Self-evident Truth Research Articles

Delegation of Authority to Human Beings: A Late Safavid Theologian’s Account on the Legislative Meaning of Tafwīḍ

Abstract In this article, I intend to examine an account of human free will suggested by one of the most prominent figures in religious institutions during the Safavid reign, which had a long-term effect on subsequent discussions on the subject. Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī (1627–1699), a renowned theologian, muḥaddith, and jurist who played a significant role in shaping Shīʿism in Iran, emphasized human free will (ikhtiyār) in his various works. While he considers it a self-evident truth, Majlisī attempts to justify human agency in voluntary activities through his arguments. However, it appears that his emphasis on human free will is primarily aimed at demonstrating that individuals are legally bound. Due to the limitations of human intellect, Majlisī argues that humans cannot be considered competent to create the legal rules they must follow. Consequently, individuals are not authorized to determine their own obligations even though they are responsible for their actions. Thus, while Majlisī was determined to establish that humans possess free will, he believed that individuals were not allowed to exercise this freedom in the realm of social and political affairs.

Is Moore’s Moral Objectivist Argument Sufficient Against Moral Relativism?

This study aims to expose certain weaknesses in Moore’s moral objectivist argument against moral relativism and subjectivism. It suggests that a moral objectivist argument has to explain moral diversity against moral relativism. Moral relativism is one of the most critical debates in metaethics, and it can be interpreted in two different ways: one as moral realism and the other as moral anti-realism. Moral realism, when reduced to moral objectivism, excludes moral relativism and subjectivism beyond moral realism. I will refer to this interpretation as narrowed moral realism. But moral realism can be extended in an inclusive way such as moral subjectivism and relativism. I will refer to this as extended moral realism. Due to the focus of the study, I will introduce both extended moral realism and narrowed moral realism in the introduction section. Then, I will address G. E. Moore's narrowed moral realism. I will criticize his arguments for their failure to explain the diversity of moral codes. Finally, I suggest that moral subjectivism and moral relativism can be appropriately addressed within extended moral realism. Contrary to Moore's claims, I contend that moral relativism and moral subjectivism would be claims within moral realism. I also evaluate the two main claims from a moral realist perspective. Moral subjectivism claims that moral reality is constructed by an individual’s mental state. Moral relativism argues that social codes of human conduct completely determine moral reality. In the first section of the study, I discussed moral relativism from a Moorean perspective, which asserts that there are self-evident and indefinable truths at the foundation of objective morality. The second section contends that if Moore is correct, however, it necessitates an explanation for why different cultures accept different moral codes. The third section argues the fact that Moore fails to provide any explanation for this. In the conclusion part, I claim that moral relativism and moral subjectivism can be viewed as moral realist theories based on the failure of Moore's arguments.

The Politics of Blame-Seeking: Strategic Antagonism, Effective Alignment and Benefitting From Backlash

Why would a politician ever want to be blamed? Under what contextual conditions might blame-seeking behaviour emerge as a rational strategy? What tactics, tools and strategies might they deploy? Where is the empirical evidence of blame-seeking in action and why does it matter? These are the questions this article engages with as it challenges the long-standing ‘self-evident truth’ within political science that blame-is-bad. We argue that a new ‘blame game’ has emerged in which blame generation is deployed not solely to taint opponents but also to demonstrate the blame-seeker’s willingness to challenge convention, break the rules, or side with the marginalized. In a broader context characterized by democratic dissatisfaction, anti-political sentiment and affective polarization, we suggest that blame-seeking assumes a powerful symbolic and performative dimension. Antagonizing certain sections of society and then harnessing the backlash provides a powerful political strategy which challenges traditional scholarly assumptions about credit and blame existing in a zero-sum relationship. We illustrate these arguments using the case of Boris Johnson’s rise to the British premiership. A focus on blame-seeking, we suggest, expands our understanding of what politicians say and do to achieve their goals in polarized political contexts.

