PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION RESEARCH (NAMAH-I HIKMAT)
Year:2019 | Volume:17 | Issue:1 (پیاپی 33) |Papers Count:13

One of the most important and challenging theories of Open Theism is its particular view of the attribute of divine omniscience. This theory acknowledges that God is the Absolute, yet stipulates that God's knowledge does not include what man performs with his free will in the future. The acceptance of absolute authority for man and the embracing of the contradiction between the "freely chosen actions of man in the future" and the "foreknowledge of God" have led the Open Theism to deny the foreknowledge of God in these acts. At the same time, they argue that the lack of “ a priori knowledge of God” in these kinds of actions does not undermine his absolute knowledge. Advocates of open theism, proving their own viewpoints by referring to all kinds of views on God's knowledge and expressing the deficiencies in these theories, maintain that this view is more acceptable logically and philosophically, and due to its compatibility with the Holy Bible. While mentioning the shortcomings of three other contending perspectives in this regard namely "simple knowledge", "middle knowledge" and "Augustinian-Calvinist view ", they consolidate their views and establish their own theory.

This article is an attempt to show that the Kyoto School of philosophy is inherently a "philosophy of religion". Although philosophers from this school, including Nishida Kitaro and others, have tried to combine western philosophical thinking with Japanese Zen Buddhist thinking, yet the result of their work, apart from creating a space for the emergence of comparative philosophies and cross-cultural studies, is nothing but the expression of religious philosophy. Undoubtedly, all Kyoto School philosophers have discussed religion and God in their writings. This article attempts to illustrate the religious nature of this school by citing theories and concepts of its philosophers, including its founder, Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and others. Therefore, after discussing the issue of religion in this school in the introduction section, we will discuss the philosophy of religion and the role of religion in the thought of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji respectively. To understand religion and God in the Kyoto School one must understand the concept of absolute nothingness in Zen Buddhist thought among its philosophers. Finally, the article concludes that though the Kyoto School as a universal philosophy is rooted in Eastern Zen Buddhist and Western rational thoughts, the nature of its philosophers' thoughts is religious, albeit different from Christianity and Islam or Judaism. To this end, the author did his best to benefit from the books, papers, and commentaries of Kyoto School philosophers.

Sayyid Murtadhā and al-Shaykh al-Mufid represent two lines of thought in the Baghdad theological school. The cultural and scientific context of that era coincided with the influential and remarkable presence of the Muʿ tazilite school of thought; an era in which the Imamiyyah had recently gone through the silent period of theology and faced a theological movement that dominated the theological literature and its methodology in its entirety. It was in this context that Sayyid Murtadhā and his students theorized about the nature of God’ s Will. Moving on from what their Imamiyyah predecessors in the Kufa school held, to some extent they approximated the Muʿ tazilite conception of God’ s Will. For the Kufa school, God’ s Will was temporally originated(hā dith), which was neither in His essence nor detached from It; and in al-Mufid’ s view, It was the object itself (nafs al-fiʿ l) or, in other words, the external created object. During Sayyid Murtadhā ’ s time and after him, however, despite remaining temporally originated and not being reduced to knowledge(ʿ ilm) and motivation(da’ i), ontologically speaking, God's Will remained similar to the Basrian Muʿ tazilite common conception as "temporally originated not in a place"(hā dith lā fi mahall). Sayyid Murtadhā ’ s line of thought in Baghdad strengthens and encompasses this idea.

The study of the relations between religion and philosophy has a long history in the works of Muslim philosophers. Al-Farabi may be considered the pioneer of Muslim philosophers in presenting a coherent and comprehensive theory of the relations between religion and philosophy. Believing in the unity of the doctrines of these two systems of thought, he views religion as a manifestation of teaching and adopting of wisdom. Practical wisdom, as part of the absolute wisdom that speaks the language of truth and demonstrative proof (Burhan), is no exception. In the same vein, he regards the religious teachings of human voluntary actions as the doctrines of practical wisdom, which are instilled in the language of allegory and persuasion, introducing the practical aspect of religion, the Shari'a, as the philosophical teachings in regard with regional and temporal circumstances. He attempts to explain the validity, inclusiveness, and durability of the teachings of the Shari'a by elaborating trans-historical and supernatural elements. He, therefore, secures the validity and inclusiveness of the religious doctrines through revelation and guarantees the survival of shari'a by introducing jurisprudence (Fighaha) as a complementary part for concluding prophethood.

