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Fārābī discusses art in two levels: art as it is, and art as it should be or the utopian art. Considering art as it is includes desirable and undesirable arts. But the utopian art or art as the working of the utopian artist consists only of desirable ones. When describing the desirable art, Fārābī focuses on bringing goodness and happiness into imagination and moderating the feelings. Undesirable and wicked arts are just on the opposite side of desirable ones. They seek to corrupt thoughts and tend to immoderate sensual qualities and moods. In Fārābī's view, people understand the intelligible truths and meanings through imagination. Furthermore, the arousal of people’s feelings and emotions often originates from the imagination and the imaginary forms. The ultimate goal of the utopia is that the public achieve the intelligible happiness. Given that the public, based on their nature or habit, are not able to perceive the intelligible truths, the intelligible happiness should be transferred to their imagination. The utopian artist is able to embody the intelligible happiness using sensory and imaginary forms and he/she brings the intelligible happiness close to people's minds through their imagination.

In some contexts, philosophical debate can be rancorous even when the volume is kept low. In other contexts, certain stripes of “evangelical apologetics” can be equally adversarial and inimical in tone. In the name of preserving a professional, if not an irenic spirit, some unspoken ground rules have been adopted for interreligious dialogue. First is the demand to avoid all appearance of circular reasoning, which is to say avoid making any rhetorical moves that depend upon metaphysical presuppositions about the reality of God. Second, it is understood that (supposedly) unimportant theologically-laden details are to be left off until the (supposedly) prior task of establishing God’s reality is achieved. Such ground rules put philosophical theologians at a distinct disadvantage in interreligious dialogue as they sideline the very voices that have the highest stake in the conversation. William Wainwright offers the concept of “passional reason” as a way to counter the ground rules. Wainwright has shown that charges of circularity and subjectivism fail in the cases of such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, and William James. Read in one way, Wainwright’s work may be taken as a strategic defense that prevents antagonists from excluding religious voices from philosophical conversation. I argue that there is an even more fruitful way to read Wainwright. Simply put, Wainwright’s recapture and rehabilitation of “passional reason” for philosophy of religion simultaneously opens the door for more constructive approaches to interreligious dialogue than an agonistic-styled philosophical debate can allow.

The aim of this work is to demonstrate that Alfred Schütz's contribution to the social sciences is understandable only within the framework of his troubled relationship with Husserl's phenomenology. We will see how Schütz tries to take charge, to face and resolve a good part of the critical issues present in Husserl's work and, above all, to make a turning point in the field of investigation of phenomenology which will prove decisive for the human sciences as it will focus his attention on the question of intersubjectivity, considered no longer as a problem concerning only the phenomenological sphere but as a fundamental category of human existence. Therefore, we will try to show how Schütz's path assumes a considerable critical value as it contributes to raise the expectations of sociology and to strengthen the confidence of this discipline which tends to go beyond the narrow boundaries outlined by Husserl and to go in a direction diametrically opposite to "The Crisis of European sciences" outlined by the father of phenomenology, since Schütz provides stable and adequate bases for the social sciences that allow to analyze the fundamental structures that support the social world, and, in this way, at the same time, he manages to safeguard the basic nucleus of the phenomenological discipline, since, stripped of metaphysical lure and devoid of verbal and oracular enchantments, it is traced back to the Husserlian idea of rigorous science. From this point of view, Schütz's merit lies primarily in having made a critical revision of phenomenology, in having initiated a broad debate on the role of the social sciences, and in having provided the first ideas for the foundation of a phenomenologically oriented sociology.

This article first explains the classical version of the Divine command ethics in both Christian and Islamic traditions, and then by pointing out its coherency, at least in appearance, with Divine sovereignty and absolute power, it tries to show why this idea is not accepted by a significant number of the Christian and Muslim theologians. William Wainwright answers this question by using Ralph Cudworth’s objections to Divine command ethics. In total, he considers seven objections and criticisms as the main reasons for Christian theologians’ turning away from the theory. By presenting these seven objections, which are mainly taken from Ralph Cudworth’s book, we try to find similar examples in the Islamic tradition and compare them with Wainwrights’ arguments. Some of these objections can be seen in both Christian and Islamic traditions of moral rationalism. But some of them, despite the similarity in content, have different formulations. Also, some objections are specific to Christian or Islamic theology. Last but not least, there are intra-religious objections based on revelations in Islam and Christianity against the theory of Divine command, which is not the subject of my discussion in this article.