“Coursebook or No Coursebook”? A False Dilemma

The outdated debate over whether an EFL coursebook is necessary or not seems as relevant as ever since it is by no means a self-evident truth to every EFL educator. This paper argues that among the range of factors affecting the assessment of a given textbook is the teacher’s promptness to promote closer collaboration with students through appropriate means. More specifically, a pre-use textbook evaluation through the compilation of an appropriate checklist was put to the test with the aim of checking the serviceability of the new coursebook for the first grade of Greek General Lyceum. The case of an EFL teacher who tried to predict the impact of a textbook on her specific teaching context indicated that the expectation of student inputs to the implementation of learning activities (e.g., participation in activities using technology) was valued as a key determinant in setting priorities for in-use textbook evaluation.

Jurisprudence: The Study of the Rule of Law in a Republic

When we understand the ontological, political and legal underpinnings associated with the concept of freedom, liberty and rights, we understand the relationship between rights and laws. Rights can be understood as liberties or as laws. Liberties can be understood as de facto rights or as de jure rights. It is de jure rights that are recognized as laws that provide the basis for the rule of law. It is the rule of law that provides the basis for equal rights and equal justice in an ideal republic. Rights, laws and the rule of law are distinct. Rights are self-evident truths. Laws are imperatives backed by sanctions (John Austin). The rule of law is a principle that purports that the recognition de facto and de jure rights provide the basis for political, social and economic justice. People live by the rights recognized by law. As such, the rule of law advocates two fundamental underpinnings in a republic: (1) the recognition of rights as the basis for equal rights and equal justice, and (2) the recognition of law as the basis for governance. (H.L.A. Hart). However, since the recognition of law is the recognition of rights, the recognition of rights precedes the governance by law principle. What is fundamental to the rule of law is that it recognizes rights, legitimizes political rule and administers equal/blind justice (Meyers, 1213). As such, no branch of government can weaponize laws to terminate recognized individual rights. The maxim of the republic should be – while anyone can be the ruler, everyone lives as free as the ruler. Majority rule and protection of self-evident individual rights is fundamental to an ideal republic. Keywords: law, equal rights, equal justice, impunity, rule of law

“Judgments of Nature”: James Wilson's Natural-Law Jurisprudence

AbstractCan and should judges refer to the natural law? I address these questions from the point of view of James Wilson, paying specific attention to a question the scholarship does not address: Why does Wilson believe judges can (and must), in certain instances, refer to natural law? I develop a new taxonomy of Wilson's conception of judgment that answers this question. Wilson's definition of judgment as including the moral sense and reason, and his division of reasoning into demonstrative, moral, and legal reasoning, indicate why he countenances judicial recourse to natural law in certain cases yet remains committed to popular sovereignty and judicial restraint. Wilson describes “judgments of nature” as intuitive judgments based on self-evident truths and articulates how judges might be called upon to make certain judgments based on a manifest repugnancy to the natural law. His judicial decisions confirm this commitment to natural law and judicial restraint.

