Ma`rifat Falsafi
Year:2009 | Volume:6 | Issue:4 (24)|Papers Count:7

In the philosophy of both Mulla Sadra and Kant, “reason” is the highest human faculty, and “rational understanding” the ultimate human understanding. For both philosophers, rationality is the most fundamental human characteristic, and the basis for his innate dignity. The difference between the two philosophers lies, however, on the fact that Mulla Sadra considers theoretical rationality (what one knows) to be the main feature, while Kant. regards practical reason (what one wants) the major criterion.Creativity is one of the manifestations of rationality that has attracted the attention of these philosophers. They discuss about creativity in both realms of theory (i.e., in the domain of intellect and imagination) and practice. The difference here lies in the fact that Mulla Sadra explains creativity within the framework of human relation to Active Intellect, while in Kant, it does not have any transcendental source, but is rooted in human autonomy and independent will.

The history of human thought testifies to the persistence of the question about the relation between reason and faith, or science and religion. And endeavor for solving this dilemma becomes a must especially for the adherents of religion who live in an age of scientific flourish, and aver to organize individual, as well as social, affairs with simultaneous recourse to religion and science.The Divine philosopher, and contemporary exegete of the Qur’an, Ayatollah Javadi Amuli, is on of the scholars who have shouldered the burden of this endeavor. From his point of view, intellect is part of religion, and not over against it, and therefore, to surmise their opposition is irrational. What may occur at the outset is an opposition between reason and narration (naql) which has been dealt with in the Islamic sciences. This article is an attempt to understand, analyze, and criticize this theory.

The author in his article firstly reviews the principles and basic ideas of Ibn Arabi’s mysticism dealing with physical resurrection, and then surveys five issues in his system of thought:1. Human being is an immaterial being who goes through different stages and always contrives a body proportionate to that stage: a material body in the material world, an intermediary body in the intermediate world, and a very different body in the hereafter.2. The hereafter has two residences: heaven and hell. An understanding of the nature and place of these habitations is necessary for understanding human condition in the hereafter.3. The whole material world will transform to hell; therefore the residents of hell have a material, but transformed, bodies.4. Heaven is located between the sphere of constellations (mukawkab) and the starless sphere (Falak Atlas). The residents of heaven, therefore, enjoy a body composed of pure matter.5. As a result, resurrection happens with a physical body, which is different from this-worldly body.

Despite its overwhelming presence and persistent consequences in Western academic arena, Idealism suffers from internal contradictions in its foundations and basic shortcomings in its cognitive outcomes.The present article, at the first step, critically evaluates some of the Epistemological foundations of Idealism, and then surveys theories of Coherentism, Pragmatism, and Structuralism as the three main epistemological upshots of Idealism. At the end, it reviews some of the arguments for the existence of the world, independent of mind, and refers to some final problems with Idealism in this regard.

HusserI’s Idealism is a theory capable of being explained in special fields as a concrete science. It does not deny the natural objective world, but its view of nature and the worId differs from other epistemological viewpoints.In this article, the authors try to falsify a view that considers HusserI’s idealism as absolute idealism by analyzing his terminology, and to show that in a careful analysis, it should be called transcendental idealism. He employs such concepts as “awareness and sympathy”, “reduction”, “intentionality”, “intuition”, and “idea-eidos” in his special sense, each of which explains the transcendental nature of Husserl’s phenomenology.The authors show that in HusserI’s phenomenology, every thing belonging to this world attains Its full particular meaning as well as its ontological condition. This is why HusserI in his Ideas tries his best to differentiate between phenomenology as method, and phenomenology as knowledge. His phenomenology covers all philosophical as well as . scientific aspects of reality.

The present article explains the epistemological foundations of the  experimental science, and examines some of the epistemic challenges of the positivist philosophy of science. Such challenges are highlighted under new titles such as cultural, social, or feminist studies. This is the result of a salient reception of Thomas Kuhn’s “scientific paradigms” on the one hand, and the acceptance of the role of social factors on the content, as well as the direction of scientific knowledge by the sociologists of knowledge, on the other.The author argues that a new generation of the philosophers of science is trying to come up with a crisscross paradigm of the social facets of scientific knowledge. By doing so, they want to elevate this discipline in a way that takes the concerns of the sociologists of knowledge into consideration, and at the same time, takes some theoretical measures to maintain the epistemic reliability of scientific propositions.

Wittgenstein is one of the philosophers of the 20thcentury whose ideas very often and clearly resonated in the works of scholars in other fields. His ideas about God and the problem of religious realism/irrealism is no exception, and even served as a basis for some theories in the field.The author in this article wants to clarify Wittgenstein’s view in this' regard. He argues that Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus seems to deny any reality for a trans-physical world because language has no access to such a world. According to this idea, he should be considered an atheist, and not a religious irrealist. In his Philosophical Investigations; however, Wittgenstein looks like a realist in matters of ontological theology, when he writes: “theology benefits from a unique language game.” This suggests that he should believe in a reality for God, deity, and religious beliefs separately from one’s mind.