What we call the "negation argument" is the second of the three arguments that Nasir al-Din al-Tusi advanced in his influential work, Tajrī d al-iʿ tiqā d, in defense of intellectual moral good and bad(husn wa qubh 'aqli). According to this argument, the negation of revealed moral good and bad (husn wa qubh shar'i) entails the negation of intellectual moral good and bad (husn wa qubh 'aqli). The presence of various semantic, ontological, and epistemological factors make al-Tusi‘ s intended conclusion and the premises of his argument open to multiple interpretations. The logical form of the most reasonable reading of this argument, which we call the “ skeptical reading” , demonstrates that the end result is the denial of the epistemological revealed moral good and bad. Certain shortcomings of this reading have also made it incapable of denying the epistemological revealed moral good and bad; ambiguity in the concept of possibility employed by the argument, the use of counterintuitive and unwarranted premises, and a confusion between the occurrence of a lie and the possibility of it in deeming the other unreliable in declaring oneself. The purpose of this article is not to defend revealed moral good and bad, neither is it to deny the intellectual moral good and bad; rather, it’ s merely a demonstration of the incompleteness of the negation argument with respect to the latter.

In his book, The God Who Risks, John Sanders tries to reach an adequate resolution to the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human free will. He admits God’ s omniscience but denies His exhaustive definite foreknowledge of future events. Sanders calls this “ dynamic omniscience” . According to this view, future events are not knowable and are epistemologically open; So, divine foreknowledge is not logically possible. God knows all there is to know, but omniscience does not require foreknowledge. God may give a forecast of what he thinks will occur based on his exhaustive knowledge of past and present factors, but such predictions are always open to the possibility that God might be mistaken about some points. Just as omnipotence is not denied by saying that God cannot do the logically impossible, so too omniscience is not denied by saying that God cannot foreknow the logically unknowable. This article is an exposition and critical evaluation of Sanders’ s view.

In contemporary philosophy of mind, some have tried to reduce mental states to physical and bodily states by proposing a model that draws upon both functionalism and the identity theory; thus, reducing the human person to his/her physical body and nervous system. On the one hand, this approach, often dubbed “ reductive functionalism” or “ identity functionalism” , can be considered a developed and revised version of the identity theory; on the other hand, due to being a version of functionalism, it has been sometimes called “ realizer-functionalism” . In this article, it has been argued that defending the possibility of life after death based upon this approach, has almost no advantages over other physicalistic formulations of the possibility of life after death; since in order to avoid an internal inconsistency, it transforms into a version of either type or token identity theory; and thus fails to employ concepts like “ realization” in order to explain the person-body relation and the multiple realizability of the person.

Lewis seeks to show why history is relevant to the philosophy of Religion. He argues that understanding how outstanding figures in the history of philosophy of religion has sought to reinterpret the concept of religion proves simultaneously the relevance of history to the philosophy of religion and the centrality of the philosophy of religion to religious studies as a whole. In the article, we shall try to show how a revision of Lewis's idea based on the insights from Neville's notion of "Normative Comparative Philosophy" proves the relevance of the history of different traditions in philosophy of religion to cope with each other's issues. Besides, we shall study the Hegelian notion of the relation between faith and reason along with the Islamic concept of faith as a case, to show how such an idea might be reified. The study shows that reading the comparative history of the philosophy of religion will help in what Lewis is willing to achieve.