Severing the Gordian Knot of Sovereignty and Migration Control

The claim that states have an unfettered sovereign right to control their borders and exclude non-citizens from their territory is accepted everywhere without contestation. Yet it is anything but a self-evident truth. While taken for granted today, the assumption that control over migration is the “last bastion of sovereignty” represents a radical departure from the norm of freedom of movement (for some, not others, namely, white, “civilized,” Christian men) that defined international law's earlier approach. What avenues for reform, resistance, and recalibration open when we revisit the legal foundations and contemporary consequences of the dominant understanding according to which states have near-absolute authority to regulate migration as an incident of sovereignty? In the spirit of asking big questions and addressing topics of lasting relevance, this symposium seeks to problematize the view that each state has unfettered discretion to control its territory and decide who it admits “upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”1 With a surge of nationalist-populist anger and anti-immigrant sentiment rising across the globe and the corresponding shrinking of rights and protections afforded to those on the move, there is added urgency to challenge the view readily expressed in public debate that migration is an “existential threat to be managed with the full and legally unregulated power of the sovereign state.”2 This view has emboldened governments, operating alone or in concert, to invest unprecedented amounts of resources, political capital, and institutional capacity to “take back control” over borders and migration—as the Brexit slogan memorably put it. With voters across the globe naming immigration a top concern, governments are recalibrating their policies in an increasingly restrictive direction, shutting the gates of admission to would-be migrants and asylum seekers.3 The deep-seated assumption that states have inherent power over migration provides legal cover for such acts, despite the immense human toll, erosion of rights, and denial of the basic protection and dignity of those who are caught in the increasingly sweeping dragnet of ever-expanding borders and migration control regimes.4 Laws, regulations, and declarations about the urgency to “sort out the border management situation to ensure that the porous borders are addressed in a way that protects the sovereignty of our state” are nowadays proclaimed as a matter of course by public authorities in established democracies as well as autocracies, spanning the gamut from former imperial powers to post-colonial states.5 Exploring what has been forgotten or pushed underground with the triumph of the dominant understanding that states have an inherent sovereign right to control their borders—a view so prevalent that we rarely notice how it impairs our ability to imagine alternatives—is the kernel of this inquiry.

Al-Ghazālī’s Methodological Skepticism and Foundationalism

In this article, I examine al-Ghazālī’s methodological skepticism and its role in establishing foundational knowledge.Despite the considerable scholarly attention given to The Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl), the foundationalism present in it has received relatively limited investigation. Al-Ghazālī established the foundations of knowledge by taking his methodological skepticism to its logical conclusions. His engagement with the sources of knowledge, namely, taqlīd, sense perception, and self-evident truths form the cornerstone of his skepticism. To understand how al-Ghazālī finds deliverance from his skeptical impasse, and ultimately establish foundational knowledge, the concepts of “divine light” and fiṭra will be dis­cussed. Unlike Greek skepticism, al-Ghazālī’s skepticism was not a denial of the possibility of knowledge about the nature of reality, nor was it a denial of Muslim doctrine, but a methodological approach to establish the foundations of knowledge.

The built environment and public spaces informing teaching and learning

Modern learning environments have evolved beyond traditional classrooms, encompassing various settings like digital networks, social media, communities, and urban landscapes. The defining characteristics of an educational space include purpose and intentionality, going beyond conventional boundaries and offering students practical, context-specific learning experiences. Engagement with public spaces and the constructed environment facilitates spatial engagement and participation.
 This text explores a critical pedagogy that aims to uncover institutional power and prevailing ideologies within everyday experiences, questioning the educational value of buildings, cities, streets, and walls. It examines the constructed environment as an educational tool, including cities, parks, houses, streets, public, and private spaces.
 Within the domain of educational research, urban public spaces and the built environment serve as crucial contexts for graduate students, providing experiential learning opportunities and an in-depth analysis of the intricate relationship between political and pedagogical rationales that shape urban spaces and structures. This exploration also extends to the spaces between buildings and the practices that influence them.
 Urban spaces offer genuine learning contexts, enhancing research skills and honing observational abilities. Students are encouraged to delve beneath the surface of familiarity, transcending self-evident truths.
 The text presents three case studies examining cultures formed by young individuals in schools, urban populations, small communities, and urban artists. These studies spotlight the educational significance embedded within the interplay of spatial configurations and the inhabitants of these spaces.
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METAPHYSICAL STATUS OF PHYSICAL LAWS

