Falsafa as Ethics of Belief
Abstract In this chapter, I begin to make the case for considering the great, medieval Islamic philosophers—the falasifa—through the prism of contemporary, Western scholarship on the ethics of belief. Within the Islamic intellectual movement, I identify three types of thought that can be classified as Evidentialist, non-Evidentialist and anti-Evidentialist. I argue that the falasifa are best described as endorsing a kind of Moderate Evidentialism, and that this view deserves consideration in the modern debate on the ethics of belief. I contrast this view with what I take to be its unique rival in the Islamic context, a view I call Moderate anti-Evidentialism.
Keywords Islam • Evidentialism • Fideism • Pragmatism • Falsafa • Belief • al-Ghazali • William James • W.K. Clifford
A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Dates, and References
Throughout this manuscript, I have transliterated Arabic words into English, with the use of diacritical marks, and have put the words in italics. However, I used Anglicised versions of certain well-known Arabic words and names. For instance, I used ‘Koran’ instead of ‘Qur’ān’ or ‘hadith’ instead of ‘hādīth’, and the names ‘al-Kindi’, ‘al-Farabi’, ‘al-Ghazali’ instead of ‘al-Kindī’, ‘al-Farābī’, ‘al-Gḥazālī’. I used the Latinate names ‘Averroes’ for ‘Ibn Rushd’ and Avicenna for ‘Ibn Sīnā’. I used diacritical marks for
© The Author(s) 2016
A.R. Booth, Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55700-1_1
1
the transliteration of the names of the lesser-known Islamic philosophers, but did not use them for the word falasifa and its cognates, since I used it so often. When quoting and referencing works in medieval Islamic philosophy, I used the full name of the work in English translation in italics, followed by page numbers; for those referred to in the original Arabic, I have used the Arabic name of the work, also in italics, with a endnote on the translation. All works, in translation or in the original, are referenced at the end of the book, before my list of secondary sources (by which I mean all non-medieval works). All dates used refer to the Common Era calendar.
1.1
KNOWLEDGE IN ISLAM
In Knowledge Triumphant, Franz Rosenthal argues that the central leitmotif of all Islamic civilization is the concept of knowledge.1 Understanding the Islamic notion of knowledge, according to Rosenthal, is necessary if one is to understand Islam, the civilisation to which it gave birth, and the particular historical course it has taken. Indeed, according to Rosenthal, “Islam means Knowledge”. The position is prima facie defensible, as Rosenthal suggests, when one considers that the Koranic term for the time preceding the Koranic revelation is jāhilīyah, a term usually translated as ‘ignorance.’2 The term suggests that the key difference between the time preceding the revelation and the time following it is that the latter was a time when people in this world came to have knowledge: specifically, knowledge given unto them by the instruments of revelation. 3 To the modern epistemologist, this claim will raise several questions: are we here talking about the claim that people living in pre-Islamic times merely had true beliefs about the world, or that they had only justified, true beliefs (falling short of knowledge) about the world? And if the latter, what does Islam tell us is the crucial difference between justified, true belief and knowledge? Are we to think that those who were alive in the jāhilīyah period lived in complete ignorance of any proposition? Or were they merely ignorant of certain, important propositions? If so, which ones? Did they lack merely propositional knowledge, or also practical? Were they living in ‘deep’ ignorance (where there was no way they could have acquired relevant evidence) or living in culpable ignorance? Rosenthal’s work, although presented as a work of epistemology, does not answer these questions. What we get, instead, is a historical study on how the Arabic concept ʿ ilm , ‘knowledge’, was taken by the various intellectual movements of medieval Islam, as well as how centrally this concept fi gured in all of these movements. As he puts it,
“there is no other concept that has been operative as a determinant of Muslim civilization in all its aspects to the same extent as ʿ ilm ” (Rosenthal 2007 , p. 2). Rosenthal even advances the bold thesis that understanding the centrality of the concept of knowledge in Islam is crucial to understanding the turn the Islamic world has taken in recent times, and how that concept has indeed underwritten a species of Islamic fundamentalism. 4 Contrary to Rosenthal, however, I contend that the epistemology of the medieval Islamic philosophers in fact gives us the resources for not only understanding extremist belief, but further grasping what is uniquely wrong with it. As far as the medieval Islamic philosophers ( falasifa ) were concerned, the core philosophical issue was not about knowledge in particular, but about what constitutes justifi ed belief. This is of course also a traditional concern in epistemology, but unless one makes the substantive assumption that nothing but evidence (or epistemic reason) can justify belief, then we can consider that the topic outruns epistemology. As such, I consider the falasifa ’s intellectual project as one primarily engaged in the ethics of belief. That is, they were concerned with understanding the epistemic (and in many cases the non-epistemic) conditions of justifi ed belief; in particular, they sought to understand when belief is blameworthy, and, as in the case of apostasy, when it is punishable by death. I will frame the views of the falasifa in terms of the contemporary debate in Western philosophy on the ethics of belief. Then, I will show how falsafa occupies a unique and defensible position-one that ought to be of considerable interest to those working on the issues sans phrase (that is, in a way that ignores whether the issues belong to a particular tradition).
