Islamic and Religious Studies: Challenges and Opportunities for Twenty-first Century Indonesia

This paper explores challenges and opportunities for Religious and Islamic Studies in the opening years of the twenty first century. It is especially concerned with relationships between the Indonesian, North American and Global contexts in which the two disciplines are located and the ways in which scholarly discourse can be enriched by trans-national cooperation and discourse. It is argued that Religious Studies should be understood as an academic discourse about religion and must be clearly distinguished from religious discourse internal to and across confessional lines. In a more concrete way, the paper is concerned with the epistemological foundations of the academic study of religion and with the issue of pluralism. It is argued that in today's globalized world pluralism is a fact that cannot be ignored or eliminated. Discussion on what Eck has identified as three dimensions of pluralism, civic, theolo­gical and academic

Three Remarks on “Reflective Equilibrium“

John Rawls’ “reflective equilibrium” ranges amongst the most popular conceptions in contemporary ethics when it comes to the basic methodological question of how to justify and trade off different normative positions and attitudes. Even where Rawls’ specific contractualist account is not adhered to, “reflective equilibrium” is readily adopted as the guiding idea of coherentist approaches, seeking moral justification not in a purely deductive or inductive manner, but in some balancing procedure that will eventually procure a stable adjustment of relevant doctrines and standpoints. However, it appears that the widespread use of this idea has led to some considerable deviations from its meaning within Rawls’ original framework and to a critical loss of conceptual cogency as an ethico-hermeneutical tool. This contribution identifies three kinds of “balancing” constellations that are frequently, but inadequately brought forth under the heading of Rawlsian “reflective equilibrium”: balancing theoretical accounts against intuitive convictions; balancing general principles against particular judgements; balancing opposite ethical conceptions or divergent moral statements, respectively. It is argued that each of these applications departs from Rawls’ original construction of “reflective equilibrium” and also deprives the idea of its reliability in clarifying and weighing moral stances

A co-original approach towards law-making in the internet age

There is an increasing interest in incorporating significant citizen participation into the law-making process by developing the use of the internet in the public sphere. However, no well-accepted e-participation model has prevailed. This article points out that, to be successful, we need critical reflection of legal theory and we also need further institutional construction based on the theoretical reflection. Contemporary dominant legal theories demonstrate too strong an internal legal point of view to empower the informal, social normative development on the internet. Regardless of whether we see the law as a body of rules or principles, the social aspect is always part of people’s background and attracts little attention. In this article, it is advocated that the procedural legal paradigm advanced by Jürgen Habermas represents an important breakthrough in this regard. Further, Habermas’s co-originality thesis reveals a neglected internal relationship between public autonomy and private autonomy. I believe the co-originality theory provides the essential basis on which a connecting infrastructure between the legal and the social could be developed. In terms of the development of the internet to include the public sphere, co-originality can also help us direct the emphasis on the formation of public opinion away from the national legislative level towards the local level; that is, the network of governance.1 This article is divided into two sections. The focus of Part One is to reconstruct the co-originality thesis (section 2, 3). This paper uses the application of discourse in the adjudication theory of Habermas as an example. It argues that Habermas would be more coherent, in terms of his insistence on real communication in his discourse theory, if he allowed his judges to initiate improved interaction with the society. This change is essential if the internal connection between public autonomy and private autonomy in the sense of court adjudication is to be truly enabled. In order to demonstrate such improved co-original relationships, the empowering character of the state-made law is instrumental in initiating the mobilization of legal intermediaries, both individual and institutional. A mutually enhanced relationship is thus formed; between the formal, official organization and its governance counterpart aided by its associated ‘local’ public sphere. Referring to Susan Sturm, the Harris v Forklift Systems Inc. (1930) decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the field of sexual harassment is used as an example. Using only one institutional example to illustrate how the co-originality thesis can be improved is not sufficient to rebuild the thesis but this is as much as can be achieved in this article. In Part Two, the paper examines, still at the institutional level, how Sturm develops an overlooked sense of impartiality, especially in the derivation of social norms; i.e. multi-partiality instead of neutral detachment (section 4). These two ideas should be combined as the criterion for impartiality to evaluate the legitimacy of the joint decision-making processes of both the formal official organization and ‘local’ public sphere. Sturm’s emphasis on the deployment of intermediaries, both institutional and individual, can also enlighten the discourse theory. Intermediaries are essential for connecting the disassociated social networks, especially when a breakdown of communication occurs due to a lack of data, information, knowledge, or disparity of value orientation, all of which can affect social networks. If intermediaries are used, further communication will not be blocked as a result of the lack of critical data, information, knowledge or misunderstandings due to disparity of value orientation or other causes. The institutional impact of the newly constructed co-originality thesis is also discussed in Part Two. Landwehr’s work on institutional design and assessment for deliberative interaction is first discussed. This article concludes with an indication of how the ‘local’ public sphere, through e-rulemaking or online dispute resolution, for example, can be constructed in light of the discussion of this article

