Abstract Introduction
Ignorance, traditionally perceived as a mere absence of knowledge, has evolved in modern political contexts into a strategic tool wielded by political systems to consolidate domination. This study explores the process through which ignorance is politicized, transforming it from a passive state into an active product deliberately produced and distributed within society. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theoretical framework, particularly his concepts of the "distribution of the sensible," "police order," and "political aesthetics," the research examines how political systems employ mechanisms such as censorship, propaganda, education, and media to institutionalize ignorance, marginalize aware subjects, and elevate those aligned with ignorance as agents of power. The central research question investigates how political systems inject and channel ignorance through the redistribution of the sensible and the resultant impact on the positioning of aware and unaware subjects. The hypothesis posits that ignorance is not a random epistemic void but a politically engineered construct that sustains the status quo by concealing non-concealed truths and suppressing critical awareness. This study aims to elucidate the interplay between ignorance, power, and resistance, highlighting the potential for aware subjects to disrupt this cycle through emancipatory acts of dissensus.
Materials and Methods
The research adopts a descriptive and analytical approach grounded in Rancière’s political philosophy. It employs a qualitative methodology, utilizing conceptual analysis to unpack the mechanisms of ignorance production and their political implications. The study integrates historical and contemporary case studies—ranging from totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union to modern digital platforms such as social media—to illustrate the evolution of ignorance-producing techniques. Primary sources include Rancière’s seminal works (Disagreement, The Politics of Aesthetics, The Ignorant Schoolmaster) alongside secondary scholarly interpretations. The analysis also draws on empirical examples, such as propaganda campaigns, educational curricula, and digital algorithms, to demonstrate how the distribution of the sensible operates across different contexts.
Discussion and Result
The findings reveal that ignorance is systematically produced through the "police order," which regulates collective perception to conceal non-concealed truths and institutionalize ignorance as a default state. Mechanisms such as censorship (e.g., Soviet erasure of historical figures like Trotsky), propaganda (e.g., Nazi campaigns under Goebbels), selective education (e.g., North Korean curricula), and media manipulation (e.g., social media algorithms promoting misinformation) serve to redistribute the sensible, marginalizing aware subjects while empowering those who conform to ignorance-driven narratives. These mechanisms transform ignorance into a political capital that stabilizes power structures by rendering critical truths invisible. However, the study also identifies moments of "dissensus," where aware subjects—termed by Rancière as "those who have no part"—disrupt the police order through aesthetic and political acts. Historical examples, such as anti-colonial movements led by figures like Gandhi, and contemporary movements like #MeToo and climate activism led by Greta Thunberg, demonstrate how aware subjects, through acts of revelation and aesthetic reconfiguration, challenge the hegemony of ignorance. Digital platforms, while often complicit in ignorance production, also serve as spaces for resistance, amplifying dissensus through viral campaigns and grassroots mobilization. Nevertheless, resistance faces challenges, including direct suppression, social ostracism, and the fragmentation of awareness in the digital age.
Conclusion
This study underscores that ignorance is a politically engineered construct, strategically deployed through the distribution of the sensible to sustain domination. By leveraging Rancière’s framework, it demonstrates how the police order uses aesthetic-political mechanisms to produce and channel ignorance, positioning unaware subjects as agents of power while marginalizing the aware. Yet, the possibility of emancipatory awareness persists through moments of dissensus, where aesthetic interventions—ranging from protest art to digital activism—reconfigure the sensible and restore visibility to suppressed truths. The analysis reveals a dynamic tension between the reproduction of ignorance and the potential for resistance, suggesting that while political systems invest in ignorance as capital, the inherent equality of human understanding, as posited by Rancière, enables aware subjects to disrupt this cycle. The findings call for further exploration of how collective awareness can be sustained against structural barriers, offering insights into fostering democratic resistance in an era dominated by information overload and algorithmic control.

Abstract Introduction
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of fundamental transformation in the relationship between theology and philosophy. In England during this era, traditional Christian theology sought to present faith as a rational system, consistent with logical necessities. In contrast, a skeptical and naturalistic tradition was emerging, with figures such as Thomas Hobbes representing its most prominent voices. Hobbes, through teachings such as materialism, moral relativism, and the denial of natural religion, paved the way for new approaches to religion, while simultaneously provoking the anger of ecclesiastical authorities.
