درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In times of secular advancement, religious organisations began with widespread creation of common ground for a defence of religious and spiritual values worldwide. Ecumenism and interreligious dialogue became a norm for almost every denomination and world religion, focused on theological discussions, forms of unity, religious diplomacy and religious peacebuilding and humanitarian aid. Religious institutions act as an important societal stakeholder and clergy enjoys authority and legitimacy in an overwhelming number of countries. This comes as an important addition to peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict societies, particularly if those societies are multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Such cases can be seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and many other places in the world where religion is being misused for political and nationalistic goals. Empirical research of such activities should also focus on spoilers in those processes. Spoilers are persons or institutions who believe that peace emerging from negotiations or dialogue threatens their power, worldview and interests, while violence, negative peace, status quo or lack of initiatives are used to undermine achievements of peacebuilding. In a religious sense, many spoilers think of ecumenical and interreligious tendencies as a betrayal of key values or disadvantage of their position in society. Spoilers may seem very interested in peace processes, they may be part of interreligious councils and play a role in various initiatives, but are insincere in their commitments, have various strategies and tactics to avoid true reconciliation and may have been positioned from their respective institutions. This paper is a result of in-depth research of interreligious peacebuilding initiatives in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and suggests ways to discover spoilers and challenges local communities face with them in the process.

Freedom of speech has traditionally been a cause championed by the left and liberal side of the political spectrum, against conservatives who have tried to limit the expression of radical ideas. Here are three examples from the United States: 1) When I was appointed to Princeton University in 1999, Steve Forbes, whose father had endowed the university’s Forbes College, called for my appointment to be rescinded, and pledged that he would not donate to the university as long as I was on the faculty. Forbes was, at the time, running for the Republican nomination for president.

The paper argues that the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is unified by a complex conception of reason that imposes consistency norms of both rationality and reasonableness.  Hobbes’s conceptions of rightness as reciprocity, and moral goodness as sociability belong to an original and attractive moral theory that is neither teleological nor classically deontological, nor as interpreters have variously argued, subjectivist, contractarian, egoist, or dependent on divine command.

It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly.  Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition.  One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability.  A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value.  This critique of Kantianism extends to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation, including Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Darwall and John Rawls.  The problem with these views, at heart, is that they attempt to ground morality in respect alone.  Yet it is love, not respect, that brings irreplaceability into view.  The paper closes with a sketch of a virtue-theoretic theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue that refines the other virtues so as to ensure a continuous and practically efficacious sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings.