درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study examines the convergence of law, beauty standards, and feminist-Foucauldian theory, emphasising the influence of beauty myths on cultural norms and legal frameworks. Beauty standards, shaped by media, commercial, and legal structures, establish a restrictive and exclusive notion of beauty, frequently favouring lighter complexion, thinner physiques, and straight hair. These norms, devoid of a biological foundation, originate from social constructs that perpetuate patriarchal and capitalist ideologies. The law significantly reinforces these standars by normalizing certain physical traita and marginalising those who differ. Utilising Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary power,” the examination emphasises how individuals internalise societal norms and consciously modify their bodies to conform to these standards. It also attacks the legal system’s inadequacy in addressing body image discrimination, which exacerbates the marginalisation of individuals who diverge from conventional beauty standards. This study underscores the significance of intersectionality, asserting how beauty myths intersect with race, gender, and class, while urging legal frameworks that accommodate diverse body types to strengthen equality and protect against appearance-based discrimination.

This paper shows how Hegel’s misconception of truth and knowledge misled his ideas of Absolute spirit, dialectically reinforced dogmatism and irrational historicism toward his disastrous conclusion of a “totalitarian playbook”. Analysis by Hegel scholars is presented and contrasted with Popper’s Critical Rationalism-based critiques. Hegel held a version of Correspondence for everyday truth plus a deeper “philosophical” truth, similar to essence, which could be unified with consciousness. This is compared to Popper’s anti-essentialism. Hegel’s dialectical theory is contrasted to Popper’s falsificationism. Popper showed that dialectical method produced historical relativism. Hegel’s Philosophy of Identity, yielding the dialectical Idealism of “what is reasonable must be real”, led to “might is right” with emergence of nations by fighting for domination on the stage of history. Popper credited Hegel with formulating the “playbook of totalitarianism”, used lethally by followers of Hegelian Left and Right. Inversion Theory claims the word “true”, implying completeness, certainty, and self-consistency, is applicable only to the objective world. Perception of it, acquired by an evolved biological process (Active Subjectivism), incorporates essential falsehood, yielding “best knowledge” of reality. It solves problems related to the regulatory, statistical, evidentiary, inconstant and even indexical nature of knowledge. Only the Inversion theory exposes the errors of dialecticism: since it involves subjective concepts, it is impossible for a true synthesis plus its negative antithesis to give a true synthesis. The historical process of the Zeitgeist contains falsehood, the cunning of reason to move the spirit forward is uncertain, and nobody can perform the truth for their time.

The aim of this paper is to examine both the potential and limitations of Hegelianism in contemporary epistemology. To achieve this, the paper first explores Robert Brandom's interpretation of Phenomenology of Spirit in his 2019 work, Spirit of Trust. In this context, Hegel is positioned as a precursor to the holistic, historical, and social dimensions of belief, as well as a critic of the empiricist intuitions prevalent in modernity, aligning with the framework of American inferentialism. This section demonstrates that it is possible to discuss the constitution of concepts without invoking sensations or immediate knowledge. The paper then turns to the reception of Brandom’s proposal by scholars such as Richard Rorty and Slavoj Žižek, who concurs that Brandom falls short in maintaining a radical stance toward empiricism, and highlight the ethical and political challenges inherent in Brandom’s neo-Hegelian inferentialism. In this section, it becomes evident that Brandom’s concept of the Hegelian absolute and his notion of remembrance cannot be reconciled with a conception of reality as negative and contingent, a view that assumes progressiveness—something Žižek, in contrast, succeeds in recognizing within Hegel's philosophy.

South Asian ethnic minorities (SAEMs) represent a growing population in Hong Kong public education. However, schools struggle to offer them fair and equitable education. One frequently mentioned, but rarely studied component in their performance is teachers’ lower expectations. This article reports on a qualitative case study to examine ethnically Chinese teachers’ expectations of South Asian students in a public primary school in Hong Kong. Five Chinese teachers were interviewed, with observations in three of these teachers’ classrooms. Results indicate teachers have lower expectations. Several influencing factors were identified, including perceptions of cultural differences between Chinese teachers and South Asian ethnic minorities’ families and inadequate training of teachers in Chinese as a second language and incorporating diversified learning strategies into the curriculum. This is one of the first studies specifically focused on exploring in greater details primary teachers’ expectations about South Asian students in Hong Kong.