In this paper, Fakhr al-Dī n al-Rā zī ’ s analysis of the origination process of human behavior(/action) will be discussed. Al-Rā zi analyzes human behavior not as a single-factor phenomenon, but as a multi-factor one. According to him, behavior is the result of epistemic and non-epistemic presuppositions. Awareness is the pivotal idea in his analysis of epistemic presuppositions. Al-Rā zī treats awareness as an impulse(da’ i) and most of the effects such as will, expedience, and corruption are referred back to it. In al-Rā zī ’ s definition, da’ i is formalized as the human awareness of pleasure, goodness, perfection, and happiness. In this article, after analyzing this definition and describing the role of practical reason in awareness and its utilization of theoretical reason, the authors examine al-Rā zī ’ s conception of the role of non-epistemic presuppositions in the origination of behavior. These views have been classified on two levels: theological and meta-theological. On the theological level, belief in God and His will; and on the meta-theological level, essential differences among human souls, epistemological effects, social context, cultural context, colleagues and peer groups, bodily structure and temperament, nutrition, environment and the issue of internalization have been analyzed as the primary grounds for the origination and development of behavior. Al-Rā zī ’ s theory always retains awareness in the origination of action and considers the non-epistemic factors in awareness to be the most important determinative in the origination of action; and thus denies their repulsive replaceability status with respect to each other.

There are principles in Islamic Philosophy which serve as evidence in favor of the view that Muslim philosophers understand Necessary Existent to be “ personal” . The principles include “ division of beings into necessary and contingent while accepting univocity of existence” , “ The demand of Necessary Existent for evidence” , “ univocity of Necessary Existent’ s attributes and those of contingent beings” , “ application of personal beings’ predicates to Necessary Existent” , “ understanding revelation as speech” , “ personal account of God in the course of prayer” , etc. There are, however, some other pieces of evidence that indicate impersonality of Necessary Existent, e. g. “ Theory of Emanation” , “ pure simplicity of Necessary Existent” , “ Infinity of Necessary Existent” , “ Apophaticity in religious language” , and “ denial of independent existence of caused being” . The latter pieces of evidence show, at least, that there is an ambiguity in understanding whether the concept of Necessary Existent in Islamic philosophy indicates an (im)personal God. At most, they demonstrate that the concept of Necessary Existent in Islamic philosophy is more compatible with an impersonal notion of God. In this article, while giving some points on the strong claim, I shall argue for the weak one.

This article is an attempt to explain and then critique the Hegel's ideas on the challenge of Formalism in Kant's ethics. Hegel is well known as the most important philosopher who articulated critique of formalism against Kant's ethical thought. He dealt with this problem in different works and from different aspects. By formalism, Hegel means that Kantian moral rule as a moral form does not entail any moral content. By appealing to such notions as transcendentality of freedom, false affirmations and negations, and Jewishness of Kantian ethics, Hegel argues for inapplicability and emptiness of Kantian ethics. To secure Kantian ethics from the criticism of Hegel, one might appeal to some readings of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason appeared in the works of some commentators of Kant like Cassirer and John Hare. They claim that religious anthropology and other religious aspects of Kant's thought, through schematization of ethics, help Kant's ethical thought to transform from a purely rational approach to a view that makes room for concrete aspects of moral action and moral agent. In this article, I shall show that while this approach saves Kantian ethics from being abstract, it fails to solve the problem of false affirmations and negations as well as the emphasis on good will.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, irreversible processes in an isolated system move towards the goal of reaching maximum entropy. In this state, mechanical work is converted to thermal energy and thermodynamic equilibrium occurs; which is determined by the equilibrium in temperature, pressure, etc. Assuming that the universe is an isolated system, the second law of thermodynamics states that the fate of the universe is a state of thermodynamic equilibrium in which all mechanical energies are converted to thermal energy and the heat is dispersed all throughout the universe. In this state, there will be no movement and the universe will expire; an event called the “ heat death” . This theory has certain theological implications that can serve as a proof for the perishability of the material world. And since decay implies creation, the heat death theory can be considered an argument in favor of the temporal originatedness of the material world.