مطالب

In philosophy, many reflections and categories were the result of intuition and thought experiments. Intuition is defined as direct, immediate, and non-inferential knowledge accompanied by a sense of certainty. The thought experiment has always been a source of new insights by imagining possible situations to demarcate concepts and revise common philosophical theories. Metaphysicians usually have consensus on the informativity of intuition, but in the analytical tradition, there are severe challenges in dealing with this type of knowledge. On the other hand, some contemporary philosophers believe that the thought experiment induce the unjustified and unacceptable results in the mind of audience. In this article, by referring to some aspects of Kripke's thought, we show that his use of intuition and thought experiments in his critique of radical physicalism is defensible. By distinguishing between fixing the referent of the mental state and the physical phenomenon, Kripke has been committed to the theory of property dualism, which is a critical approach to physicalism in the realm of philosophy of mind.

Realist fiction, which had a pivotal place in 19th. Century literature, has lost its central position in the contemporary literary scene as modernism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have raised some serious challenges against it, advocating experimentalism in fiction, instead. Still, in our age, when globalization and capitalism breed different forms of marginalizations and injustices in societies, it is the realist fiction that better than any other form can depict the struggles and pains of these marginalized lives. Thus, realist fiction deserves to be considered a major genre of our time rather than a second-rater. This paper attempts to investigate into the present state of realist fiction in the literary scene, and it argues that, with the significant theoretical backing from the postpositivist realist critics, it can move toward reclaiming its position in literature today. Postpositivist realists base their defense of realist fiction on the notion that the representation of reality, identity and experience in realist fiction, in spite of being theory-mediated and affected by ideologies and discourses, is possible, as these objects of representation are real and important for being real. The paper maintains that the postpositivist support can favorably affect the present place of realist fiction. Still, the rightful realist fiction of our time, in tune with the developments in the theories of knowledge and fiction, unlike the 19th. century realist fiction, has patches of experimentalism, while keeping its realistic ethos, which further indicates that the contemporary fiction is the fiction of an era affected by postpositivist realist concepts.

Truth and knowledge are essentially the dictates of some rationality or metaphysical ordainment. By sense experience man is capable of accounting for his past, contemplate his life and predict his future and all of reality, for traditional Africa, however (as is the case with most native societies), there is another mode of knowing beyond man’s immediate capacity in search of truth and reality. An analysis of this perception indicates that there is some metaphysical tinge to epistemology or knowledge claims—whether in the spheres of justice, morality/ethics, religion, political authority, prosperity, law, or ontology/world-view. Put on a plain pedestal: Isn’t there an African mode of knowing? By the study among the Afemai-Etsako of Southern Nigeria, this article tersely adumbrates the scope and nature of knowledge and discovers that, beside the common routes to it (experience and reason), the gamut of knowledge among the traditional Africans also have several metaphysical strands reducible to creative determinism, reactive interference, and representativeness in timing and naming.

Reduction is a concept first introduced by Descartes in explaining his view of the rationalization of philosophy through mathematics. He seeks to consider length, breadth, and depth for phenomena so that reducing the phenomenon to his own analytical geometric apparatus; thus shrinking the whole world into a small machine. In the present study, the authors took into account the deficiency in defining the reduction of phenomena to a mathematically sound system as the reason for a large group of problems and therefore they came to redefine the Cartesian reductionism of phenomena by removing the search space through a learning system. In due definition, it is possible to reduce the NP problems to P space without using a quantum algorithm that requires a quantum computer to exist. The present study points out that the problems arising from the mathematical modeling of the Covid-19 pandemic are due to a deficiency in the definition of Cartesian reduction, which leads to an increase in the computational complexity of its diagnosis and treatment using computational tools.

In this essay I present a new and empirically-testable strategy for completing quantum mechanics. In recent decades, urban design and architecture disciplines witnessed plenty of theories and school development. Primarily, those disciplines are inspired by philosophical perspectives. Thus, it is required to have a good deal of perception on the philosophical roots. Contextualism theory and approach is considered one of the most important controversial approaches in urban design and architecture. The present study intends to elaborate contextualism and explicate its difference with other similar philosophical ideas. Subsequently, it tends to explain the epistemological and philosophical foundations of contextualism in postmodernism and Gestalt school and subsequently to elucidate its position in the postmodern art and specifically in postmodern urban design and architecture. Contextualism is an idea based on the epistemology that the meaning perceived from an epistemological sentence would differ according to the epistemological standards. The idea has three distinct uses in philosophical views, primarily, the truth condition of the sentences is come to be assessed; in the second use, the language meaning is dependent on the context. The paper indicates the first and second uses of contextualism are mostly seen in urban design and architecture contextualism theory.

Philosophers consider sense as a means for true cognition. In spite of the fact that Islamic philosophy are generally regarded as rational philosophy, it does not mean that they do not assume epistemological value for sense. To some of them, including Ibn Sina, sense is extremely important. In the present article, I argue that the role of sense in Ibn Sina's epistemological system is very significant although the I would not consider Ibn Sina  as an empiricist in the sense that Hume is in the Western philosophy. Rather, I consider Ibn Sina empiricism similar to  the theory of Locke. It is due to the fact that Ibn Sina considers the human mind as a tabula rasa with no actual data at the birth. It is believed that with sense the knowledge begins. In addition, in this study, by taking into the account of both empirical and rational criteria (in Ibn Sina's epistemological system), it is ultimately accentuated that in the most cases, Ibn Sina's tendency is found to be more toward empiricism. In another part of the paper, the role of sense in the realm of the concepts and affirmation (sensory and rational) is explained. It is concluded that sensory conceptions are the outcomes of sense. Other ideas (concepts) are mediated by sense; sensory affirmations immediately come from sense and in rational affirmations, sense plays a role as an introduction. In sum, this is the explanation of Ibn Sina's statement: "Whoever has no sense will have no knowledge"