The creators of physics sought to construct it like Euclidean geometry, where a few mathematically formulated axioms, laws, opens the possibility of an unlimited number of theorems, conclusions concerning specific situations, verified by special observations, experiments. The idea of this program of cognition, not necessarily quite consciously, arose from what may be called Biblical Platonism, a synthesis of the Pythagorean-Platonism of antiquity and Biblical cosmism. Explicitly or not, this program implied the following properties of the laws, the atemporal logical structure of the universe: sufficient mathematical simplicity, universality, absolute precision, completeness and compatibility with life and thought, and anthropicity. The subsequent development of physics has demonstrated both a truly cosmic success and certain problems and limits of this paradigm. The former manifested in the universality of coverage and the fantastic accuracy of the mathematically elegant laws of matter discovered. The latter were related to the dualism of mind and matter, the enigma of the emergence and development of life, the discovery of the limits to the applicability of theories, and the forced rejection of some self-evident truths that previously seemed immutable. The article outlines approaches to the solution of these problems, which seem to be compatible with biblical Platonism.

Being and Becoming Well in the Most Transparent of Times: The Limits of Racialized Healing Strategies in Educational Research

This article examines the possibilities and limits of strategies directed toward racialized healing amidst declarations of pandemics and legislative attacks on public school teachers. We question what these strategies take as a self-evident truth: that race and racism can be conceptualized in terms of health and transparently addressed through research and practice focused on racialized healing. To complicate this assertion, we locate the strategies within a race-health nexus, a form of biopower. This nexus establishes norms, categories, and classifications that justify ranking and comparing, dividing and differentially intervening on some in the name of the health and wellbeing of all. We historicize how this nexus became integral to schooling in the United States in the 19th century, normalizing populations according to civilizational values that doubled as health standards. We argue that this nexus makes possible biopolitical strategies of “tailoring treatments” and “cultivating potential” that continue to undergird health and healing strategies in educational research and pedagogical practice today, thereby reconfiguring, rather than overturning, hierarchies of human difference. The analysis demonstrates that racialized healing strategies provide no ontological guarantee for reducing racialized harm. Instead, such efforts must be reflexively situated within the interplay of biology, coloniality, and education that makes “healing” seem necessary and urgent in the first place.

Integrated Care: Reflections on Change in Health Services, Axel Kaehne

The subject of Integrated Care has been written about extensively from both a practice and a policy viewpoint, yet it still remains as elusive as Lewis Carrol’s Snark. Axel Kaehne’s book is a significant step forward in capturing in a very readable form the plurality of approaches taken to its scholarly examination: reprising and bringing together the insights and conclusions of a significant volume of published material over the last two decades. The author draws out key points such as the assumption that integrated care is regarded as a self-evident ‘good’, yet very little concrete evidence exists about the underlying problem integrated care seeks to solve other than reliance on another seemingly self-evident truth that it is the answer to disparateness, fragmentation and lack of individually focused care and treatment pathways of clinical and social care services. He identifies the fact that integration is a policy-driven activity rather than a natural evolution from practice.

Experimenting with Failure

In his article ‘Mindless Modernism’, published in 2013, Joshua Gang expressed his scepticism about the established narrative of modernism’s so-called inward turn. In his view, the notion that modernism was concerned with exploring the complex intricacies of human consciousness offers at best a partial view of the influence of psychology on the period’s most formally experimental literature. ‘In treating the introspective mind as a self-evident truth of modernism’, Gang warned, ‘we preclude rather than encourage new approaches to the period, particularly if those approaches are invested in the history of science, analytic philosophy, or the empirical study of mind.’1 The article was a necessary reminder that ‘psychology, and modernism’s relationship to psychology, did not end with introspection’.2 In many ways, Joshua Powell’s Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology: Perception, Attention, Imagery is the kind of scholarly work that Gang called for. Published in Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series, the book focuses on Beckett’s theatre and prose works from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Powell argues that Beckett’s works are not simply artistically radical but can also be understood as scientific experiments. The book’s aim is to outline ‘the extent to which the psychological experiment comes to inform Beckett’s own experimental methods, and ultimately what these methods can be seen to achieve’ (p. 9). There are six main chapters in the book, most of which focus on a specific work (Not I, That Time, Footfalls, and Nohow On get individual chapters), through the lens of psychological concepts such as inattention or face-reading. Powell’s approach is significant in two respects. First, he shifts the focus from Beckett’s canonical early novels towards his less famous later plays such as Not I or That Time. Second, he largely bypasses the conversation about Beckett’s relationship to psychoanalysis (which he correctly argues has long dominated critical discussions) in favour of less frequently explored commonalities between Beckett’s work and behaviourism and gestalt psychology.

On classical liberalism and democratic optimism: James M. Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom

We recently marked the 60th anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. It was also the 30th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom et al’s ‘Covenants with and without a sword’, in which she demonstrated the capacity of individuals for self-governance without submission to an external authority. This article considers these two foundational works as a starting point from which to explore the intellectual tradition of ‘democratic optimism’ in public choice. The Buchanan/Ostrom legacy is an unshakable faith in the capacity of individuals for self-governance, a significant departure from more orthodox thinking that presumed the necessity of a social planner to oversee, coordinate and enforce collective actions. Their work also illustrates the importance of questioning the assumptions of economic models and modes of thought. Examination of antecedent assumptions is useful not only for understanding the depth and complexity of economic and political choices, but also for thinking about the history of the economics discipline, the viability of research programmes and the ‘danger of self-evident truths’.

Melancholic Relationship to Appearance: A Fanonian Reading of Amadu’s Novel “No Past No Present No Future”

This study is an exploration of the melancholic relationship to appearance reflected in Amadu Maddy’s “No Past No Present No Future”. To this end, the researcher uses textual analysis and descriptive criticism to unravel the causes and consequences of melancholic relationship to appearance. The theory of racial melancholia which is dominantly informed by Fanonian approach to the psychology of racism is used to account for the intra-psychic forces which operate within the melancholic characters in the subject novel. As the finding discloses, Amadu’s novel saw at close range that the immediate postcolonial world is dominated by two groups of people: some hermitized white souls whose mindset is stuck in more traditional forms of biological, and pseudo-scientific racism, and those black people with “black skin and white masks.”. Both exist in a borrowed time, unable to come to terms with the psychological states upon which their conscious and unconscious thoughts are hanging, have long lost wellness. The former see their articles of racial superiority as a self-evident truth; the latter plunge into a psychic process whereby the loss of belonging becomes the cause of ongoing trauma, realizing that they belong nowhere, that they must live in a world that would never give recognition to their existence. 
 This study is an exploration of the melancholic relationship to appearance reflected in Amadu Maddy’s “No Past No Present No Future”. To this end, the researcher uses textual analysis and descriptive criticism to unravel the causes and consequences of melancholic relationship to appearance. The theory of racial melancholia which is dominantly informed by Fanonian approach to the psychology of racism is used to account for the intra-psychic forces which operate within the melancholic characters in the subject novel. As the finding discloses, Amadu’s novel saw at close range that the immediate postcolonial world is dominated by two groups of people: some hermitized white souls whose mindset is stuck in more traditional forms of biological, and pseudo-scientific racism, and those black people with “black skin and white masks.”. Both exist in a borrowed time, unable to come to terms with the psychological states upon which their conscious and unconscious thoughts are hanging, have long lost wellness. The former see their articles of racial superiority as a self-evident truth; the latter plunge into a psychic process whereby the loss of belonging becomes the cause of ongoing trauma, realizing that they belong nowhere, that they must live in a world that would never give recognition to their existence.
 
