Integral to the discipline of anthropology are both science and holism. The application of Optimality Theory to two partial kin terminologies narrows analysis to descriptive value, fragments phenomena, and constrains data selection, which precludes significant knowledge. Embedded in this critique is a call to move analysis from fragment to whole and from descriptive features to deeper levels of knowledge underlying kin terms, thereby leading to a cognitive path for holistic understanding of human phenomena.

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation (...) in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games. (shrink)

Many current researches have sought to explore the thought and contributions of Ibn Khaldūn to the various disciplines of human knowledge including philosophy of history, historiography, politics, economics, and education. Little interest, however, is given to his contributions to the theory of critical thinking. This research investigates Ibn Khaldūn’s perspective on critical thinking and critique of intellectual disciplines while exploring its origin and dimensions. The research shows that Ibn Khaldūn’s critical thinking is essentially entrenched in the fundamental vision and origins (...) of Islam, and reflective of the broad Islamic scholarship and the practices of Muslim scholars across the different religious and rational disciplines. What characterises Ibn Khaldūn’s contribution to the field of critical thinking is his ability to apply it across various fields of scholarship yet with a conscious attention to society’s dynamics, particularly the practical dimensions and implications of his theory of human society. (shrink)

The modern concept and study of civilization have their roots, not in western Europe, but in the long tradition of scientific and philosophic inquiry that began in a self-conscious Islamicate civilization. They emerged—as Heidegger would say—within a “region of being” proper to systematic science. Western European thought has introduced new elements that have completely altered how collective and personal identities are conceived and experienced. In this age of “globalization,” expressions of identity survive precariously outside their former boundaries, and humanity faces (...) numerous challenges—environmental degradation, policy inertia, interstate bellicosity, cultural rivalries. Yet, the world has been globalized for at least a millennium, a fact partially obscured by the threadbare but widespread belief that modernity is a product of something called the West. One is thus justified in asking, as many people do today, if humanity has not lost its initiative. This is not a historical, a sociological or an empirical question, but fundamentally a philosophical one. The modern concepts of identity and personhood have come under heavy scrutiny because there can be no human initiative without the human agency that flows from them. Given their present inscrutability, and at the same time profound importance to us, Dr. Shaker brings to bear a wealth of original sources from both German thought and Ḥikmah, the latter based on material previously unavailable to scholars. He shows why posing the age-old question of identity anew in the light of these two traditions, whose special place in history is assured, can help clear the confusion surrounding modernity and civilization—i.e., the way we, the acting subject, live and deliberate on the present and the past. Proximity to Scholasticism, and therefore Islamicate philosophy, lends German thought up to Heidegger a unique ability to dialogue with Ḥikmah, as scholars since Max Horten and Henry Corbin have been discovering. Two fecund elements common to Heidegger, Qūnawī and Mullā Ṣadrā are of special importance: logos as the structural embodiment of the primary meaning of a thing, and the unity-in-difference that Ṣadrā finally formulated as the substantial movement of existentiation. Heidegger, who occupies a good portion of this study, questioned modern ontology at a time of social collapse and deep spiritual crisis not unlike ours. Yet, that period also saw the greatest breakthroughs in modern physics and social science. With the waning of the old naïvetés of biologism, psychologism and social evolutionism, our very conception of time and space as measurable determinations was overturned. Dr. Shaker thus concludes with a few chapters on the theme of identity renewal in Western literature and Muslim “reformism.” The roots of the latter point to a civilizational point of convergence between the Eurocentric worldview, which provides the secular aesthetics roots of modernism, and an intellectual current originating in Ibn Taymiyyah’s epistemological reductionism. Both expressed the longing for pristine origin in a historical “golden age,” an obvious deformation of the commanding, creative oneness of being that has guided thought for millennia. (shrink)

The legal-ethical dynamism in Islamic law which allows it to respond to the challenges of modernity is said to reside in the institution of ijtihād (independent legal thinking and hermeneutics). However, jurists like Mohsen Kadivar and Ayatollah Faḍlalla have argued that the “traditional ijtihād” paradigm has reached its limits of flexibility as it allows for only minor adaptations and lacks a rigorous methodology because of its reliance on vague and highly subjective juridical devices such as public welfare (maṣlaḥa), imperative necessity (...) (ḍarūra), emergency (iḍtirār), need (ḥāja), averting difficulty (‘usr) and distress (ḥaraj), hardship (mashaqqa), and harm (ḍarar) without interrogating the fundamentals (uṣūl) of ijtihād. In contrast, in the “foundational ijtihād” model theology, ethics, intellect, epistemology, linguistics, hermeneutics, modern sciences, history, cosmology, anthropology, and the sources of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) interact with one another to obtain resolutions that are just and non-discriminatory. (shrink)