One of the accusations leveled against Sufis is that they are libertarian and that they believe in the liberty of indifference. Drawing on authentic Islamic sources, the writer traces the question in the Islamic Sufism.

According to event-causal modest libertarian accounts of free action, the sort of control an agent requires to perform free actions consists in the action’s being nondeviantly and indeterministically caused by apt reasons of the agent. It has been argued that these modest views succumb to a problem of luck because they imply that, given exactly the same past up to the time of action, and the same laws of nature, at this time the agent could have performed a different action, or no action at all. Hence, it appears that whatever the agent does at this time as a result of indeterministic deliberation is a matter of freedom- or responsibility-undermining luck. In this paper, I argue that neither Robert Kane’s variant of modest libertarianism, which combines a form of non-traditional agent causation with indeterministic event causation, nor John Lemos’ weightings variant, in which agents perform intentional acts of assigning weights to their reasons, circumvents the luck objection.

Despite the millenniums-old tradition in Abrahamic circles of removing the foreskin of a penis at birth, the involuntary and aggressive practice of circumcision must not be made an exception to the natural, negative right to self-ownership-a birthright which should prevent a parent from physically harming a child from the moment of birth going forward. This paper will present a natural rights argument against the practice of male child circumcision, while also looking into some of the potential physical and psychological consequences of the practice. It will compare the practice with that of female circumcision, which is banned in developed nations but still practiced in the third world, as well as other forms of aggressive action, some once-prevalent, while disputing arguments made for parental ownership of the child, religious expression, cultural tradition, cleanliness, cosmetics, and conformity.

Libertarians on the one hand hold that free will is incompatible with determinism, and on the other hand free will is real and can be realized even in indeterministic conditions. Therefore, libertarianism tries to show that firstly how determinism and free will are incompatible and secondly how free will can be possible in an indeterministic world. The second challenge seems to be more difficult than the first one, since in indeterministic conditions agent’s actions and choices would seem to be matter of luck and not under control of the agent. Most of traditional libertarians had tried to solve these problems by appealing to non-natural factors. However, some people like Robert Kane have presented their solutions without any explicit metaphysical presupposition. They believe that modern sciences can resolve the problem of free well. In this essay, we will firstly explore Robert Kane’s ideas and then try to take a critical view on it.

Contemporary discussions on freedom have recently drawn attention to the implications the mind-body relation.Contemporary discussions on freedom have recently drawn attention to the implications of the mind-body relation. Historically, the notion of freedom has centered on various naturalistic options, compatibilism, and weaker notions of libertarian freedom. This leaves strong agent causal libertarianism as a minority position. Entering these discussions, I seek to establish the relation between a particular mind-body view and strong agent causal libertarianism. I make two claims upon characterizing strong agent causal libertarianism. First, I argue that strong agent causal libertarianism requires some version of substance dualism (or immaterialist agency). Second, I argue that strong agent causal libertarianism probably requires something like classical or Cartesian substance dualism. Drawing from the philosopher John Foster in The Immaterial Self, I show that the central defining feature of the sort of libertarian agency under investigation is ‘intrinsic autonomy’. While I recognize that Cartesianism is unpopular in contemporary discussions, I agree with Foster that it is probably what is entailed if we are going to ground something like a strong agent causal libertarianism. The substance needed to explain this robust form of freedom begins to look like something not of this world and more like the substance described by René Descartes.

Dehkhoda is one of Iran's most influential literary political elites in the constitutional era. He has dealt with the most important political issues of Iran's constitution in the course of many years, with a powerful pen and a penetrating view. Among the literate and the cultural, at least, there was at least one person who was as knowledgeable as the Dehkhoda who knew the status quo in both thought and action. Understanding his important political ideas, beyond his literary and cultural personality, plays an important role in the proper understanding of constitutionalism. He was a full-fledged "progressive" who had a national and Iranian view of the important feature of his valuable vocabulary. On the basis of this rise, he regarded constitutionalism as a positive, legal, libertarian political system, and in the negative sense defined it as an antithesis of "despotism". Dehkhoda must be regarded as a continuation of the early intellectuals of the Qajar era, who go beyond them and move towards a different understanding and understanding. This article seeks to explain Dehkhoda's understanding of constitutionalism, given her place in modern Iranian intellectual history.

INTRODUCTION: Obesity is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. It is believed that adipose tissue inflammatory substances contribute to the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease. To find out the metabolic benefits of weight loss in reducing cardiovascular risk, we assessed the effect of modest weight loss on plasma inflammatory markers in obese women.METHODS: In a clinical trial, 42 obese women underwent a 10 week restricted diet program. Body weight, fasting glucose, insulin, total cholesterol, triglyceride, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c) and plasma inflammatory cytokines were measured at baseline and after 10 weeks.RESULTS: Weight, BMI, fasting blood glucose, insulin, cholesterol and triglyceride had significant reductions. No significant changes were observed in HDL-c and LDL-c concentrations. All plasma inflammatory proteins improved significantly except CRP level.CONCLUSIONS: Modest weight loss (»5%) is associated with favorable changes in plasma inflammatory markers.