David Hume grew up in this intellectual environment and developed his philosophy both in continuation of, and in critical response to, the rationalist and natural theological traditions. Drawing inspiration from Locke, Berkeley, and Hobbes, Hume established his radical empiricism and, by analyzing concepts such as causation, substance, the self, and God, demonstrated that much of traditional theological doctrine lacked a solid epistemic foundation.
In reaction to this approach, early critics labeled Hume an atheist, skeptic, and destroyer of religion. However, interpreters such as Ernest Mossner, Kemp Smith, Passmore, Gaskin, and Paul Russell in later centuries have shown that Hume’s skepticism had a constructive dimension, and that his aim was not the negation of religion but rather the clarification of the limits of human knowledge.
Nonetheless, a fundamental question remains: what was Hume’s actual stance regarding God and religion? Should he be considered an atheist or an agnostic? This article argues that both characterizations are inadequate, and that the most accurate description of Hume’s position is God indifference. In this view, the question of God is not a central issue, but rather a topic outside the core domain of human epistemology and ethics.
The term God-indifference in this article is neither equivalent to Apatheism nor to theological Indifferentism; rather, it is an interpretive term proposed to accurately represent Hume’s perspective on religion. In this sense, Hume is neither a denier nor a defender of God; instead, by focusing on human psychology and ethics, he removes the question of God from the center of philosophy and reinterprets religion in light of human experience.
Materials & Methods
This research employs a conceptual-hermeneutical method grounded in historical-philosophical analysis. The study integrates three levels of investigation:

Textual Analysis: A close reading of Hume’s primary works—A Treatise of Human Nature, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and The Natural History of Religion—to identify his treatment of divine and religious themes.
Contextual Interpretation: Examination of the intellectual and theological milieu of early modern Britain, including responses to Hobbes, Clarke, Butler, and other figures of natural theology.
Conceptual Reconstruction: Introduction of the term God-indifference as an interpretive tool to describe Hume’s stance toward the divine, distinguishing it from related notions such as indifferentism (a theological neutrality) and apatheism (a psychological or practical indifference).

The methodology of this research combines historical and philosophical analysis, aiming to reconstruct the structure of Hume’s thought and to determine the place of his philosophy in the development of modern philosophy of religion.
Discussion & Results
The analysis reveals that Hume’s position cannot be adequately captured by the dichotomy of belief and disbelief. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, while Hume’s characters debate the teleological and cosmological arguments, none provides a conclusive proof of divine existence. Even the possibility of a “supreme cause” is left as a mere hypothesis, lacking moral or existential significance. Hume thus neither affirms nor refutes God’s existence; he simply regards the question as lacking epistemic value.
Similarly, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume dismantles metaphysical concepts—such as causality, substance, and the self—that traditionally underpinned natural theology. His critique of causation, for instance, undermines the logical structure of the cosmological argument. If causal inference rests merely on habit and not on rational necessity, then no argument from the world’s order can lead to a necessary divine cause.
Moreover, Hume’s moral philosophy reinforces this perspective. By grounding morality in sentiment rather than divine command, he redefines the basis of ethics as natural, psychological, and social. Religion, in this view, is a byproduct of human imagination and emotional need, not an outcome of rational proof.
This interpretive shift culminates in what the present study calls God-indifference a philosophical posture that neither rejects nor affirms divinity but de-centers it. Unlike apatheism, which denotes emotional or practical unconcern about God, Hume’s God indifference is epistemic and philosophical: the belief that the question of God’s existence simply does not matter for human knowledge, ethics, or happiness.
Such an interpretation clarifies why labeling Hume as an atheist or agnostic is misleading. The atheist seeks to deny God; the agnostic withholds belief but continues to treat the issue as central; Hume, by contrast, shifts the axis of philosophy altogether—from divine ontology to human experience. Religion thus becomes, for Hume, an object of empirical and psychological inquiry rather than a domain of metaphysical speculation.
This reading also explains the constructive side of Hume’s skepticism. His purpose was not to destroy belief but to redefine its limits, showing that meaning, morality, and social order can arise independently of theological foundations. Consequently, Hume’s philosophy paves the way for a new, human-centered philosophy of religion—one that interprets faith as an expression of emotion, imagination, and the search for meaning rather than as a system of proofs about divine reality.
