مطالب

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).

Nowadays, although our aesthetic ideas are based on modern theories and perspectives that have pervaded the art, the root of western tradition of art dates back to Greek and Roman art tradition. Theory of form in art tries to emphasize the materiality of artistic object, though in later theories, it has been more flexible and proposes issues such as content and function, as well as attributing concepts such as composition, color, technique etc. to the artwork. Plato by proposing mimesis theory and expanding its scope considered a pattern and framework for attitudes and thoughts in static arts such as painting, literature and dynamic performance arts such as drama and music, and managed to regulate and organize them. For Plato, in this process, ēthos functions as a determinant factor.  This present study is an attempt to discuss this question with descriptive-analytical approach: “will artistic form in Plato's theories be important after proposing the representational attitude toward art?” The results demonstrated that Plato's samples of beauty, in addition to descriptions and implications about the features of artistic form in some conversations can be considered equal to artistic form and due to the reflective theory in its revolution process, artistic form development into transcendence ethical form.

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.