درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This article tries to find a way out of the epistemological problem and the self-body question in Cartesian dualism in light of Mulla Sadra Shirazi's philosophy. There are possibilities in Sadra's thought which make achieving this objective possible. The argument develops in three steps to bring into focus the subject, the object, and knowledge. Concerning the subject, Mulla Sadra's philosophy demonstrates that self/soul and body are unified through modal boundedness (tqyid-i al-sha'ni) which is called existential objectivity in which the self-body duality makes no sense. In his discussion on the object, Shirazi points out that philosophical truths such as necessity, causality, oneness, and so on are unified to the external being and the objective reality in an integrative way (taqyid-i al-indimadji) having existential objectivity. Regarding knowledge, Mulla Sadra emphasizes the existential character of knowledge rather than its essentiality. Therefore, the existence or the existential unity between the knower, the known, and the knowledge overcome the self-body and self-external world cleavages. Because of its unity with the body, the self is present in the external world and perceives the world or the external facts, and then some ideas of the external worlds will appear in mind.

Sadra and Heidegger share a common fundamental concern, i.e. the retrieve of the question of Being. Their whole philosophical career in one sense has been devoted to the accomplishment of this single task. They belong to different philosophical traditions and have lived in different worlds and have had different spiritual and intellectual ideals. However, their ontological concern have numerous points of similarity and can be comparatively assayed. The mystical dimension of the philosophical discourses of these two philosophers of the Truth of Being is one of the significant comparative issues that can be studied in view of a certain set of mystical concepts. One of the key mystical concepts is Yaqzah or mystical awakening that refers to the existential awareness that occurs in the mystic following a Divine enlightenment. The current essay seeks to comparatively study the mystical relevance of the notion of Being-Mindfulness of Sadra and Heidegger in view of the mystical concept of Yaqzah. It has been shown that despite undeniable differences we can discern significant similarities in both notions and take a constructive step for more integrative understanding of human condition as a whole.

HélèneCixous, the renowned contemporary philosopher and feminist, provides such a heretic account of femininity which transcends the feminist social or political movements. She believes that “the female” can create a new identity for itself, when keeps its distance from the masculine symbolic order. Of course, this has nothing to do with the absence of women in the cultural realm, rather the problem is that if the female aspects of human being are not to be eliminated, a new ontology is required to sustain it in a pointlessness situation, so that it can always resist the conventional perceptual patterns. In other words, the female can only make its identity and the nature of rationality dynamic, when it injects the strangeness in the masculine order. This means keeping a position on the margins of history, while also infusing the feminine energies into the symbolic body. In this research, we try to show that for Cixous, emergence of the new is dependent both on some kind of feminine otherness and the marginality. This can be realized by various dismantling tools such as women’s writing and polyphonic identities. Finally we make it clear that through the female otherness or being on the margins, the feminine can provide a way of thinking about those realities which have not been thought up so far in the symbolic rationality, or have always been rejected as the unthinkable.

In this paper, I argue for a new solution to Mary’s puzzle in Jackson’s famous knowledge argument. We are told that imprisoned Mary knows all facts or truths about color and color vision. On her release, she learns something new according to B-type of materialism and according to property dualism. I argue that this cognitive improvement can only be accounted for in terms of what Schellenberg has recently called “capacitism,” namely the claim that that experience is constitutively a matter of discriminating and singling out particulars by employing perceptual capacities. Of course, I am not claiming that knowing the phenomenal character is simply the possession of abilities, let alone that the phenomenal character is a sort of know-how. That is why my claim is not affiliated with Lewis and Nemirow's ability hypothesis position. I take for granted here a sort of property-representationalism, according to which the phenomenal character of experience supervenes on the cluster of properties that the respective experiences represent. On her release, Mary acquires those perceptual abilities on the basis of which she learns to discriminate all shades of color. And after applying her old physical concept RED to the shade of red, she comes to know what it is like to experience red (propositional knowledge).