Faculty of Religion and Theology

I critically analyze Richard Moran’s account of knowing one’s own emotions, which depends on the Transparency Claim (TC) for self-knowledge. Applied to knowing one's own beliefs, TC states that when one is asked 'Do you believe P?', one can answer by referencing reasons for believing P. TC works for belief because one is justified in believing that one believes P if one can give reasons for why P is true. Emotions, however, are also conceptually related to concerns; they involve a response to something one cares about. As a consequence, acquiring self-knowledge of one’s emotions requires knowledge of other mental attitudes, which falls outside the scope of TC. Hence, TC cannot be applied to emotions.

In the case of substantial mental attitudes, such as one's values, deeper desires, and cares, a small minority argues that avowal is essential in achieving self-knowledge. Current orthodoxy is more skeptical: substantial attitudes are better reflected in the relevant patterns of action and reaction and hence known through interpreting these patterns. In this paper, I will clarify these opposing positions on the status of avowal, which I call the commitment view and the skeptical view respectively. I will then offer two arguments against the skeptical view. First, I will show that substantial mental attitudes cannot, as the skeptical view needs to assume, be discovered in patterns of action and reaction. Secondly, I will inquire the complex relation between avowal and patterns of action and reaction and argue that a gap between the two cannot be determined nor understood without the agent's perspective (including their avowal). Both arguments establish that the skeptic cannot deny a necessary role for avowal. This reflects the agential nature of substantial mental attitudes and challenges the dominant view of substantial self-knowledge.

Reigning orthodoxy in the philosophical study of human rational capacities, such as being able to act intentionally and to reason, is to characterize them in causal psychological terms. That is, to analyze these capacities in terms of mental states and their causal relations. It is against this background that the work of G.E.M. Anscombe has gained renewed interest. The main goal of this chapter is twofold. First, I will explicate Anscombe's philosophical approach by analyzing her account of intentional action and by relating it to the misperceptions of that account in (the history of) the philosophy of action. Importantly, Anscombe holds that an analysis of intentional action in terms of what it is, e.g., an event with certain specific features, cannot provide non-circular explanations. Instead, following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Wittgenstein, Anscombe seeks to explicate intentional action in terms of its form, i.e., the way in which it exists. The second aim of the chapter is to show the import of Anscombe's approach by applying it to the philosophy of reasoning. After discussing two main problems for the current orthodox view in epistemological debates on reasoning, I will propose an alternative Anscombe-inspired view of reasoning. In this so-called form view of reasoning, reasoning is characterized as a tool to drag out implications, embodied in judgments of the form p as following from q. The upshot of the chapter is that concepts of our rational capacities do not depict certain psychological states or processes, but rather our involvement with rational connections that exist in our lives and practices.

This is the translation of an Arabic statement published on June 7th 2017 from the UAE-sponsored Forum Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies Criticising Qatar. The statement was issued shortly after the blockade of Qatar began on 5th June 2017.

The following is a translation of the comments of a contemporary Mauritanian Islamic scholar and Islamist politician made in response to an interview of Hamza Yusuf published by France 24 on 7 January 2019.  The original interview appears to have been recorded in early December 2018 at the same time as the 2018 Forum for Promoting Peace in Islamic Societies, and at the same venue as the Forum that year, namely at the Jumeirah at Etihad Towers Hotel in Abu Dhabi.  A recorded response from Wuld al-Ḥājj al-Shaykh was made available through social media shortly after France 24 published the interview.  Wuld al-Ḥājj al-Shaykh is a Mauritanian MP and until 2018 was the deputy speaker of the Mauritanian Parliament. Born in Timbedra in south-eastern Mauritania, he pursued Islamic studies in the traditional Mauritanian maḥẓara system.

The attached document contains a translation of Yusuf al-Qaradawi's fatwa on democracy, as found in Roxanne L. Euben and M Qasim Zaman's Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought. The original Arabic follows the translation. The translation is not my own, and is only provided here for ease of access.

If you would like a copy of this paper, please email me at usaama.al-azami@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Neo-traditionalism is trying to develop its own transnational Islamic political discourse, but it is struggling in the shadow of Islamism. The Arab Spring, which put forward the proposition of popular participation in the political process created the impetus for this. Islamists had a readymade discourse backed by reasonably effective civil society institutions to fall back on that helped galvanize their activists relatively successfully even if it has so far proved a mostly abortive effort. Counter-revolutionary Neo-traditionalism which has contrasted with Islamism in its statist orientation has consequently only had relatively sclerotic civil society institutional infrastructure. In the wake of the Arab revolutions, one of the most important state-backed Arab scholars to attempt to remedy this state of affairs has been 'Abdullah Bin Bayyah (b. 1935). Yet his ideas appear largely derivative of, or reactions to, Islamist ideas and institutions. This article traces the evolution of some of Bin Bayyah’s activities and ideas from the beginning of the Arab revolutions in 2011 to his decisive break with the Islamists in 2013, and finally his establishment of counter institutions and institutional initiatives to the Islamists in the years that followed. I argue that many of his ideas and initiatives appear to be little more than the repackaging of Islamist discourse in Neo-traditionalist garb. Given that counter-revolutionary Neo-traditionalism is, by design, structurally subordinate to an authoritarian state, it seems unlikely that it will develop any long-lasting and independent Islamic political discourse.