Conclusion
In light of this analysis, Hume’s religious philosophy should be understood as a form of God-indifference—a reflective detachment from metaphysical claims about God that reorients philosophical inquiry toward human life and experience. He does not advocate atheism, which would still involve a kind of metaphysical commitment to the nonexistence of God, nor does he adopt agnosticism, which continues to treat the divine question as an unsolved problem. Instead, Hume marginalizes the entire issue, regarding it as secondary to the study of human nature, sentiment, and morality.
This stance has profound implications for modern philosophy of religion. It challenges the assumption that religious thought must center on belief in a deity and opens the door to a non-theistic but meaning-oriented understanding of faith. Hume’s philosophy thus anticipates later existential and humanistic trends that interpret religion as a function of human emotional and moral life rather than as metaphysical speculation.
Ultimately, God-indifference encapsulates Hume’s enduring legacy: a redefinition of the relationship between philosophy, religion, and human experience. In his framework, the divine ceases to be the axis of intellectual inquiry, and human nature—its perceptions, passions, and search for meaning—takes center stage. This transformation marks a pivotal moment in the history of Western thought, moving from the theology of being to the philosophy of living, from metaphysical proofs to existential understanding, and from the question of God to the reality of humanity.

Abstract Introduction The Victorian era's dominant narrative of industrial and technological progress, often glorified in contemporary media, starkly contrasts with the reality of systemic oppression and class exploitation depicted by authors like Charles Dickens. In his 1854 novel, Hard Times, Dickens directly confronts these pervasive mechanisms of power, identifying how they are enacted through the dominant ideological discourses of industrialization and utilitarianism. These discourses are institutionalized in the novel's key settings the factory and the school within the dystopian industrial city of Coketown. While previous studies have explored the novel's social critique, a comprehensive Foucauldian analysis of its specific mechanisms of power, discourse, and subject-formation remains a significant research gap. This study aims to fill that gap, analyzing how power operates in the novel using Michel Foucault's key concepts. This research investigates how Dickens represents Foucauldian disciplinary power in institutions, how these institutions produce subjects, and how the novel depicts resistance against this dominant ideology. Materials and Methods This study employs a descriptive-analytical methodology, conducting a textual analysis of Hard Times through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault. The research is library-based, drawing on Foucault's primary texts and relevant literary criticism. The core theoretical framework adopts Foucault's concept of power not as a top-down, repressive force ("sovereign power"), but as a productive, pervasive network of "disciplinary power". As detailed in Discipline and Punish, this power functions through institutions (schools, factories) to create "docile subjects" who are useful, efficient, and self-regulating. The analysis focuses on two interconnected concepts: Discourse (systems of power/knowledge, like Utilitarianism, that define "truth") and Disciplinary Mechanisms (techniques like surveillance, conceptualized in the Panopticon, which lead subjects to internalize control). Finally, the methodology incorporates Foucault's axiom that "where there is power, there is resistance," treating resistance as an integral part of the power dynamic itself. Discussion & Results The Foucauldian analysis of Hard Times yields a two-part finding centered on the novel's primary institutions: the factory and the school. Industrial Discourse and the Factory The novel’s industrial discourse, embodied by Josiah Bounderby, uses the factory for exploitation and disciplinary control. The polluted, monotonous environment of Coketown is a physical manifestation of this discourse, reducing workers to dehumanized "hands." The character of Stephen Blackpool illustrates this operation. The law functions not as a neutral arbiter but as a Foucauldian "juridical power" serving the dominant class, seen in his inability to obtain a costly divorce. When Stephen resists the system's binary logic (refusing to spy for Bounderby or fully join the union), he is subjected to disciplinary elimination. He is fired, re-defined by power through a false accusation of theft, and ultimately eliminated by the industrial system, dying in a mineshaft. His resistance, though profound, is tragically crushed. Utilitarian Discourse and the School The educational discourse is personified by Thomas Gradgrind, whose school is a machine for "subject-formation." His philosophy of "Facts" is a utilitarian discourse designed to destroy imagination and produce "docile subjects" suited for the industrial machine, enforcing this through panoptic surveillance in the school and home. The character of Sissy Jupe provides the novel's central case study of resistance. Gradgrind attempts to discipline her, notably by trying to erase her identity by changing her name from "Sissy" to "Cecilia." When she fails to provide a "factual" definition of a horse, she is expelled. Unlike Stephen's, however, Sissy's resistance is ultimately successful. She represents an "everyday resistance," quietly maintaining her own knowledge system based on empathy and human connection. This alternative knowledge proves superior when the Gradgrind system collapses, as Sissy provides refuge for the broken Louisa and facilitates Tom's escape. She subverts the disciplinary system from within. Conclusion This Foucauldian analysis of Hard Times concludes that the novel is a sophisticated deconstruction of modern power. Dickens portrays a society where dominant ideologies Utilitarianism and Industrialization function as productive Foucauldian discourses, using institutions like the school and factory to shape and control subjects. The novel’s characters, Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby, are embodiments of this disciplinary power, one shaping the mind and the other controlling the body. However, Dickens does not present a totally determined world, confirming Foucault's axiom that power and resistance are inseparable. The study identifies two distinct forms of resistance: the tragic resistance of Stephen Blackpool, whose ethical defiance is crushed, and the subversive resistance of Sissy Jupe, whose adherence to empathy creates a rupture in the dominant discourse, offering an alternative path based on human values. Ultimately, this research argues that Hard Times prophetically illustrates the Foucauldian link between knowledge and power. It shows how "truth" is manufactured to serve power, how subjects are produced by this "truth," and, most importantly, how the persistence of the human spirit provides an enduring site of resistance.

Abstract Introduction Reza Davari Ardakani offers a profound reinterpretation of the concept of “failure” within the historical, philosophical, and existential framework of Iranian thought. This article explores how Davari’s notion of failure transcends mere social or psychological defeat, emerging instead as a layered cultural and civilizational experience. The study situates this concept within the broader context of Iran’s modern identity crisis, rupture from tradition, and confrontation with Western modernity. Central to the inquiry is the dialectic between “philosophy of failure” and “failure of philosophy,” and how responsible engagement with failure may catalyze the rebirth of thought. Materials & Methods The research adopts a qualitative, hermeneutic approach rooted in critical social theory. Primary sources include Davari’s philosophical writings and public discourses, analyzed through thematic and conceptual mapping. The study identifies four analytical layers of failure in Davari’s thought: Historical rupture and the absence of generative tradition Existential interpretation of the “era of closure” Cultural and institutional stagnation (e.g., academic inertia, habitual repetition, decline of dialogue) Civilizational and identity consequences manifesting as crisis of self-awareness Comparative analysis is employed to distinguish Davari’s framework from other Iranian and Western philosophical positions, including Heidegger and Fardid, while emphasizing his unique project of reconstructing Islamic rationality. Discussion & Result Davari conceptualizes failure as a historical-existential condition rooted in the disjunction between tradition and modernity. He argues that Iranian society’s mimetic encounter with the West has led to a loss of organic continuity, rendering tradition inert and modernity superficial. His critique of Iranian intellectuals—marked by unread philosophical texts and disengagement from deep reflection—highlights structural deficiencies in education and public discourse.
While Davari warns against blind Westernization and reactionary anti-Westernism, his proposed remedies—reviving tradition and rethinking the West—raise questions about practical implementation. The study critiques the lack of institutional strategies in Davari’s work, especially regarding education, humanities, and international dialogue. Davari’s vision of founding a new rationality within the Islamic world, distinct from global modernity, is presented as a philosophical horizon rather than a concrete roadmap. His emphasis on dialectical engagement between tradition and modernity aims to generate a new mode of thought that is neither nostalgic nor imitative. Conclusion Davari’s philosophy of failure is not a lamentation but a call to philosophical awakening. He sees failure as a mirror in which Iranian thought can recognize its historical limitations and begin anew. His framework offers a compelling diagnosis of Iran’s intellectual and civilizational crisis, emphasizing the need for historical consciousness, creative tradition, and critical engagement with the West.
However, the study concludes that Davari’s project, while rich in conceptual depth, requires complementary practical strategies to translate philosophical insight into societal transformation. Failure, in Davari’s narrative, is not the end—but the beginning of renewed questioning, identity reconstruction, and philosophical creativity. Thus, the “philosophy of failure” becomes a philosophy of possibility.