one of the bases for the development of an iranian theory of international relations is the intellectual and practical traditions found in the course of iran’s history. the ways in which iranians have perceived and understood world politics, however, have not been monolithic and have changed in the course of time due to particular historical circumstances inside iran as well as at the regional ...

this article reviews the commentary tradition around the metaphysics of avicenna’s shifā’ as it evolved in the lands that belonged to avicenna’s own cultural horizon, most of all in iran. from this overview it emerges that this tradition is characterized by a keen interest  in textual criticism and a solid philosophical grasp of avicenna’s metaphysical doctrines. this interest is reflected in t...

Patient requests for "inappropriate" medical treatment (violations of the standard of care) based on religious beliefs should have special standing. Nevertheless, not all such requests should be honored, because some are morally disturbing. The trouble lies in deciding which ones count. This paper proposes criteria that would qualify a religious belief as medically valid to help physicians deci...

To support temporal operators and to increase the efficiency of temporal queries, indexing based on temporal attributes is required. We consider the problem of indexing the temporal dimension in valid time databases. We assume that the temporal information of data objects are represented as valid time intervals that have to be managed dynamically by an efficient index structure. Unlike the time...