Rosenthal notes that the Arabic concept ʿilm differs from the English concept of knowledge. For instance, in modern English ‘knowledge’ does not admit of a plural formation, whereas ʿilm in Arabic does, as per ‘ulum. More significantly, ʿilm can admit of degrees and can be graded, whereas ‘knowledge’ in modern English cannot, at least not if used about propositional knowledge. Indeed, some contemporary epistemologists have taken as data the fact that ‘knowledge-how’ is gradable, where propositional knowledge is not. The former but not the latter locution seems felicitous here:
– I sort of know how to play the guitar.
– I sort of know that Brighton is in England.
And this bit of data is then taken to be part of a broader set of evidence for the claim that practical knowledge cannot be reduced to propositional, theoretical knowledge. In English the notion of justification (as applied to beliefs) does seem to be gradable, however. The following locutions seem perfectly felicitous, for instance:
– James is more justified than Andrew in believing that he is good at rugby.
– I have better justification for the belief that there is a Higgs Boson particle than I had ten years ago.
– James is sort of justified in believing that his date will arrive on time.
As we may infer from the above examples, the English notion of justification (but not knowledge) is gradable; yet, the Arabic notion of ʿilm is gradable. This distinction gives us prima facie reason to think that when the falasifa wrote about ʿilm, they had in mind a concept closer to epistemic justification than knowledge. Again, the fact that we can felicitously speak of ‘justifications’ and ‘reasons’ in English (where talk on ‘knowledges’ sounds odd) gives us reason to prefer (or at least consider as a plausible alternative) an interpretation where the Islamic medieval philosophers were primarily interested in the conditions for justified belief, rather than the concept of knowledge. The primacy of the issue of apostasy, as we shall see, further vindicates this last claim, for according to even the most notoriously strict accounts of apostasy in medieval Islam (for instance those of al-Ghazali) one can fail to be an apostate when one fails to know the claims of Islam. Most importantly, however, the falasifa themselves mirror the gradability of the Muslim concept of ʿilm in their epistemology, where, in Aristotelian fashion, they painstakingly enumerate the various differentiae to which knowledgeas-such is subject, and, in neo-Platonic fashion, the hierarchy that dominates that taxonomy.5 This countenanced gradability concerning the subject of ‘knowledge’, when better considered as ‘justified belief’, may provide the keys to understanding a unified view of the falasifa’s take on the relationship between faith and reason, with respect to well-known problems regarding interpreting both their individual views and their political philosophy.
1.2 THE ETHICS OF BELIEF IN THE WEST
Let us grant the claim that it is initially plausible that the falasifa were at least somewhat concerned with the ethics of belief. Next, let us consider the modern, Western debate on this issue. The debate has become a complex one, and as with any topic in contemporary Western philosophy,
replete with hyper-specialised jargon and hair-splitting distinctions. The way I conceive the debate here will necessarily look blunt-edged to the specialist, but I hope it will be both detailed to be useful, yet general enough to serve the broad ends of this particular book.
Traditionally, the ‘ethics of belief’ has been taken in the Western philosophical world of the last two or three centuries to denote a debate between two groups of philosophers considering the question regarding what is justified belief. The first—Evidentialists—think that nothing but evidence, or more broadly, epistemic reason (reason to think that a proposition ‘p’ is true), can justify a subject S’s believing that p. Not only do Evidentialists think that evidence that p is necessary for S’s belief that p to be justified, they also think that no consideration other than evidence is relevant to whether S is justified in believing that p. They adhere to:
Evidentialism
S’s belief that p is justified iff S has epistemic reason to believe that p.
The second group I term non-Evidentialists. This group of philosophers simply deny the truth of Evidentialism, and think the following:
Non-Evidentialism
S’s belief that p is justified iff S has, for reasons of sort α, β, γ, δ, either one or a combination of α, β, γ, δ reason to believe that p.
Non-Evidentialists may admit that S’s having epistemic reason to believe that p is necessary for S to be justified in believing that p, but they never admit that it is sufficient. That is, they deny that having epistemic reason to believe that p always entails that S is justified in believing that p. The archetypal Evidentialist is usually considered to be W.K. Clifford, a late nineteenth century British mathematician6 and philosopher, who wrote the following in The Ethics of Belief:
It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. (Clifford 1877)
At first glance, Clifford’s view follows Locke and the British empiricists7; however:
Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which if it be regulated, as is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything, but upon good reason; and so cannot be opposite to it. He that believes, without having any reason for
believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither does he seek truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties as he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and errour. (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, iv, xvii, 24).8
This view, as formulated by Locke and Clifford, raises many questions: what sort of ‘ought’ is the ‘ought to believe’ referred to here, what sort of wrong is it to believe upon insufficient evidence? Is it a moral wrong? Or is it a purely epistemic wrong? Or, is it just wrong tout court or ‘all things considered’? I have argued elsewhere (Booth 2012, 2014) that the obligation involved in ‘ought to believe’ is an ‘all things considered’ ought, such that Locke and Clifford must be talking about ‘all things considered’ oughts if their view is to make sense.9 Clifford, certainly, seems to have ruled out that he is talking about a merely epistemic ought, given his opening discussion of the moral wrong involved in a ship captain’s taking his crew out to sea on the belief that the ship is sea-worthy, where such a belief is based on insufficient evidence.10 For now, I assume that the question here is about more than what makes a belief epistemically justified, since I think that the falasifa, given their concerns with the capital crime of apostasy, must have been concerned with more than merely what one ought to believe from an epistemic point of view.
