PHILOSOPHY
Publication Record
Arabi,
O. 1999. Early Muslim Legal Philosophy: Identity and
Difference in Islamic Jurisprudence. Center for Near Eastern Studies, University
of California.
———. 2000.
Orienting the Gaze: Marcel Morand and the codification of Le Droit Musulman
Algerien. Journal of Islamic Studies 11 (1):43–72.
———. 2000.
The Interdiction of the spendthrift: A human rights debate in classical Fiqh.
Islamic Law and Society.
———.
2001. Dawning of the third millennium on Shari'a:
Egypt's law No. 1 of 2000, or, women may divorce at will. Arab Law
Quarterly.
Khalidi,
M. A. 2000. Incommensurability. A Companion to the
Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
———. 2001.
Utopian Zionism or Zionist proselytism? A reading of Herzl's Altneuland.
Journal of Palestine Studies. 30:4.
Khalidi,
M. A. Innateness and domain specificity. Philosophical Studies
105:191–210.
Koons,
J. 2000. Do normative facts need to explain? Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly.
Abstracts, Conferences, and Proceedings
Arabi,
O. November 1999. The regimentation of the subject: Madness in Islamic and
modern Arab civil laws. Legal Personality in Modern Arab Laws, Centre
d'Etudes et de Documentation Economique, Juridique, et Sociale; French
Cultural Mission, Cairo, Egypt.
———.
March 2000. Ambulant marriage: Grass-roots lawmaking in Saudi Arabia of the
1990s. First Mediterranean Social and Political Science Meeting, European
University Institute, Workshop on Legal Education and Legal Knowledge,
Florence, Italy.
———.
September 2000. The interdiction of the spendthrift. The Legal Person in
Islamic Law: Notions of Capacity and Incapacity, Cornell University, Ithaca,
New York, USA.
Khalidi,
M. A. May 2001. Innateness and domain specificity. American Philosophical
Association Central Division, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Koons,
J. October 1999. Do normative facts need to explain? Alabama Philosophical
Society Conference, Orange Beach, Alabama, USA.
———.
February 2000. Belief-ascription and analyticity. Midsouth Philosophy Conference,
Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
Graduate Theses and Projects
Alameddine,
R. A. January 2000. Limits of rationality. M. A. Khalidi, B. Haydar, and K.
Ferguson.
Ghandour,
B. M. August 1999. Science and the sociology of knowledge. M. A. Khalidi, W.
N. Nasr, and K. Ferguson.
Masri,
Gh. M. A. October 1999. Aristotelian 'Second Nature' in McDowell's account of
conceptual capacities. M. A. Khalidi, B. Haydar, and K. Ferguson.
Zaatari,
D. M. B. March 2001. What is left of the empiricism-nativism debate? M. A.
Khalidi, W. N. Nasr, and B. Haydar.
Research Projects
Innate ideas and domain-specific capacities
Contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have
often linked the question of whether our mental capacities are innate to the
issue of their domain-specificity, i.e., whether they are specifically
designed to perform certain specific tasks (e.g., language processing).
However, this connection does not seem to be a constitutive one. I
propose one way of understanding the innateness of our mental capacities,
then I explore some reasons for linking the phenomenon of innateness with the
seemingly separate one of domain-specificity. After showing that these
reasons are not sufficient to establish a constitutive link between the two
phenomena, I propose a diagnosis of why they have often been associated by
philosophers and cognitive scientists. The connection between them is
an epistemic one; it is easier to tell in the case of domain specific
capacities whether or not they are innate. Khalidi, M. A.
Supported by URB
Completed or in progress at AUB
Nature and nurture in cognition
This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate
cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky.
The 'triggering model' of innateness, first made explicit by Stich (1975),
explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the
stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of
innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal
conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as
biological models of innateness are forced to do. This can be avoided in the
case of cognitive capacities, precisely because informational content is
involved. Even though one cannot measure output relative to input in a
precise way, there are indirect and approximate ways of assessing the degree
of innateness of a specific cognitive capacity. Khalidi, M. A.
Supported by URB
Completed or in progress at AUB
Plato and al-Farabi on the democratic city
In Plato's Republic, there is an account of the
degeneration of the virtuous city into various non-virtuous cities.
