al-ghallābī is rated as among the shī‘ī authors of the third/eighth century, through whom many historical traditions have been related in shī‘ī and sunnī sources. examining the status of al-ghallābī’s traditions in the two major sects (of shī‘a and sunnī), this writing is intended to find the reason for the permeation of his traditions into the sources belonging to the sunnīs – who are very cau...

Commentary on Bergstrom and Rosvall, ‘The transmission sense of information’, Biology and Philosophy. In response to worries that uses of the concept of information in biology are metaphorical or insubstantial, Bergstrom and Rosvall have identified a sense in which DNA transmits information down the generations. Their ‘transmission view of information’ is founded on a claim about DNA’s teleofun...

According to modern religious studies, religions are rooted in certain metaphorical representations, so they are metaphorical in nature. This article aims to show, first, how conceptual metaphors employ image schemas to make our language meaningful, and then to assert that image-schematic structure of religious expressions, by which religious metaphors conceptualize abstract meanings, is the ba...

In this response, I do four things. First, I defend the claim that the action compatibility effect does not distinguish between embodied and traditional accounts of language comprehension. Second, I present neuroimaging and neuropsychological results that seem to support the traditional account. Third. I argue that metaphorical language poses no special challenge to the arguments I gave against...

leaving some important elements of the traditional phenomenology of religion aside, ninian smart proposes the dynamic phenomenology of religion or, in other words, the historical- comparative method, the main concern of which is to set evolutions of religious phenomena in their historical context. he holds that there are two mistakes in contemporary religious studies and philosophy of religion:...

Hitherto, theories of similarity have restricted themselves to judgments of what might be called literal similarity. A central thesis of this article is that a complete account of similarity needs also to be sensitive to nonliteralness, or metaphoricity, an aspect of similarity statements that is most evident in similes but that actually underlies metaphorical language in general. Theoretical a...

counterfactual analysis is concerned with explaining events that have not happened. counterfactuals are mental experiments through which one can reconstruct hypothetical versions of the history in one’s mind; these versions are relatively different from the real history, but provide one with the opportunity to test historical hypotheses against the available evidence. historicist researchers in...