The opposing view, I label non-Evidentialism. I give this view a broader term in order to encompass the philosophical positions known as Pragmatism and Fideism. The contemporary opponent to Clifford was William James, who in “The Will to Believe” contends that belief (and in particular, religious belief) may be made rational by non-epistemic factors, such as the determinants of self-interest. Of course, James was a wellknown proponent of a more general view known as Pragmatism (where, for instance, the idea of truth as a correspondence relation between proposition and the world is rejected). But in the context of non-Evidentialism, pragmatism is not taken to be so comprehensive a doctrine, but rather the view that belief can be justified by pragmatic or prudential considerations. Pascal’s Wager is often invoked as a means to illustrate the position. Briefly, the Wager put forward by the eponymous seventeenth century French philosopher and mathematician held that that prudential considerations may make belief in God rational, given the utility of believing there is a God if there is a God when compared to the minimal negative utility if there is no God.11 The second philosophical position encompassed
within non-Evidentialism, Fideism, is commonly associated with Soren Kierkegaard (1847)). Fideism contends that certain beliefs may be made rational—that is, can be justified—when they are the product of faith.12 Paradigmatically, belief in God is considered justified on this basis—but the Fideist need not restrict her domain solely to religious beliefs. What is important to her is that the belief be held in an act of self-constitution rendered possible by our radical human freedom, in a ‘leap of faith’. Such acts may involve more garden-variety acts of doxastic self-constitution, as per when, knowing that most marriages end in divorce, someone comes to believe at the altar—and against the evidence—that he will be forever faithful to his beloved.13
Both the Fideist and the Pragmatist positions seem to be predicated on the idea that we can believe at will. This idea, while defended by luminaries such as Descartes,14 is widely considered to be manifestly false today, at least as a contingent, psychological matter of fact about ourselves15 (though some think that the very nature of belief rules out the possibility of our believing at will16). Indeed, the falsity of the proposition that we can directly believe at will has been taken to be a data point in favour of an argument against a particular internalist account of epistemic justification. Internalist accounts of epistemic justification must be committed to a quasi-deontological17 understanding of the latter—viz. that S’s being justified in believing p should be understood to mean that S has dispatched her epistemic duties or obligations in believing that p, and that she is thus blameless in believing that p. But if belief is not under our voluntary control, then the idea that we are subject to epistemic obligations seems to violate the principle that ought implies can—in other words, that A can be obliged to φ only if φ -ing is under A’s voluntary control. In the contemporary literature, the data point that belief is not under voluntary control has been used to defend a different kind of Evidentialism, according to which there are no obligations pertaining to belief other than epistemic obligations. This variety of Evidentialism holds that if there were non-epistemic obligations to believe, then belief should be sensitive to non-epistemic considerations when, in deliberation, S considered whether to believe p. But, when we—in full awareness—deliberate as to whether to believe p or not, only evidential considerations (epistemic reasons) can sway us. There are therefore no non-epistemic obligations to believe.18 This kind of Evidentialism differs from Clifford’s, since the latter is consistent with the claim that it is a matter of moral obligation to believe in accordance with one’s evidence. Jamesian Pragmatism, on the other hand, is the opposing view that there may be morally salutary consequences to believing against the evidence.
Today, the modern Pragmatist is concerned with defending the idea that a debate between James and Clifford is a coherent one.19 However, if Jamesian Pragmatism, or the view I have called non-Evidentialism above, is shown to be true, then the modern Pragmatist line must also be.
The falasifa were from the outset explicitly advocating an Islamic philosophy, and conceived of their philosophical project as furthering the theistic enterprise. In this vein, Sayed Hossein Nasr has suggested that they should be viewed as engaged with “theosophy”.20 As such, their view concerning doxastic obligation was certainly not the modern, Evidentialist one, since they all held that it was at least in certain cases morally impermissible to fail to believe certain Islamic propositions (such as the šahāda, the attestation of faith in Islam, stating that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God). The central question they were concerned with is the one the classical (Cliffordian) Evidentialist sought to answer: ought we to believe these propositions just in case they are supported by sufficient evidence, where the ‘ought’ referred to is not a mere epistemic ought. Whether they thought that ‘ought’ was then a moral ought is an open question. Again, I have argued elsewhere (Booth 2012) that any position must regard that ought as an ‘all things considered’ ought, rather than merely a moral or epistemic ought, on pain of inconsistency. Briefly, one cannot determine whether one is blameworthy for holding a particular belief by considering reasons belonging to one sort of ought, such as a moral ought, since different kinds of ought can come into competition with one another. If different kinds of ought can compete, as per prudential ought pushing someone in one direction and epistemic ought in another (e.g. it is inconvenient for a politician to believe that the German Parliament will take a hard stance on Greece’s leaving the Eurozone, but the evidence for that proposition is overwhelming), then the existence of one, conflicting kind of ought can excuse the failure to comply with another (the politician is excused from failing to dispatch her prudential obligation, given the existence of the competing epistemic one). As such, it is only a judgement that takes on board all the differing pushes and pulls of competing kinds of reason that can determine whether one is blameworthy with respect to having a particular belief. In being acutely aware of the need to address the balance between the demands of theoretical and practical reason, the falasifa end up with a position much like the one I have just canvassed. For the moment, let us make do with the working hypothesis that at the very least they did not think that the ought in question here is purely an epistemic ought, and that as such, the issues they were concerned with resemble the issues
underlying the historical debate between Clifford and James, rather than the modern debate. However, they further present an argument in favour of something akin to Jamesian Pragmatism (or non-Evidentialism more broadly), and if their argument for such a position succeeds, it also vindicates the modern Pragmatist position.