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress

Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) denotes the problem of jointly localizing a moving platform and mapping the environment. This work studies the SLAM problem using a combination of inertial sensors, measuring the platform's accelerations and angular velocities, and a monocular camera observing the environment. We formulate the SLAM problem on a nonlinear least squares (NLS) batch form, whose solution provides a smoothed estimate of the motion and map. The NLS problem is highly nonconvex in practice, so a good initial estimate is required. We propose a multi-stage iterative procedure, that utilises the fact that the SLAM problem is linear if the platform's rotations are known. The map is initialised with camera feature detections only, by utilising feature tracking and clustering of  feature tracks. In this way, loop closures are automatically detected. The initialization method and subsequent NLS refinement is demonstrated on both simulated and real data

More or less pluralistic? A typology of remedial and alternative perspectives on the monetary valuation of the environment

Maintaining plural values is important when there is no conclusive principle by which the relative priority of normative positions can be determined. Value-articulating institutions predicated upon such principles have a low pluralistic potential. In response to the failures of stated-preference approaches to economic valuation, new perspectives have been developed to capture plural values. Three broad approaches are identified. The first, functional diversification, seeks to encompass the multiple qualities of the object of valuation, whereas positional modification enforces a particular mode of thinking on the subject. Both entail a prior judgement of values and benefit from a reduction in the range of values. Eventually, therefore, both approaches collapse pluralism to a problem that can be tackled. The third approach, structural reconstruction, has greater pluralistic potential, recognising that the more diverse and uncertain the object of valuation, the more compelling it is.postprin

Language on Holiday and the Philosophy of Mind: A Linguistically Sensitive Approach to Phenomenal Consciousness, Pain, and Psychological Predicates

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to debates about three topics in the philosophy of mind: phenomenal consciousness, pain, and the extension of psychological predicates. Chapter 1 outlines my metaphilosophical views and gives a roadmap to the thesis. Chapter 2 argues that the ‘what-it’s-like’ phrase as it is characteristically used in the literature on phenomenal consciousness has a technical meaning. I argue that this has the consequence that the phrase says nothing informative about phenomenal consciousness and that lay people’s use of the phrase does not show that they believe in phenomenal consciousness. Chapter 3 argues that eliminativism about phenomenal consciousness is a view worth taking seriously. First, I clarify the eliminativist position, then I explain its motivation. Finally, I draw on the discussion in chapter 2 and argue that there is no compelling evidence for lay belief in phenomenal consciousness, hence that we are currently not in a position to say whether common sense counts in favour of eliminativism or realism. Chapter 4 addresses the main problem for eliminativism – the problem of explaining why people believe in phenomenality. I discuss four recently proposed theories and conclude that we are currently not in a position to tell which of these is the most promising eliminativist-friendly explanation of belief in phenomenality, but that the potential of (at least some of) these theories confirms the claim that eliminativism is a view worth taking seriously. Chapter 5 defends the Bodily Theory of pain, according to which pains are bodily occurrences located in an extra-cranial body part, which contrasts with the Experiential Theory, according to which pains are experiences located in the mind or brain. Chapter 6 discusses what a defender of the Bodily Theory should say about the pain-in-mouth argument, i.e. the step from (1) There is a pain in my finger, and (2) My finger is in my mouth, to (3) There is a pain in my mouth. Several accounts have been offered to explain why (1)-(3) sounds wrong. In chapter 6 I offer a novel account – the mereological view – that entails the Bodily Theory of pain. Chapter 7 discusses cognitive scientists’ ascription of psychological predicates to the brain, i.e. when cognitive scientists say things like ‘The brain thinks’. I propose the Synecdoche View, according to which the locutions of cognitive scientists are figurative, with ‘the brain’ referring to the human being, such that ‘The brain thinks’ reports the thinking of the human being, not the thinking of the brain. One consequence of this is that the locutions of cognitive scientists offer no reason to believe that psychological predicates extend to brains. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis by offering a speculative error theory, according to which some of my opponents’ views are based on conceptual conflations.Aker Scholarshi

Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics