۱.
کلید واژه ها:
Joseph de Maistre Retributionist theology Considerations sur la France Deuteronomist historian
Joseph de Maistre is usually portrayed as Edmund Burke’s French counterpart, as they both wrote important treatises against the French Revolution. Although Maistre did share many of Burke’s conservative political views, he was much more than a political thinker. He was above all a religious thinker who interpreted political events through the prism of a particular retributionist theology. According to this theology, God punishes evil deeds, not only in the afterlife, but also in this terrestrial life; and sometimes, he may even use human tyrants as instruments of his wrath. This interpretation especially evident in Maistre’s Considerations sur la France, an early work in his philosophical career. In that book, Maistre interprets the French Revolution as divine punishment, and in that regard, his views bear some similarities to the Deuteronomist historian in the Hebrew Bible, who interpreted the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile, as divine punishment in retribution of Israel’s sins.
۲.
کلید واژه ها:
philosophy Epistemology post-modernism hermeneutics
Over the centuries, beginning with the classic Greeks through the trends of the mid-20th century, philosophical enterprise has been intricately and seemingly irretrievably rooted in the theory of the given—an edification of philosophy as that giant mirror and standard for measuring what counts as knowledge; but is it thus synonymous with or reducible to epistemology? How or why? There are two answers to both of these questions. The attempt in this work is to delineate those separate concerns, their areas of convergence and disparity, but also indicated the genesis of edifying philosophy rooted in epistemology but which has been discredited in the works of some post-modernist reformers—Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Quine, and Rorty. Against theirs, this piece shows that historically, philosophizing has had a methodology and some perceptual axioms; that it is not easy to abdicate it from this mode, no matter the will and zeal—for success is not a matter of will alone; that the post-modernists revolution is nothing new with its swollen nerves and arteries (as others before it, it soon wanes). It concludes that the urge for philosophic understanding shows no sign of abating and so the philosophical journey will probably go on and on, each stage building on and rewriting its past and ruminating specific but perennial problematic; that while some of the issues seemingly do appear resolved, others may have endured and eloped any final solution; and finally that the philosophical method and basic assumptions have seriously remained firmly even beyond post-modernist restructurers.
۳.
کلید واژه ها:
Hikmi Rationalism Kalam philosophical Shi’a
One important question that the emergence of philosophical or rational Kalam has raised is what rationalism in the so-called Kalami (theological) schools actually means. This paper investigates the answers to the aforementioned question in Shi’a Kalam. Also, we have a comparative look at the philosophical Kalam and the rational one, concluding the identity of Shi’a Kalam with Shi’a philosophy. In this work, we have referred to three types of rationalism: personal, Vahmi (imaginal), and Hikmi (philosophical) rationalism. In short, our answer to the above question would be that, Shi’a Kalam – specially in Khaje Nasir’s works – is based on Hikmah (philosophy), and so, rationalism in this school does not refer but to this approach. This type of rationalism is in contrast to the personal or Vahmi rationalism. As a matter of fact, Those Mutakalims (theologians), who use Hikmi rationalism, don’t try to criticize philosophy or elicit from it; they just try to employ the principles, foundations, and results of Hikmah to explain, justify, and defend their religious beliefs
۴.
کلید واژه ها:
Gilles Deleuze time-image Still Life sheets of the past Prince Ehtejab
Gilles Deleuze, the notable post-modern philosopher, in his two-volume cinematic books Cinema 1: movement-image (1986) and Cinema 2: time-image (1989) recognizes two major periods in history of cinema (classic and modern) in terms of representing movement and time respectively. Referring to various films of modern cinema especially post-war European cinema like Italian neorealism, Cinema2 speaks about the possibility of direct presentation of time in cinematic works. Explaining Deleuze’s theories and his two formulations of direct presentation of time as ‘pure optical situations’ and ‘sheets of the past’, in this essay we try to give an analysis of the two most important films of Iranian history of cinema: Still Life (1974) and Prince Ehtejab (1974). Finally, we will conclude that these films are not mere representation of preexisting philosophical concepts, rather in contrast to linguistic thought, they provide some kind of visual and non-linguistic philosophical meditations of time, cinema of time
۵.
کلید واژه ها:
Epistemology Knowledge the Value Problem John Dewey American Pragmatism
We value possessing knowledge more than true belief. Both someone with knowledge and someone with a true belief possess the correct answer to a question. Why is knowledge more valuable than true belief if both contain the correct answer? I examine the philosophy of American pragmatist John Dewey and then I offer a novel solution to this question often called the value problem of knowledge. I present and explicate (my interpretation of) Dewey’s pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey values competent inquiry and claims it is a knowledge-forming process, and I argue that it is competently conducting inquiry that explains why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. Knowledge is always the result of a process of competent inquiry (itself valuable) whereas belief can but need not be the result of inquiry. I end by considering and replying to reasonable objections to my pragmatic solution.
۶.
کلید واژه ها:
belief Normativity prohibitive prescriptive constitutive norm permissible
That falsity is a defect in belief can be captured with a prohibitive norm holding that truth is the necessary condition for permissibility of belief. Furthermore, such a formulation avoids the difficulties encountered in earlier literature that offered prescriptive norms. The normativity of belief thesis is widely discussed in the literature. I criticise bi-conditional formulation of the norm of the normativity of belief thesis which holds that truth is both the necessary and sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation. I argue that the part which holds that truth is the sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation is redundant. The argument follows from clarifying the key ideas at stake in the normativity of belief thesis, namely, that false belief is a defect and that the normativity thesis is supposed to distinguish the concept of belief from other cognitive attitudes and the slogan that belief aims at truth.
۷.
کلید واژه ها:
relativism Paradox peritrope infinite regress global relativism Plato
Since the time of Plato, relativism has been attacked as a self-refuting theory. Today, there are two basic kinds of argument that are used to show that global relativism is logically incoherent: first, a direct descendent of the argument Plato uses against Protagoras, called the peritrope; and, second, a more recent argument that relativism leads to an infinite regress. Although some relativist theories may be formulated in such a way as to be susceptible to these arguments, there are other versions of relativism that are impervious to these charges of incoherence. First the arguments against relativism will be stated. Next, a radical form of global relativism with assessment sensitivity is introduced, RR. Finally, it is shown how RR can be defended against the challenges of the peritrope and the regress. No attempt is made to defend RR as a plausible theory; however, the usual attempts to show the logical incoherence of radical forms of global relativism fail.
۸.
کلید واژه ها:
Ibn Tufail Hay Ibn Yaqzan SciArtist SciArt Story
Ibn Tufail as a scientist as well as an artist exposes the issues of human anatomy, autopsy, and vivisection and, thereby, could be regarded as a SciArtist. SciArt might be defined as a reciprocal relation between art and science. Followings are the kinds of these interactions: artistically-inclined scientific activities,science-minded artistic activities, and intertwined scientific and artistic activities. In their fictional treatises, Avicenna, Ibn Tufail, and Suhrawardi are traditional avatars of SciArt. This paper frames an account of SciArt, suggesting in detail Ibn Tufail’s work as a prototypical example, while Avicenna and Suhrawardi go beyond the scope of this paper. An instant of intertwined scientific and artistic activities strongly captivates the attentions to Ibn Tufail, describing human anatomy, autopsy, and vivisection in his Treatiseof Hay Ibn Yaqzan. Recognized as the first philosophical story, Hay Ibn Yaqzan depicts the whole philosophy of Ibn Tufail by the story of an autodidactic feral child a gazelle raised whom in an island in the Indian Ocean.
۹.
کلید واژه ها:
History nature Highest good happiness Virtue conflict
Discussing two common critiques on theological interpretations of the concept of the highest good in Kant’s moral philosophy in his paper, Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant, Reath has invited readers to have a secular interpretation of this concept and pointed out its advantages. In the present paper, we will attempt to provide the main principles of Reath’s claims and demonstrate why Kant has stated both of these interpretations in all of his critical works—a subject that has confused Reath. For this purpose, we will indicate that in both of the above interpretations, Kant has offered the concept of the highest good in a historical context, in which the intellectual idea of the highest good as a desired ultimate totality makes the intellect to grow in history and cultivate the talents of human kind through numerous conflicts embedded in nature.
۱۰.
کلید واژه ها:
Kristeva language semiotics Signifiance Subject
Reaching out to history and subject in terms of meaning variation, Kristeva could show that language cannot simply be a Saussurean sign system. Rather, she went on to delineate that language, beyond signs, is associated with a dynamic system of signification where the ''speaking subject'' is constantly involved in processing. Julia Kristeva, a French critic, psychoanalyst, theoretician, a post-structuralist philosopher of Hungarian origin, dwells upon ideas from linguistics, psychoanalysis, sociology while representing text analysis, sign and subject from emotional and motivational perspectives. She believes that processing language structure and subject depend upon semiotic and symbolic domains that emerge in the scope of ''signifiance'' process whereby the semiotic domain processes and primary structures against the symbolic realm. In Kristeva''s view, the sign Chora, while being the milieu for energy, dynamism, and motility, shows the internal and signification drives of the language, and will involve changes in signification mutation of subjectivity.
۱۱.
کلید واژه ها:
Cognitive Semantics PhenomenologyCognitive Semantics Naturalised epistemology Embodied Mind Emergence Metaphor Schemes Category Theory Phenomenology
The paper addresses the main questions to be dealt with by any semantic theory which is committed to provide an explanation of how meaning is possible. On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structure of language, rely on the existence of end products in the morphogenesis of meaning. On the other, the paper argues that philosophy of language, which, either in the analytic or the structuralist or the hermeneutical tradition, made little use of such resources (when they are not simply rejected). Left the main question unanswered. Though phenomenology intended to focus on the constitutive process, it ended up mostly with philology. Cognitive semantics paved the way to focus on patterns of bodily interaction within the natural environment out of which basic schemes emerge and are metaphorically “lifted” to any universe of discourse. The explanatory commitment is thus endorsed through two hypotheses: (1) these schemes, of topological and kinaesthetic structure, determine the range of forms of atomic sentences of any natural language, and (2) the category-theoretic notion of universality allows for a proper analysis of how such schemes are “lifted”.
۱۲.
کلید واژه ها:
moderate morality allowing harm interest-based contractarianism political ethics International Relations
What is morality’s scope? Should all our actions be evaluated morally? Is it necessary to be causally responsible for harm to have a responsibility to reduce it? Is there a morally relevant distinction between those consequences of our actions which we intend or do and those which we foresee but do not intend or allow but do not do? Is helping others a matter of supererogation (i.e. beyond the call of moral duty) or a matter of obligation? These are crucial questions that need to be debated in normative and applied ethics. However, they were not raised seriously and independently until the last decades of the 20th century. There are several answers to these questions. This paper defends the answers of an approach which is called “moderate morality.” So, at first, it defines “moderate morality,” and pays heed to the views of its opponents, including Peter Singer, Shelly Kagan, and Peter Unger. Then, it tries to defend “moderate morality” based on “interest-based contractarianism.” Finally, it examines “its result in applied ethics” and tries to find a reasonable answer to a crucial question in the “political ethics of international relations” in our globalized era: What moral obligation, if any, do we have individually and as a society toward the people whose basic human rights are being violated not only in our country but also all over the world?
۱۳.
کلید واژه ها:
folk ethics moral philosophy moral capacities virtue ethics consequentialism
Contemporary ethics and moral philosophy need a kind of revision due to their negligence in human moral capacities, ordinary life, and humans’ expectations of ethics. The assumptions and presuppositions of ethics result in their current unsatisfactory status. In this paper, we first explore and criticize those presuppositions. Then, instead of introducing ideal presuppositions of ethics, we introduce folk ethics and its components in order to show that contemporary ethics and moral philosophy should always begin with folk ethics. The most important advantage of folk ethics is its realistic foundation, which in turn will produce better results.
۱۴.
کلید واژه ها:
ethics religion Demystification Modernism Subjectivism
Kant's demystification is meant to put away any metaphysical and revealed elements from ethics and religion. Kant, fulfilling this, first argues that metaphysical questions of reason, from theoretical aspect, have no certain answers. In practical reason, he establishes his moral foundations, based on own human being without any referring to metaphysical bases. In fact, Kant places human being as the base, legislator and finally the end of ethics, so that the totality of morality is depended on itself him/her and there is no moral reality out of our humanly understanding. Kant, then, by confirming the necessity of rational religion, believes that the age of revealed religions have been expired, since they were belonged to the childhood age of human being’s reason, while in Kant’s rational religion, this is human being’s subjective intellect that defines the nature and function of God. Therefore, for Kant’s moral and rational religion, there is no credibility for affairs like miracles, blessings and prayers, since they indicate religious misguidance. In Kant’s rational pure religion, the religion is relied on human being’s pure reason in which his/her reason is the only criterion of religious beliefs. Therefore, for Kant, religion means recognizing our duties as divine judgments, and that such religion pertains to our mundane life not for worshiping God in order to get his satisfaction or benefitting his grace. In short, Kant’s religion and morality are totally depended on our humanly and earthy rationality and understanding, and that there is no mystery out of our humanly willing. So the mysteries that are claimed by revealed religions are meaningless, since our reason, itself, determines the nature, function and virtues of God, moral axioms and religious beliefs.