When it comes to accounting for theistic belief, the role of prophecy—or divine scripture more generally—in determining correct religious belief presents a complex issue to both the Evidentialist and non-Evidentialist positions on prophecy. If we take an Evidentialist view, then we must, on pain of special pleading, consider a theistic belief justified just in case it is believed on the basis of sufficient evidence.21 In other words, a religious belief’s correctness is determined by its truth conditions. But if this is the case, what is prophecy’s unique epistemic role? Does Evidentialism entail that we can reason our way, by investigating the world, into correct religious belief (if there is such a thing)? If it does, then it appears as if we can arrive at correct religious belief without consulting divine scriptures at all. Perhaps we can think that the latter provides us with sufficient evidence for the former, evidence that would not otherwise be available to us, humans. But then how are we to ascertain for any putative piece of genuine scripture x that x is genuine? In other words, how do we rigorously determine the probative value of the putative piece? If we are able to find a way, then the idea that the evidence given to us from scripture is only attainable through the study of that scripture comes under threat. And if there is no way to determine the value of a given piece of scripture, then we have a problem reconciling Evidentialism with the standards of correct religious belief. This conundrum might then motivate one to take the non-Evidentialist position, such that without recourse to special pleading, we can consider correct religious belief to be determined by something other than its truth-conditions. But this idea is in turn faced with parallel problems. At first glance, it entails the assumption that religious scriptures do not offer any evidence in favour of the proposition that God exists, and offer instead pragmatic reasons in favour of believing that God exists. And this latter position might well be considered blasphemous, and inconsistent with what the scripture itself decrees. Second, even if prophecy is to give us non-epistemic reason to believe in God, we nonetheless need a way of determining genuine prophecy from false prophecy. And, again, the possibility of doing so undermines the idea that prophecy teaches us things we could not otherwise have learnt.
This problem, or at least an analogue of it, stands as the central problem of medieval Islamic philosophy, together with the question of what it means to be a responsible believer. The body of scripture most directly pertaining to Islam-qua-religion comprises both the Koran as well as a series of hadith. The latter are a series of reports concerning the life, practises, and sayings of the prophet Muhammad. They are of central importance to Islam, since Muslims are enjoined to treat the manner in which Muhammad lived his life to be exemplary. For the most part, the hadith were collected orally in the century following the death of Muhammad. Under the Abbasid caliphate, scholars sought to authenticate and collate hadith into a more authoritative, canonical form. At the same time, Islamic civilisation under the rule of the Abbasids undertook a major translation project of ancient Greek philosophical sources into Arabic. Given this historical backdrop, it comes as no surprise that the falasifa were acutely concerned with the process of authenticating hadith: in other words, the process of discerning genuine prophetic speech. However, thinking of the falasifa as engaged with this and related issues around the ethics of belief will bring interpretative clarity as to their overall enterprise, as well as bring interesting arguments to bear on the modern debate. I now turn to a sketch of their relative positions as seen through this historical and cultural prism.
1.3
THE ETHICS OF BELIEF IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
1.3.1 Imān vs. Islam
A famous hadith from Caliph Umar22 goes as follows:
The Prophet once came across a stranger who asked him: What does ‘Islam’ mean?
The Prophet answered: “Islam means that you should testify that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, that you should observe the prayer, pay the zakāt, fast during Ramadan, and make the pilgrimage to the Kaʿba if you have the means to go.”
The stranger agreed, but asked: what is meant by belief (imān)?
The Prophet replied that it means that you should believe in God, his angels, his books and his prophets. (The stranger turns out to be the Archangel Gabriel).
There are a myriad of ways in which one could take the broader meaning of this hadith. One naturally might interpret it as emphasizing that merely acting in accordance with the prescriptions one finds in the Koran (such as testifying that there is no God but God, or performing the pilgrimage to
the Kaʿba) is necessary but not sufficient if one wants to ‘walk the straight path’ of Islam (aṣ-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm). These deeds must be performed with certain accompanying beliefs—in other words, these beliefs are propositions we ought to believe.23 Conversely, one might argue that Islamic belief is only a matter of performing the relevant required actions. As such, we might take the passage to suggest that the Islamic view of belief is a thoroughly dispositionalist one, where ‘S believes that p’ just means that S has a set of behavioural dispositions associated with a belief that p. For instance, if I like cake, believing that there is a cake in the fridge means that I will be disposed to open the fridge and eat the cake when hungry.24 Alternatively, we may read the hadith as insisting that to be a Muslim is to be in a state of knowledge (since knowledge = Islam) and as such is not a matter merely of faith (where imān is taken to translate as faith, rather than belief, or where the two are roughly synonymous). This latter reading broadly commits to an Evidentialist position, according to which all beliefs, including religious beliefs, are subject to only epistemic standards of correctness.25 The related, obverse interpretation would be that it tells us that faith, (imān) rather than knowledge, is the central obligation involved in being a good Muslim. This latter view resembles Fideism, the view that certain beliefs are a matter of faith, and that their justification thus outruns evidential considerations. As I mentioned in the preceding section, Fideism is a variety of non-Evidentialism. Franz Rosenthal has put together overwhelming evidence that the prevailing, modern Muslim view is that ‘Islam’ and ‘imān’ are synonyms, and what they denote is identical. This may give the prima facie impression that the prevailing Muslim view of the ethics of belief is a non-Evidentialist one. But as Rosenthal himself argues, that would be a mistake. First, one can find passages which contain an explicit endorsement that the two concepts need to be kept apart.26 Second, scholars of medieval Islam largely agree that there were factions within Islam during various periods which endorsed the distinction, but felt unable to say so explicitly. As Rosenthal puts it:
Those who felt that faith was to be kept separate from knowledge were the ones who were inclined to favour rationalistic or esoteric knowledge and to play down the importance of formal faith. Since “faith”, however, was a sacred term of religion, it was only prudent for such thinkers to avoid public discussion of the term outside their own groups whenever possible, and not to use it when belief was under discussion as an element of epistemology. Thus, we rarely find clear-cut statements of views on the distinctiveness of knowledge and faith. (Rosenthal 2007, p. 108)
If Rosenthal is right about this, a bifurcation of views in the Islamic self-understanding begins here, one that parallels the distinction in the Western ethics of belief between Evidentialist and non-Evidentialist understandings of what renders belief justified. In the next three sections, I further explore this possibility.
