Reconsidering Taylor's Design Argument

Contemporary philosophers have largely neglected Richard Taylor’s design argument. Given that the initial responses to the argument were largely negative, one might be tempted to conclude that the argument is simply philosophically inadequate. This paper rejects that conclusion by showing how Taylor’s argument has been misunderstood by his critics. In defending Taylor, it is shown that the two types of objections levied against him fail to even blemish his design argument, let alone refute it. Consideration is also given to the argument’s historical lineage, along with a proposal for future considerations of the connection between epistemological realism and design

International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's ‘Islamic government’

Eurocentric approaches to political Islam tend to deploy an internalist methodology that theoretically obscures the generative and constitutive role of international relations. This article addresses this problem through a critical application of Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ to Ayatollah Khomeini's invention of the concept of ‘Islamic government’. It argues that this concept was international in its socio-political stimulus and intellectual content, and, crucially, reflected, influenced, and mobilised an emergent liminal sociality that combined Western and Islamic socio-cultural forms. This heterogeneous character of Iran's experience of modernity is, the article argues, theoretically inaccessible to Eurocentric approaches’ homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of history, which, as a result, generate exceptionalist modes of explanations