۱۵.
کلید واژه ها:
Cross-Cultural Philosophy Logos of Life Gnosis Ikhwan as-Safa Crisis of Sciences New Enlighenment
The acculturalization of humanities from the late 1980ies onwards led not only to imagined different worlds (e.g. West / Islam), postmodernity overshadowed also common grounds of world`s philosophies. Christianity and Islam share far more than what might separate them, and we find Islam in „the West “as Christianity „in the East“. The Logos of Life Philosophy as developed by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (1923-2014) strives towards deciphering the deep layers of philosophy and its common grounds. Tracing back to Gnostic, Platonic (neo-platonic) and Islamic shaped philosophies - Ikhwan as-Safa will serve as an example - the Logos of Life / Aql Al-Kulli (universal reason) will be historicized in the following while introducing approaches towards a New Enlightenment (A.-T. Tymieniecka) as an alternative to the current crisis in meta-sciences
۱۶.
کلید واژه ها:
theoretical reason practical reason theology ethics sacred theology moral faith
Since Kant is a son of his time, his thought is originally rooted in the Enlightenment. The distinction between theoretical and practical reason, formal and material conscientiousness, authentic and doctrinal theodicy, sincerity and falsehood, and finally, historical and moral faith religion, are implications of the court held by Kant for metaphysics. Meanwhile, Kantian distinction between deism and theism in one hand, and inclination toward Job and Christ as the symbols of moral faith of religion in the other hand, can be explained by the German Protestantism of the age of Fredrick the Great and his successor. The theology based on practical reason criticizes rationalism in faith and suggests perception of religion through morality. But, Aquinas as a Christian catholic emphasizes on historical religion, revealed religion, Divine legislation, faith in Divine worship and ecclesiastical faith. Aquinas is the most distinguished supporter of rational theology. However, he believed to other kind of theology named theologia sacrae scripturae or sacred theology which its main subject is Divine beings. The main bases of Aquinas‘s ethics are revelation and foundations of church. Kant, in the contrary, tries to make room for faith inside the realm of morality and speak of practical reason theology through denial of theoretical reason.
۱۷.
کلید واژه ها:
being Coming to be Aristotle cause of being metaphysics Zeta 17
This paper considers Aristotle’s distinction between the cause of being and the cause of coming to be. It is intended to show that Aristotle is able to unify both kinds of causes on the basis of the idea that a thing’s substance is its end. He is not confused about the cause of being and of coming to be, as it might seem in several passages. The paper’s focus is on Metaphysics Zeta 17. In contrast to David Charles’ interpretation, my reading of this chapter puts weight on the fact that the end is said to explain both coming to be and being. According to this reading, Zeta 17 is a clue to understanding the unification of both causes in Aristotle.
۱۸.
کلید واژه ها:
love Phenomenology Emotion excellence of self-awareness Hafiz
Love, this eminent humane experience, has been explored not only by writers and poets, but also by philosophers, psychologists and even experimental scientists. This paper aims to discuss a novel aspect in phenomenology of love, as the concept of destructive and constructive nature of love, which is to the best of our knowledge, presented for the first time. The fundamental idea of this paper was obtained from verses of Hafiz, then polished by theories of Robert Cloninger and several other thinkers in the field of human emotions. Many verses of Hafiz display love experience as a necessary step towards growth, in a way that could be evinced further by the development of the "self-aware psych" introduced by Cloninger. He introduces the "self-aware psych" as one of the three constituting domains of human mind and personality, the intuitive essence bringing integrity for personality. If self-aware psych flourishes by favorable growth and development, it would prepare the ground for creativity, wisdom and well-being, otherwise, personality disorders would be contingent. The destructive and constructive nature of love, towards development of self-awareness and mental growth, is further determined by re-explaining the proposed theory of "ego as a complex" by Carl Jung, the theory of "network of intentionality" by John Searle, and the theory of "emotional processing" by Edna Foa and Michael Kozak in this context.