1.3.2 Islamic Evidentialism
The Abbasid Caliphate ruled the Islamic empire from 750 to 1258, when it was broken up by the Mongol invasions and their sack of Baghdad, the Abbasid seat of power, in 1258. The Islamic empire was enormous during this time, encompassing most of the modern-day Middle East, Iran, and North Africa (Islamic Spain, al-Andalus, existed as the independent Caliphate of Córdoba from 929 to 1031, overlapping with the Abbasids). The Islamic empire had grown at an astonishing speed from 622 to 750, first under Muhammad, then under the rightly-guided caliphs (rashidūn), 27 and then under the Umayyad dynasty, which was in turn vanquished by the Abbasids. There was little scope for further territorial gain for the Abbasids; their attention turned itself inwards, directed towards glorifying their dynasty from within. They moved the geographic center of power from the Umayyad seat at Damascus to Baghdad, which they would turn into the world’s foremost centre of learning and culture. In Baghdad, the Abbasids built the famous House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmāh), a vast library, and a centre for the translation and study of the Greek scientific and philosophical works the Islamic world had come into contact with as they made territorial gains in the Levant. The surviving witnesses of such texts were often in Syraic, further complicating the work of translation. The sack of Alexandria would prove a boon to the nascent translation efforts of the Abbasids, as what was left of its celebrated library was assimilated into Arab culture. During this time, the Abbasids—especially the early Abbasid caliphs Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809), al-Māʿmun (813–833), and al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842)—were extraordinarily generous patrons to individual scholars, translators and philosophers, many of whom they invited to their courts.28 Thus, they gave rise to a period often referred to as the ‘Islamic Golden Age’, or sometimes the ‘Islamic Renaissance’. It was against this historical backdrop that Muʿtazilite theology became the state-sponsored, official interpretation of Islam under the Abbasids. Adherence to the theology was vigorously enforced.29 Muʿtazilite theology was an especially rationalistic theology, in the sense that it promoted
the role of epistemic reason in religious faith.30 As Montgomery Watt (1984) notes, European scholars in the late nineteenth century came to have a sympathetic attitude to this school, about which there had been until then little knowledge. In an 1865 account, the Swiss scholar Henrich Steiner had even qualified the Muʿtazilites as “the free-thinkers of Islam” (cf. Watt 1984, p. 46). Such European scholars saw in the Muʿtazilites an appreciation of the values of free-will and personal moral responsibility, which looked to be in accord with nineteenth century European values, and so offered the possibility of a rapprochement between the worldviews of Islam and the West. However, as Watt also points out, modern scholars of Islam have discovered that this view was overly idealistic, and that the Muʿtazilites, far from being “free thinkers”, were in fact devout Muslims, zealous in their vision of the faith—a zealousness exemplified in their inquisition of unbelievers. Nevertheless, they were instrumental in bringing Greek thought into Islamic civilization. As Watt puts it:
While it may be difficult for the Western scholar of the last quarter of the twentieth century to share the enthusiasm for Muʿtazilism of the scholars of a century earlier, it certainly made an outstanding contribution to Islamic thought by the assimilation of a large number of Greek ideas and methods of argument. This was essentially the achievement of the great Muʿtazilites of the Golden Age. (Watt 1982, p. 54)
Further, there is something indeed ‘rationalistic’ (in the sense above) about what came to be their core theological beliefs. These consisted of five essential tenets, the first two of which seem to have been given lexical priority:
(i) God is Unity, One (tawḥīd).
(ii) God dispatches Justice (ʿadl).
(iii) There is a “promise and a threat” of Paradise and Hell.
(iv) One should adopt an “intermediary position”.
(v) One must “command the right and forbid the wrong”.
