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Ayala (American philosopher and biologist) has presented new theories on the evolutionary ethical explanations. Due to the large scope of Ayala’s discussion on evolutionary ethics, only some of his theories will be reviewed in this paper after mentioning Ayala’s theoretical foundations about the formation of moral sense and moral norms. Following Darwin, Ayala distinguishes the moral sense and the moral norms accepted by the human community. Therefore, he believes that the biological-natural processes lead to the evolution of the human mind; this growth and development in the mind results in the moral sense in the human. On the one hand, the norms and ethical systems of any human society have been emerged due to the cultural evolution in that country. Hence, cultural evolution is the foundation of Ayala’s ethical pluralism theory. As such, Ayala advocates the objectivity of moral values and Kantian subjective morality. He rejects the dependence of the moral sense on evolutionary mechanisms such as group selection and relative selection since he, like Kant, regards human rationality as the only reason for justifying moral sense. In this paper, Ayala’s theories on ethical pluralism and the role of cultural evolution in the formation of moral norms are discussed and criticized. Ayala’s success in establishing a universal normative ethical system will be approached skeptically; however, his biological explanation of the origin of moral sense can be considered as a Kantian account of morality.

The question of what is the soul is one of the fundamental questions in philosophical psychology and the answer to it, along with other psychology questions, has been and is one of the most important and first concerns of philosophers. Among the philosophers, Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi have offered a novel view of the identity of the soul in comparison with their predecessors. In order to know the identity of the soul, Ibn Sina mentions the experience of human beings suspended in space in some of his works, and Suhrawardi, while expressing and modifying Ibn Sina's experience, speaks of other experiences. Through this research, it becomes clear that the efforts of the two in recognizing the soul are not the same, because Ibn Sina comes into existence in the experience of a human suspended in space, which is a hypothetical experience, and Suhrawardi in the experience of liberation from the body and experience in sleep and wakefulness. There are some realities and not assumptions about oneself that both views have been interpreted and evaluated in this article.