This paper examines the political philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through three distinct approaches: optimistic positivist scientism, critical middle ground, and phenomenological pessimism. The central issue addressed is the ethical and political implications of AI, specifically how it influences governance, social structures, and human autonomy. The research questions explore how AI can be understood in terms of its potential and risks, how different political philosophies interpret its role, and what governance models can mitigate its negative consequences. The methodology adopted is a comparative analysis of key thinkers and their contributions to the debate on AI. The framework includes positivist, critical theory, and phenomenological perspectives, with a focus on how these paradigms inform the understanding of technology and its societal impact. Key theorists discussed include Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Yuval Harari, Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, each offering a unique viewpoint on the nature of AI and its implications for governance and human existence. The findings highlight three divergent views: the optimistic positivist approach sees AI as a tool for progress, advocating for technological innovation and global governance; the critical middle ground emphasizes ethical oversight and regulation to prevent social inequality; and the phenomenological pessimism warns of AI’s potential to undermine human freedom and autonomy, leading to a dystopian, technocratic society. The study concludes that while AI offers significant potential for improving human life, it also raises profound challenges that require careful regulation, ethical consideration, and a commitment to preserving democratic freedoms.

In this paper, I take for granted the view of a long tradition tracing back to Kant that the content of perception is nonconceptual, nonpropositional, and iconic. However, I challenge the idea that this content is either an existentially quantified proposition (the existential view), an object-involving proposition (the particularist view), both (the pluralist view), or still that there is no fact of the matter about the elusive content of perception (Block). Instead, I propose an alternative hybrid model as the most suitable for perception, namely a mix of the representation of properties (relativistic content) and acquaintance with whatever causes the relevant token experience. Although this format is iconic or map-like, the best semantic model for understanding this relativistic content of perception is an open sentence with predicates and free variables. Since this content is neither particular nor existential, it is incomplete (at least in the light of Fregean semantics). That is, it is neither accurate nor inaccurate per se. Perceptions do not represent particulars, let alone the causal relationship between particulars or environmental conditions and the token experience. In other words, neither particulars nor causal relations belong to the content of the experience. Instead, particulars and causal relations belong to the evaluative circumstances of the content (Lewis's context-index pairs). Perceptions represent "de re" properties as accurate or inaccurate attributions to what is causally responsible for the relevant token experience.

The accelerated integration of digital technologies into education has renewed longstanding philosophical debates concerning the nature, role, and consequences of technology in schooling. While international scholarship has increasingly emphasized the importance of interrogating the philosophical assumptions underpinning teachers’ engagement with technology, little work has examined such orientations in the Iranian context. This qualitative study explores Iranian secondary school teachers’ implicit philosophies of educational technology and critically evaluates them through the conceptual frameworks of Andrew Feenberg’s philosophy of technology and Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological perspective. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers and employing a hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis, this study identifies four Philosophical–Pedagogical Themes in Educational Technology (PPTET), each of which is revealed through the binary logic inherent in the pharmacological integration of technology in education. Through a Stieglerian reading, such dualisms are shown to obscure the constitutive and ambivalent nature of technological mediation in processes of teaching, learning, and individuation. The findings reveal a need to move beyond access-oriented and utilitarian narratives toward cultivating critical digital judgment and fostering pedagogical practices grounded in care, attention, and reflective technological engagement.

We cannot evaluate Kant's critical project without considering Transcendental Idealism, as it provides his solution to the enduring problem of metaphysics. Kant views transcendental idealism as a means through which metaphysics can follow 'the secure course of a science' (Bxiv), while also 'removing an obstacle that limits' (Bxxv) practical reason. The most contentious element of his proposal is his classification of empirical objects as appearances rather than things in themselves. This distinction restricts our knowledge to things as they appear, leaving their true nature beyond our cognitive grasp. In this article, I will explore Kant's concept of the 'thing in itself' and examine whether Allison's two-aspect interpretation is a valid representation of Kant's theory and if it effectively resolves its issues. The first part of this article will focus on Allison's two-aspect reading of the 'thing in itself' and his solutions to its paradoxes. The second part will address three objections raised by Guyer, who critiques Allison’s reading from a two-object perspective, and Kant's main argument in the Aesthetic. Lastly, I will evaluate the internal consistency of Allison’s interpretation and its alignment with Kant’s texts. I will conclude by demonstrating that, although (1) Allison consistently counters Guyer’s objections and (2) his interpretation captures the overall intent of Kant’s project, (3) it is not entirely consistent with Kant’s writings.