Principles (iv) and (v) require further explication. Principle (v), simply, is about the obligation to impose justice via any means necessary though consistent with justice itself, up to and including the use of force. Principle (iv) is more complex. The Arabic word muʿtazila translates as ‘withdrawers’ or ‘those who withdrew’. This refers to an (arguably folkloric) account
of how it was that the Muʿtazilites came to be known as people who suspended judgement in response to the following question: can someone who has sinned be appropriately considered a true believer? This, of course, is related to the issue of how to interpret the difference, if one exists, between imān and Islam as it appears in Caliph Umar’s hadith. Indeed, to pose the central question facing the Muʿtazilites in slightly different terms, must one’s actions accord with one’s belief that p if one is said to believe that p? As I hinted at earlier, answering the question above in the negative might well come with a commitment to what modern, Western epistemologists call dispositionalism about belief, or even a broader, more pragmatic account of the content of our mental states. This sort of view in turn supports the idea that faith and religious observance are identical, such that what determines correct religious belief outruns evidence—it is instead a matter of faith. Being a true believer is a matter of acting in accord with Koranic obligation, and such actions we can choose to commit, or choose not to commit. As such, belief appears voluntary (a function of our actions, or our dispositions to action), can be both the object of blame and praise, and, further, has non-evidential correctness conditions—viz. compliance with strictures about how to behave. The Muʿtazilites, however, did not take this line, and thought that there was no determinate answer to the question whether someone who has sinned can be considered a true believer. As their name signals, they literally ‘withdrew’ from debates on this question, and proposed an intermediate answer—that is, they withheld judgment with respect to the question.
The position had serious political implications at the time. First, it meant that the Muʿtazilites did not have to take sides on pressing contemporary arguments, such as whether ‘Uthman was a heretic,31 or whether ʿAli was properly one of the rashidūn. As such, until 850 when the more orthodox Sunni al-Mutawakkil became caliph, the Abbasid Empire had been one where the divide between Sunni and Shi’a Islam remained relatively marginal. Further, it allowed the early Abbasid establishment to freely sponsor and give patronage to scholars whose views might otherwise have been considered too close to blasphemy, or even apostasy, for comfort. During this time one could not be legally tried for apostasy if one explicitly claimed allegiance to Islam, even where one’s actions seemed to suggest otherwise, or even if one had other beliefs that seemed to contradict it. Significantly, withdrawal of judgment was not the view of the Hanbalites, who were persecuted under the Abbasids; however, via the re-invigorating
work of Ibn Taymmiyya, they were to become the thinkers of choice for the eighteenth century Wahhabist movement (whose views have become dominant in modern-day Saudi Arabia). In conclusion, regardless of the progressive political implications of Muʿtazilite doctrine as it pertains to the suspension of judgment with respect to the nature of faith and religious knowledge or observance, (or, put more simply, their view of the relationship between belief and action) one cannot yet firmly classify the Muʿtazilites as Evidentialists.
Nevertheless, their emphasis on the principle of divine justice is what made the nineteenth century European scholars on Islam so partial to the Muʿtazilites. For the Muʿtazilites here seem to endorse the ideals of personal freedom and moral responsibility, especially the Kantian ideal that “‘ought’ implies ‘can’”, in other words, that we are only morally responsible over things within our voluntary control. A just God punishes those who have chosen to sin, and rewards those who have chosen to do good and abide by God’s law. If Zayd is forced to sin, and could not have done otherwise but sin, then it is an unjust God that punishes him.32 As we discussed earlier, in Muʿtazilite thought, the same principle applies to our beliefs as well as our actions. The issue relates directly to how we are to think of the difference between infidels (kuffār), and apostates (murtadd), and on whether and how to punish them. Infidels do not believe the religious principles of the Koran, full stop. But, when there was no way that an infidel could have had access to the Koranic revelation, or to testimony of it, how are we then to judge them? The Muʿtazilites—and here is where the nineteenth century perception of them qua “free thinkers” parts company with reality—took a hard line here, deciding that in many cases infidels were indeed doing something morally wrong in failing to have Koranic belief. Underlying this line of reasoning is the idea that by considering the evidence around them, those without exposure to the revelation would have come to have beliefs that at the very least resemble Koranic belief in all but name. And they could have come to acquire these beliefs even when they had no way of accessing the Koran. Thus, people who fail to have Koranic belief are simply failing to exercise their capacity of reason, and since whether or not we use our capacity of reason is within our control, we can be—at least indirectly—held accountable for irrational beliefs.33 Further, there is a thematic connection here between infidels and apostates, with respect to beliefs that at least resemble proper Koranic beliefs. Consider whether those who introduce innovation (bid‘ah) into religion are also apostates. After all, Islam considers such innovation to be
heresy. The modus operandi for the Muʿtazilites on the issue of such heresy was to take a more lenient political stance, claiming the matter was in many instances indeterminate and subject to suspension of judgment. The early Muʿtazilites took this approach, as we briefly discussed above, with respect to Shi‘a Islam. Here, the key determinant of apostasy centers on whether or not a putative apostate has done all that she can with respect to arriving at correct belief. If she seems to have done so, by virtue of having beliefs that resemble the correct (in this case, Sunni) Koranic ones, then while she may still be guilty of lesser crimes, one cannot charge him or her with apostacy, as the matter is too indeterminate for us humans to judge, and may be properly resolved only at the Day of Judgment. Thus, a Shi‘a under Muʿtazilite rule escapes the death penalty. Again, the keystones of the Muʿtazilite logic in this situation are that ought implies can, and that the teachings of prophecy do not tell us anything that cannot be at least approximately learnt via the use of reason alone. Part of the relevant indeterminacy here concerns whether one can sin and be a true believer. The view that we cannot always judge whether or not someone holds their beliefs in good faith that is, whether or not they have done all that is within their control in order to arrive at what they think is correct belief, coheres better if one views belief as a private, occurent mental state.34 These views on belief and reason, when taken together, present us with a reasonable case for taking the Muʿtazilites as committed to Evidentialism, at least prior to 850.
