining perspective on reality through removal from it.

Japanese Philosopher Seiichi Hatano (1877–1950) on the Problems of Time

The name of Seiichi Hatano (1877–1950) is still not so widely known outside of Japan. At the same time, he belongs to those outstanding Japanese thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, who not only introduced to their compatriots the history of Western philosophy, but also acted as generators of original concepts created on the basis of deep critical understanding of the Western intellectual heritage. The article deals with the reconstruction of Seiichi Hatano’s theory of time, formulated in his monograph “Time and Eternity” (1943), which crowned his creative career. The starting point of Hatano’s philosophy of time were studies of the basic human experience, which he interpreted in terms of the flow of life and the interaction of the Self and the Other. The subject of the Japanese thinker’s special interest was the problem of overcoming temporality. Hatano’s original contribution to the theory of time was the creation of the three-fold scheme of temporality, considered on the main levels of life – natural, cultural, and religious, conclusions about the divergence of time at the natural and cultural levels, and the idea that the past in history is governed by the perspective of the future.