Philosophy and Kalam
Year:2014 | Volume:46 | Issue:2|Papers Count:8

This paper intends to find an answer to the problematic description of the “thing in itself”, “phenomena” and the relation between the two in Kant and Allameh Tabatabaei's philosophy and to consider how Allameh can solve the existing challenges in Kant's philosophy. This research shows that since Kant accepts some necessary relation between “intelligible essences” and phenomena, he considers the existence of intelligible essences as a certain fact. In spite of accepting the intelligible essences, he believes noumena remain always unknown, because they cannot be known by experience. On the other hand, Allameh argues that the appearances in mind (quiddity) are representations of the reality of the things (existence). Therefore he makes a meaningful relation between' the thing in itself' and the phenomena, similarly, the related challenges in Kant's philosophy can be answered through Allameh's philosophy.

Because of using principles such as principality, unity, gradation of existence and concomitance between existence and unity, along with an exhaustive understanding of Ibn Sina's philosophical principle about our knowledge of unity and multiplicity, Mulla Sadra believed new philosophical aesthetical principles such as principality, unity and gradation of beauty, though he didn't use these terms explicitly. We can reconstruct implicit Mulla Sadra's theory on art by considering his view on typology of human beings, cognation of cause and effect, and the fact that creating art is a kind of causality. Therefore, we have four kinds of art: theocentric, passionate, indignational and satanic. The real art is the theocentric one and the other three are pseudo. Satanic whispering, as an exterior cause, and estimation faculty, as an interior one, play the main role in keeping human beings occupied with passionate, indignational and satanic pseudo arts.

Some philosophers have tried to justify the existence of infinity in collections such as chains of numbers, temporal contingent and abstract souls by three conditions: actuality, coming together and succession and protected mentioned collections against arguments of absurdity of the infinite regress.In this paper, we show that appealing to mentioned conditions to exit chains of numbers, temporal contingent and abstract souls from circle of actual infinity is not successful. Inseparability of numbers and multiplicity in the first condition, lack of appropriate meaning of the term "coming together" in the second one and consideration of limitations of human minds in justification of the third condition cause these conditions to encounter serious challenges.

Our problem in this article is Ibn Miskawayh's analysis of the nature of happiness, and its methodology isdescriptive analytic. Ibn Miskawayh considers happiness as “good” and “perfection” with respect to their holders, so, he establishes some inseparability between happiness, and good and perfection. IbnMiskawayh has two definitions for the concept of good. He divides this conception into some kinds, namely honorable, praised, absolute, non-absolute, general and so on. Meanwhile, he believes that happiness has four charachteristics: non-temporal, acquisitive, dedicated to the wise, the incomprehensibility of its eternal kind before death. Ibn Miskawayh divides happiness into different kinds such as happiness in body, happiness out of body and so on.

In contemporary texts of Islamic logic, the “subject-obversion” has been introduced as a rule on basis of which one can replace the subject term of a categorical proposition with its complement and change both quality and quantity of the proposition. Thus from an A-proposition such as “all A is B”, onecan infer “Some not-A is not B”. Well, let's take that A is included by B but notvice versa, and B is most extensive universal such as “existent” or “thing”. In this case “all A is B” produces the contradictory of our favorite conclusion, i.e. “all not-A is B”. Therefore, the so-called subject-obversion rule, at least in A-proposition, is not logically valid.

“Sources of knowledge” is one of the significant topics in contemporary epistemology. Epistemologists accept five sources of knowledge: perception, reason, introspection, testimony, and memory. This paper compares introspection, testimony and memory in Mulla Sadra and Descartes' philosophical systems. The two philosophers accept introspection, testimony and memory as the sources of knowledge. Both consider the knowledge derived from introspection as certain. They consider testimony as Transferor and memory as maintainer.

A characteristic of modern-time is incorporation of man family life in his individual and social identity, one of the consequences of which is evaluation of family rights with criteria provided in the Civil Code. While Islamic philosophers believe that family has an eminent position, and, to manage it, these philosophers suggest principles which are exclusively applied to family and are different from those governing man individual and social life, applying these principles in a tactful manner is a wise condition required by individual perfection and social equilibrium. It seems that a true understanding of the position of family in its combined-form and recognizing its rights and responsibilities are more important than addressing the members of family independent of this combined-form. This article addresses the role of this important aspect of man life with greater emphasis on Avicenna's ideas.

The existence of different kinds of evil in the world has always been taken to criticize the rationality of theism by atheists. The Swinburne' steleological theodicy is a significant response to the problem of evil among theists' different answers. In his theodicy, Swinburne contends that his theodicy may answer the problem of moral evil besides answering the problem of natural evil. The purpose of this paper is, first, to explain the Swinburne' steleological theodicy and analyze it according to his works and, second, assess his teleological theodicy. It will be shown that his theodicy is confronted with the various criticisms.