The Muʿtazilites case for Evidentialism, premised as it is on the idea of God’s justice, remains vulnerable to philosophical troubles, among which are the following: first, the Muʿtazilites left little scope for indeterminacy when it came to their own core doctrines. After all, there was hardly much leniency given with respect to what they considered incorrect answers during their inquisition. However, notice that the guiding question of that inquisition was not, ‘do you accept the principle of God’s unity’? Rather, they posed the more indirect and intellectual question, ‘do you believe the Koran was created or not’? Understanding how this latter question relates to the issue regarding the oneness of God requires the instrument of reason. Arguably, this demonstrates the Muʿtazilites’s primary concern with the latter as the proper determinant of faith, rather than blind commitment to rote learning, even if the consequences of their inquisition were obviously going to militate against that end. Second, one might wonder what divinely meted-out fate the Muʿtazilites could think
was appropriate for those who die before being given the opportunity to enact any free choice (doxastic or otherwise). Third, what special role could the Muʿtazilites think that prophecy possessed, once it is ruled that, in principle, one could reason one’s way into correct belief? Perhaps they could hold that its role is to guide reason, a view which resonates with Socrates’s guidance of the slave-boy in Plato’s Meno to correct opinion35; but this will look deflationary, to say the least, to those for whom revelation has an essentially indispensible role.36 The matter is a vexed one for any kind of Evidentialist. Indeed, the more literally minded Hanbalites thought that the word of prophecy was to be taken as literal truth, as factively representing the world, but a vital aspect of the world that cannot be cognized through the use of reason alone.37 Yet, if this is the case, then the possibility of any moral, normative judgment on the beliefs of infidels is obviated.
Whatever the internal philosophical tenability of their views, the Muʿtazilite position as the official theology in Islam during the early Abbasid period certainly buttressed and perhaps even caused the rise of falsafa in the Muslim world. The first of the falasifa was likely al-Kindi (801–873), known as “the Philosopher of the Arabs” and a clear proponent of Evidentialism. The nickname “Philosopher of the Arabs” was given to him in reference to his good Arab pedigree as a descendent of the Kindah tribe, one of whose chieftains was a companion of Muhammad. Al-Kindi was born and educated in Basra, and worked in Baghdad under the patronage of the Abbasid caliphs, especially al-Maʿmun and al-Muʿtasim (al-Kindi became tutor to the latter’s son, and so enjoyed a privileged position at court). Al-Kindi’s main concern, qua philosopher, was to demonstrate the utility and legitimacy of the study of philosophy within a culture essentially identified with prophecy.38 As such, he was especially concerned with the relationship between faith and reason, and thus with the question of what justifies belief. This latter question is, of course, the guiding question of the ethics of belief. The following passage from his On First Philosophy (essentially a work in philosophical theology), neatly characterizes his position:
We ought not be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, /even if it comes from races distant and nations different from ours. For the seeker of truth nothing takes precedence over the truth, and there is no disparagement of the truth, nor belittling either of him who speaks it or of him who conveys it. (The status of) no one is
diminished by the truth; rather does the truth ennoble all. (al-Kindi On First Philosophy, p. 58)
Two things are implicit in the passage above. The first is that al-Kindi’s Muslim contemporaries were inclined to view philosophy as a Greek import, and therefore foreign and potentially anti-Islamic. Thus, we find the references here to “nations different to ours” and “races distant”. Indeed, the word given to philosophy in Arabic, falsafa, is an Arabized version of the Greek word philosophia. Using the Greek term as a more or less direct loanword, instead of translating the sense of the word into Arabic (i.e., ‘love of wisdom’) would have further enhanced the sense that philosophy was not properly Islamic (cf. Adamson 2007a). The second is that all beliefs, including religious beliefs, are to be assessed relative to their truth conditions. That is, we have good epistemic reason to hold religious beliefs; especially, for al-Kindi, religious beliefs as they are expressed by the Muslim faith. This reasoning underlies his confidence that Muslim belief can withstand the study of non-Islamic works, since nothing that is true in these works can contradict Koranic belief, if the reason for Koranic belief is purely epistemic. If one takes Koranic belief in this way, and moreover takes the Koran to mandate the seeking of truth, then all true propositions must be considered compatible with Koranic belief. This is of course an Evidentialist position, since the idea is that the Koran prescribes that for any given belief it is correct, just in case it is true. Since, for al-Kindi, we can take it to be obvious that Islamic belief is true, this Evidentialist line of reasoning amounts to a defence for the study of philosophy (even qua foreign import), since insofar as the latter discovers the truth, that truth is Islamic, or at least perfectly compatible with Islam.
As with Muʿtazilite Evidentialism, al-Kindi’s Evidentialism appears vulnerable to problems. For instance, it makes no further progress as regards the issue of the unique function of prophecy.39 Further, one may wonder whether the position pays due heed to the possibility—well known to anyone who has read Plato’s Meno—that at least part of what gives true beliefs their epistemic value has to do with how those beliefs were acquired, and whether they have due “resilience”.
