Objectivity

The importance of modernity is because of man's place as the axis of all beings and existents like God and the World, and they get their meaning and validity in the light of him. Although man has reason and freedom and he is the noble master of all creatures, in the meanwhile, he has many defects in his existence, and his accomplishments have been gradually increased during the centuries. Hence, we can say that man actually and absolutely does not have any perfection, and he cannot get his achievements perfectly. However, with changing in the relationship between man, God, and the world during the modernity age, the whole of man's approaches to God and the world changed, and this brings about some basic problems and crises. In this process, man gained and acquired a kind of genuineness and principality towards God and the existents of world that their place and importance, especially divine truths like God, were defined in the light of human epistemic abilities and their validity were depended on human knowledge. Hence, the place of divine truths was lowered to the limits of human understanding, which I call it the humanization of divine truths. On the other hand, because of his weakness for understanding the divine truths, man has gradually put them aside from his philosophical thought, and has recognized them meaningless. In the meanwhile, he has tried to understand the empirical world and its managing without considering what is beyond it. I call this demystification of the existents by the other areas such as ethics, politics, and even science, which all of them have been depended on the human being. Consequently, certainty and truth became humanistic, that is, man became as the axis of certainty and truth, which the most important result of that is the relativity of certainty and its restriction to human knowledge, will, and ability. This paper tries to discuss the above subjects, considering some of the important thinkers of modern and postmodern philosophy like as Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger. It also attempts to show that although Heidegger complained to subjectivism and modernistic approach of truth, his effort to redefine truth and certainty was not successful and could not rescue it from a crisis. That is because he could not go beyond human understanding to reach a holy and absolute certainty and truth, while – according to this paper – the only real way is paying attention to divine certainty, revelation, and God.

After offering an overview of some of the main themes of Popper’s political thought, the paper argues that his account faces two problems relating to institutions. The first is that while Popper stresses the ‘rational unity of mankind’, and the potential for any of us to furnish criticisms of public policy, it is not clear what institutional means currently exist for this to enable this to take place. Second, Popper has stressed the conjectural character of even our best theories. However, at any point, some theories will have fared better in the face of criticism than others, and they may give us important information about constraints on our actions. At the same time, as ordinary citizens we may not be in a good position to understand the theories in question, let alone appraise the state of the specialised discussion of them. There is, it is suggested, a case for thinking of ways to institutionally entrench such fallible theories, especially in the current setting in which social media play an important role

The idea that science is objective, or able to achieve objectivity, is in large part responsible for the role that science plays within society. But what is objectivity? The idea of objectivity is ambiguous. This paper distinguishes between three basic forms of objectivity. The first form of objectivity is ontological objectivity: the world as it is in itself does not depend upon what we think about it; it is independent of human thought, language, conceptual activity or experience. The second form of objectivity is the objectivity of truth: truth does not depend upon what we believe or justifiably believe; truth depends upon the way reality itself is. The third form of objectivity is epistemic objectivity: this form of objectivity resides in the scientific method which ensures that subjective factors are excluded, and only epistemically relevant factors play a role in scientific inquiry. The paper considers two problems that arise for the notion of epistemic objectivity: the theory-dependence of observation and the variability of the methods of science. It is argued that the use of shared standard procedures ensures the objectivity of observation despite theory-dependence. It is argued that the variability of methods need not lead to an epistemic relativism about science. The paper concludes with the realist suggestion that the best explanation of the success of the sciences is that the methods employed in the sciences are highly reliable truth-conducive tools of inquiry. The objectivity of the methods of the sciences leads to the objective truth about the objective world.

This article provides a brief background of how Comparative Theology is understood today, to point out features of how it is practiced that are responsive to issues peculiar to contemporary Catholicism, and to suggest how a version of CT might be developed that is more consistent with Islamic traditions of thought on related issues. In order to accomplish this last goal, a brief introduction to the traditional “Islamic sciences” is provided. It will be suggested that an Islamic Comparative Theology (ICT) can be understood as a multidisciplinary field that draws on several Islamic sciences, as well as research in religious studies. I argue in favor of a blurring of the distinction between Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology, and point out that relevant discussions are to be found across a variety of traditional Islamic sciences, but that it would be advantageous to collect these discussions together and to augment them with information gleaned from both secular and Islamic approaches to the teachings of Muslim thinkers about theological issues, broadly understood, in comparison with what is found in non-Islamic traditions in such a manner to enrich our own understandings of the issues and those with whom we engage in dialogue.

The contemporary world observes an increasing leaning from the thinkers in various intellectual and cultural spheres towards an approach to reality, interpreting reality as something in relationship to human beings and his goals and purposes, not independent of them. Richard Rorty is among the adherents of such a thought. The present article uses an analytical-critical method to show how Rorty has defended this view and to evaluate his view. According to the present study, it is clarified that Rorty adduces the features he considers for language to negate the possibility of accessing pure and naked reality; thus, he considers the available reality as made by ourselves in cooperation with others, which has a quite lingual structure. In my view, however, despite the fact that believing in lingual structure of reality places us in a better situation for defending concepts such as activity, freedom, self-consciousness, ownership, thinking and genuine life, Rorty’s emphasis on solidarity, instead of objectivity and truth, entails a dominion of culture over the rational sciences. Consequently, we observe a leaning towards the principality of ‘will’ (including both individual and social) according to which, philosophy turns into something a posteriori and relied on will.