مطالب

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom emerges as one of the greatest Irish characters, a temporally indomitable rebel who shatters the regular chronology and enters into the self-created heterogeneous world for the sake of challenging Irish nationalistic sacredness. The multiple characteristics of Leopold’s subjective perception of time directs us to Alain Badiou’s distinctive ontological reading, in which he proposes the term void as an ignored ontological heterogeneity triggered by the state’s monolithic structuration. By localizing the void under the name of the event, the required condition will be prepared for the eligible subject, namely, a rebel to engage idiosyncrasy in hope of changing a future that is still in the formation. By examining Ulysses, this article explores the ways in which Leopold’s mind embraces a plethora of immediate impressions in the form of failed inconsistencies that can be used as a personal artifact in social context laden with anti-colonial sentiments to first, provide self-created truths, and then reexamine structured situations at the sudden moment of excess, bracing itself for new causal events. Moreover, the article examines miscellaneous, pithy insignificant events as narratorial tropes cast across the spatial-temporal plane of Ulysses, diverging the narrative from linear narration, and at the same time distracting the character from approximating their centrality.

Discussions on the works of lesser-known philosophers in history can illuminate various issues, helping to establish historical connections between various thinkers. One such philosopher is Abū al-Hasan Kāshānī (d. 1558), a 16th-century figure whose views have not yet been thoroughly studied. He authored numerous works in the field of philosophy and logic, many of which remain unpublished or unedited. His treatise on mental existence (al-wujūd al-dhihnī) contains detailed and profound contributions. Mullā Ṣadrā (c. 1571-1635/40 AD) authored several works on mental existence based on Kāshānī’s views. For example, it was Kāshānī who first used the distinction between primary predication (al-ḥaml al-awwalī) and common technical predication (al-ḥaml al-shāyiʿ al-ṣanāʿī) in solving the puzzle of mental existence. Mullā Ṣadrā adopted Kāshānī’s terminology in his magnum opus Al-Asfār al-Arbaʿah. We demonstrate Kāshānī’s influence on Mullā Ṣadrā’s account of mental existence, utilizing a comparative and descriptive methodology. The material of this research includes Kāshānī’s manuscript on mental existence as well as Mullā Ṣadrā’s works on this issue. The authors edited and revised Kāshānī’s manuscript and during the editing realized this important influence by comparing it with Mullā Ṣadrā's works.