According to this scheme, the democratic city is in fourth place, after the
timocratic and oligarchic cities. However, in al-Farabi's Political
Regime (al-Siyasah al-Madaniyyah), which is heavily influenced by
Platonic philosophy, there is a passage in which he declares the democratic
city to be second only to the virtuous city. This seems difficult to
justify at first, and poses an interpretive puzzle. The discrepancy can
be explained by observing that al-Farabi is rating political systems
according to the ease with which they can be transformed into a virtuous
city. This criterion for evaluating political regimes is quite
different from that which measures their similarity to the virtuous
city. Democracy may be second-best when it comes to the former
criterion, but not the latter. While al-Farabi implicitly acknowledges
this, Plato does not. Khalidi, M. A.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Belief-possession and computational role
I argue that functionalism in the philosophy of mind runs
into a fatal problem similar to the problem of analyticity in the philosophy
of language. (Submitted). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Emotions and incommensurable moral concepts
Many authors have argued that emotions serve an epistemic
role in our moral practice; some even argue that this epistemic connection is
so strong that creatures who do not share our affective nature will be unable
to grasp our moral concepts. I argue that even if this sort of
incommensurability does result from the role of affect in morality,
incommensurability does not in itself entail relativism. In any case,
there is no reason to suppose that one must share our emotions and concerns
to be able to apply our moral concept successfully. Finally, I briefly
investigate whether the moral realist can seek aid and comfort from
Davidsonian arguments to the effect that incommensurability in ethics is in
principle impossible, and decide that these arguments are not successful.
I conclude that the epistemic role our emotions play in moral discourse does
not relativize morality. Forthcoming in Philosophy. Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
How to avoid the twin perils of anti-empiricism and the given
I argue for a Sellarsian account of how perception
rationally constrains belief. I conclude that such an account of
perception provides an alternative to the dominant contemporary accounts of
knowledge (such as foundationalism and coherentism), and precisely for this reason,
is able to solve a puzzle that has, in my view, resisted solution by these
dominant theories. (Accepted for presentation at the Symposium on
Coherentism in Epistemology, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Is hard determinism a form of compatibilism?
I argue that hard determinism turns out to be a form of
compatibilism, and so, granting the falsity of libertarianism (something most
philosophers are willing to grant), compatibilism is the only remaining
position in the free will debate. (Submitted). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Must we believe in God to believe in reason?
A number of philosophers have claimed that only a theist
can justifiably believe that reason is reliable, arguing that we have no
reason to believe that a cognitive apparatus produced by the random processes
of evolution will be a reliable guide to the truth. I argue that the
theist is in no better position to justifiably believe in the reliability of
reason, and that the theist and atheist alike must merely accept on faith
that reason is reliable. Nor, if we must accept the reliability of
reason purely on faith, does this necessarily prevent us from criticizing the
theist for accepting the existence of God on faith. (Submitted). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Response-dependence in morality: Scary, tame, or just false?
Response-dependence theorists equate moral truth with the
generation of some psychological response: what makes this action
wrong, as opposed to right, is that it would cause (or merit) emotional
response of type R (perhaps under ideal conditions). Many have worried
that if emotion played this constitutive role in morality, then this would
lead to objectionable sorts of moral relativism. I explore the various
response-dependent conceptions of morality. Several, I conclude, are
innocuous, and would not lead to relativism, even if true. The
remaining, potentially worrisome forms, turn out to be false. Thus,
response-dependence does not pose a threat to the objectivity of morality.
(Submitted for publication; accepted for presentation at the 2001 Australian
Association of Philosophy Conference, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
Skepticism: An alleged epistemic duty
Philosophers often appeal to intuitions about particular
cases to try and demonstrate that we are implicitly committed to epistemic
principles that, if consistently applied, lead to epistemological
skepticism. For instance, some philosophers claim we all believe that
if you cannot rule out all hypotheses incompatible with a particular
proposition, P, then you cannot be justified in believing that P. I
argue that no such principle is implicit in our actual practice of justifying
beliefs, and that an understanding of the conservative and diachronic aspects
of justification reveals how we may justifiably believe that P even if we
cannot rule out all hypotheses incompatible with P. (Submitted). Koons, J.
Completed or in progress at AUB
|