 
 Received: 03 October 2022 / Accepted: 30 December 2022 / Published: 5 January 2023

Анджолини vs Кант: к философскому наследию Полоцкой иезуитской академии

The movement for the revival of the Scholastic tradition (Neo-Scholasticism) was a reaction to devastating criticism by the representatives of Enlightenment which led to the destruction of traditional metaphysics and of epistemological optimism, the two pillars of European religious philosophy. Reception of Kantian ideas in Neo-Scholasticism varied from total rejection to its use in renewing the philosophical foundation of religious philosophy. In this regard the legacy of the Polotsk Jesuit Academy was one of the first attempts to interpret Kant’s ideas and confront them in the framework of the Scholastic tradition. It is therefore not irrelevant to look at how Kant’s programmatic ideas were perceived at the Polotsk Jesuit Academy, one of the few centres of Jesuit philosophy that survived in the territory of the Russian Empire in the early nineteenth century. The object of this study is the attempt at a critical analysis of Kant made in the Philosophical Instructions for Students at the Polotsk Academy by the Academy’s professor, Giuseppe Angiolini. Angiolini constantly refers to Kant in his reasoning and sees him as his main ideological rival. The ideas articulated in the Philosophical Instructions influenced the philosophical positions of the Academy’s graduates who in turn made a tangible contribution to the development of the Belarusian intellectual tradition. The relationship between Kant’s ideas and the ideas Angiolini drew from the Scholastic tradition is analysed through the use of the concepts that are common to both trends, such as the transcendental, the empirical and the sensible, self-evident truths and common sense.

Perception, Justification, and Philosophical Truths

In this commentary, I consider some of the main themes in Robert Audi’s and raise some objections with special reference to Audi’s account of the nature of perception and perceptual justification and his claim that there exist non-trivial, self-evident philosophical truths and principles.

Critical Realism and the Sun Paradigm

A ‘paradigm’ is a mindset based on interconnected assumptions and underpinnings which appear to be self-evident truths. It is thus an intellectual structure founded on connected components while being, at the same time, an understanding of reality. 
 
 Paradigms decide what does, or does not, happen. A shift to accurate paradigm opens the way for much positive and beneficial change.
 
 A new paradigm cannot be understood by using the analysis and understandings of the old paradigm. It can only be understood in terms of its own new analysis and understandings

Моральные аспекты компатибилизма

Most participants in the current free will debate do not believe that the thesis of physical determinism is true in the actual world. Regardless of this fact, compatibilists keep argu­ing that free will is compatible with physical determinism, and incompatibilists keep challenging this claim. In the first and second section of this paper, I show that the com­patibility of free will with physical determinism is mainly discussed as a means to clarify what the criteria of free will and moral responsibility are. Many naturalistically minded libertarians accept the same criteria of free and morally responsible action as many com­patibilists do, but they introduce an additional criterion of indeterminism. In the last three sections, I question the moral implications of this additional criterion. In the third section, I propose a thought experiment in which agents meeting the incompatibilist criteria of freedom (IC-agents) and agents meeting the compatibilist criteria of freedom (CC-agents) live in the same possible world. If libertarians are right that an agent’s moral status depends on whether that agent meets the additional incompatibilist criterion of indeter­minism, then our treatment of IC- and CC-agents in that world should be sensitive to the moral difference between these two types of agents. However, at least in some cir­cumstances this is not the case, as I demonstrate with the example of two moral dilemmas in sections four and five. I conclude that the assumption about the different moral status of CC- and IC-agents is not supported by our moral intuitions, and thus cannot be as­serted by incompatibilists as a self-evident truth, but requires further justification.

Res nulla loquitur

The concept of res nulla loquitur, the no-thing speaks, is a reformulation of the rule of evidence, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself. It is drawn from a careful examination of the recorded arrest of Sandra Bland in 2015, and the evidence collected in Texas’s subsequent investigation of her death while in custody. Engaging with what remains of Sandra Bland’s speech performatively by “listening while you look” (Moten), the article offers a critical reading of the rhetoric of self-evident truth associated with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence on lethal arrest and more recent audio-visual evidence of police use of lethal force against black citizens. To emphasize the sonic dimension of the terrain of struggle with the violence of the word of law, each section is accompanied by sound loops the author created from evidence used by artist, lauren woods, in her exhibit, American Monument (2020). These sounds loops can be accessed at resnullaloquitur.com.