Socialism Key Thinkers Quotes

You know when they get really against women? When all the scholars start studying philosophy.” The misogyny running through fiqh, said the Sheikh, was a matter not merely of scholars’ medieval mores, but of the influence of the Greek philosophers on them. Aristotle, a man who held that the subjugation of women was both “natural” and a “social necessity,” influenced key Muslim thinkers who shaped medieval fiqh, argued Akram. Before Aristotle became a core text, and before the medieval scholars enshrined their views on gender roles in Islamic law, men and women were accorded far more equal freedoms in Islam, he explained. He sketched peaks and troughs in the air, as if plotting the rise and fall of sexism through history. “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” was reaching its crescendo above us. “So why do people get obsessed with following the schools of law?” I asked. “Why not just go back to the Quran?” A wide, bright smile. “People can

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.

The common linguistic and intellectual ground on which Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophy flourished then characterized the entire medieval Islamicate world. But within the semiclosed precincts of “this peninsula” (a term of endearment as much as a geographical designation, used by both Jews and Muslims), the commonality is particularly striking, and perhaps easier to follow. Without imposing on al-Andalus a single predominant school of thought (be it Pseudo-Empedoclean or Aristotelian), and without appealing to a spurious Spanish “genius,” one can identify recurring themes in Andalusian speculative thought. The true meaning of tawḥīd and the correct interpretation of the divine attributes run like a thread through Andalusian thought, from Ibn Masarra and Ibn Gabirol to the Almohads and Maimonides. The respective merits of rational thought and revelation, philosophy and scriptures, preoccupied thinkers from Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā Ibn Paqūda to Averroes and Judah Halevi. Key concepts such as tadbīr (as divine providence or as human governance) or iʿtibār (contemplation and drawing a lesson) surface time and again, receiving different interpretations and being put to different uses by Ibn Masarra and Baḥyā, by Averroes and Maimonides. All of these thinkers had to negotiate their way in the political and social framework of al-Andalus, balancing mundane commitments to the court and to their respective communities with a yearning for perfection, for the sublime and the transcendent. We can sometimes trace the movement of these themes from one thinker to another; more often, the transmission lines remain buried, leaving us to choose between assuming an enigmatic osmotic process and admitting the existence of yet unknown contacts.