Reason

Eugène Ionesco in his play, The killer (1960) depicts a true reflection of the human condition; he depicts the images of life and death, being and non-being, and the reality of man’s reduction into the cypher of non-being. He wants man to come to grips with his true situation; hence, man's existence is fundamentally a conflict between the infinite extensions of the human urge as opposed to the necessary and limited state of being. The aim of this paper is to examine Ionesco's ideas on the loneliness of man in this alienated universe, his hidden anxieties and his struggle for survival within an Existential framework of Søren Kierkegaard; examples are drawn from The killer (1960) in order to fully examine Ionesco’s particular vision of life. Such a study aims at bringing about a realization and understanding of the conditions man is exposed to in the universe. It is too hard for Bérenger to believe that nothingness precedes, envelops, and conditions all being. He faces the two coexistent side of living: in felicity and in the shadow of death.

The relationship between faith and reason can be discussed at two different levels. One is called Rreligious Eepistemology which deals with the rationality of faith, and while the second level deals with the relation of a set of data available to the human mind because of revelation and what is available to human mind throthough his reason.. In this paper I argue that the prominent way of justifying faith in contemporary Shi‘ite t Thought is the argument from the data of reason. Regarding to the relation of the data of revelation and the data of reason, we must consider three forms of it separaetely. In the case of a contradiction of revelation and the reason, they usually give the priority to reason and use the method of interpretation (ta’vil) for making them cohernt with each other.. In such cases whereich reason and revelation have the same assertion or revelation says and reveals what is beyond reason without the contradiction between the two, they usally accept revelation as the source of knowledge.

“Reason” and “Rationality” have been the most controversial subjects in human thinking. Question of reason is faced not only with questions about the capacity of reason to discover truth, the possibility of choice, and the decisive role of reason in epistemology, but also it deals with questions about thought, freedom, and the nature of thought. Reason is a common point among all human beings; therefore, there is no difference between people in the amount of intellect, but the differences are due to the dominant epistemological paradigm in each period and the impact of historical, social and cultural conditions on the interpreting of that paradigm of intellect. In the last few centuries, the concept of reason and rationality has encountered major challenges. Western epistemological approaches such as post structuralism and methodological approaches such as genealogy, seek to find gaps of this concept in the historical process. On the other hand, the concept of reason in Islamic thought and its relationship with religion has always been controversial. Some contemporary Muslim thinkers, by giving originality to reason and respecting Western modernity, have a critical approach to traditional society and the way to achieve an ideal society with new outlook such as pluralism, critical religious rationality and democracy in a religious society based on rationality. Some other Muslim thinkers, by proposing views such as the theory of rationality and spirituality, go beyond the modernist approach to religion, seeking a way to avoid religious intellectual contradictions. This article tries to examine both Western and Islamic perspectives on reason and rationality.

Continuing the path of Neo-Platonic philosophers and Farabi, while accepting the framework of the Greek thought in reaching the truth of the beings in the universe through the rational knowledge in the framework of Aristotelian logics, Avicenna has attempted to present a certain interpretation of some fundamental concepts of the Greek thought and offer a metaphysics with quite rational and argumentative results as well as a rational interpretation for some of the principal concepts of the Quranic thought in the Islamic world, a metaphysics that can be called the essential Greek-Islamic rational system. The present article attempts to use an analytical-explanatory method to prove that, firstly, Avicenna accepts the Greek rational thinking method in reaching the truth of the beings, calling it the certitude wisdom and knowledge. And – in line with Aristotle – he introduces the man’s sensory faculty as the starting point for the path of acquiring certitude knowledge, through which he reaches the rational knowledge of the beings. Secondly, it states the most important axes of Avicenna’s philosophy in his legal reasoning reading of principles of Aristotelian thought.

J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is about animal rights and animal Ethics. In this novel, an aging novelist gives a series of lectures about animals and their moral status. Elizabeth Costello takes issue with the tradition of Western philosophical thought which is based on the binary opposition between reason and emotion. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk’s Janina Duszejko is also an elderly woman haunted by the horror of what human beings do to animals. The present interdisciplinary study -a library-based qualitative research- reviews the similarities between these two characters and aims to show that Duszejko could be seen as Costello’s alter ego. It surveys the writers’ choice of sentience over reason, the way the texts have undermined the arguments of their major characters, and the similarities between animals and prisoners of concentration camps. Findings show that Coetzee and Tokarczuk do not uphold the Western tradition that divides experience into reason/emotion, masculine/ feminine, justice/ love, and public/ private. In both novels, the writers avoid binary oppositions and through Costello and Duszejko ask the readers/audiences to open their hearts and become one with their victims.

Practical reason is the use of reason to decide how to act and perform in a social reality. When someone deliberates about what to do, one puts all the reasons for the action, and then all the reasons against the action will determine the outcome of the action. In that situation, we can describe that practical action with reason because we will determine reason with the weight of different reasons not on the weighing reasons. In this paper, we analyze that reasons have weight against the theory that weights of reasons have no role in a theory of reasoning, and defend that reasons have weight with the evidence of practical reasons. The aim of this paper is to argue that weight of reasons has a role in the process of reasoning. In every situation of life, we can use have reason and weight of reason according to the practical situation of life.

Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali is one of the most important thinkers of the Seljuk period in Iran. Ghazali’s Thought, based on his works, is very wide-ranging in various fields of religious sciences. At the beginning of his scientific life, he wrote a book entitled “Maqasid al Falasifa” (The Aims of Philosophers), but in the final period of his research, he wrote the “Tahafut al-Falasifah” (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) and joined the opponents of philosophy, in which he expressed the contradictions of philosophers. Consequently, many thinkers believe that he is not only against philosophy but also against reason, and as a result reach the conflict between reason and religion or the sharia of religion.This article examines the question of whether there is a conflict between reason and sharia in Ghazali's thought? Does al-Ghazali mean the philosophical views of philosophers only those that are incompatible with the Shari'a? And what should be done if there seems to be a contradiction? This article tries to address these questions by referring to Ghazali's intellectual works.