These problems are addressed in the works of the prominent medieval Islamic philosophers (namely al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes). In what follows I will argue their ideas constitute a unified position I term Moderate Evidentialism.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Address of the President at the unveiling of the monument to General Sheridan, Wednesday, November 25, 1908
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Address of the President at the unveiling of the monument to General Sheridan, Wednesday, November 25, 1908
Author: Theodore Roosevelt
Release date: June 29, 2022 [eBook #68422]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Government Printing Office, 1908
Credits: Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT TO GENERAL SHERIDAN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908
Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the blank cover and the pamphlet cover by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908
WASHINGTON
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1908
It is eminently fitting that the Nation’s illustrious men, the men who loom as heroes before the eyes of our people, should be fittingly commemorated here at the National Capital, and I am glad indeed to take part in the unveiling of this statue to General Sheridan. His name will always stand high on the list of American worthies. Not only was he a great general, but he showed his greatness with that touch of originality which we call genius. Indeed this quality of brilliance has been in one sense a disadvantage to his reputation, for it has tended to overshadow his solid ability We tend to think of him only as the dashing cavalry leader, whereas he was in reality not only that, but also a great commander. Of course, the fact in his career most readily recognized was his mastery in the necessarily modern art of handling masses of modern cavalry so as to give them the fullest possible effect, not only in the ordinary operations of cavalry which precede and follow a battle, but in the battle itself. But in addition he showed in the civil war that he was a first-class army commander, both as a subordinate of Grant and when in independent command. His record in the Valley campaign, and again from Five Forks to Appomattox, is one difficult to parallel in military history. After the close of the great war, in a field where there was scant glory to be won by the general in chief, he rendered a signal service which has gone almost unnoticed; for in the tedious weary Indian wars on the Great Plains it was he who developed in thorough-going fashion the system of campaigning in winter, which, at the cost of bitter hardship and peril, finally broke down the banded strength of those formidable warriors, the horse Indians.
His career was typically American, for from plain beginnings he rose to the highest military position in our land. We honor his memory itself; and moreover, as in the case of the other great commanders of his day, his career symbolizes the careers of all those men who in the years of the nation’s direst need sprang to the front to risk everything, including life itself, and to spend the days of their strongest young manhood in valorous conflict for an ideal. Often
we Americans are taunted with having only a material ideal. The empty folly of the taunt is sufficiently shown by the presence here today of you men of the Grand Army, you the comrades of the dead general, the men who served with and under him. In all history we have no greater instance of subordination of self, of the exalting of a lofty ideal over merely material well-being among the people of a great nation, than was shown by our own people in the civil war.
And you, the men who wore the blue, would be the first to say that this same lofty indifference to the things of the body, when compared to the things of the soul, was shown by your brothers who wore the gray. Dreadful was the suffering, dreadful the loss, of the civil war. Yet it stands alone among wars in this, that, now that the wounds are healed, the memory of the mighty deeds of valor performed on one side no less than on the other has become the common heritage of all our people in every quarter of this country. The completeness with which this is true is shown by what is occurring here to-day. We meet together to raise a monument to a great Union general, in the presence of many of the survivors of the Union Army; and the Secretary of War, the man at the head of the Army, who, by virtue of his office, occupies a special relation to the celebration, is himself a man who fought in the Confederate service. Few indeed have been the countries where such a conjunction would have been possible, and blessed indeed are we that in our own beloved land it is not only possible, but seems so entirely natural as to excite no comment whatever.
There is another point in General Sheridan’s career which it is good for all of us to remember. Whereas Grant, Sherman, and Thomas were of the old native American stock, the parents of Sheridan, like the parents of Farragut, were born on the other side of the water. Any one of the five was just as much a type of the real American, of what is best in America, as the other four. We should keep steadily before our minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; that it is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent. Here in this country the representatives of many old-world races are being fused together into a new type, a type the main features of which are
already determined, and were determined at the time of the Revolutionary war; for the crucible in which all the new types are melted into one was shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day. The strains will not continue to exist separately in this country as in the old world. They will be combined in one; and of this new type those men will best represent what is loftiest in the nation’s past, what is finest in her hope for the future, who stand each solely on his worth as a man; who scorn to do evil to others, and who refuse to submit to wrongdoing themselves; who have in them no taint of weakness; who never fear to fight when fighting is demanded by a sound and high morality, but who hope by their lives to bring ever nearer the day when justice and peace shall prevail within our own borders and in our relations with all foreign powers.
Much of the usefulness of any career must lie in the impress that it makes upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, the generations that come after. We of this generation have our own problems to solve, and the condition of our solving them is that we shall all work together as American citizens without regard to differences of section or creed or birthplace, copying, not the divisions which so lamentably sundered our fathers one from another, but the spirit of burning devotion to duty which drove them forward, each to do the right as it was given him to see the right, in the great years when Grant, Farragut, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, when Lee and Jackson, and the Johnstons, the valiant men of the North and the valiant men of the South, fought to a finish the great civil war They did not themselves realize, in the bitterness of the struggle, that the blood and the grim suffering marked the death throes of what was worn out, and the birth pangs of a new and more glorious national life. Mighty is the heritage which we have received from the men of the mighty days. We, in our turn, must gird up our loins to meet the new issues with the same stern courage and resolute adherence to an ideal, which marked our fathers who belonged to the generation of the man in whose honor we commemorate this monument to-day.
*** END OF THE
PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK
ADDRESS
OF THE PRESIDENT AT THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT TO GENERAL SHERIDAN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908 ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
START:
FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no
