PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Year:2012 | Volume:8 | Issue:21|Papers Count:6

In his magnum opus Perceiving God, William Alston has tried to show that one can be justified in believing some religious beliefs on the grounds of some religious experiences. According to his theory, those religious experiences which have -phenomenologically- perceptual characters are entitled to play the role of ground for some other beliefs. This paper examines some of the main criticisms of this view, as well as Alston's replies to them. Evaluating the arguments of two sides of the debate, the author puts forward his comments and criticism. It has been finally concluded that as far as Alston's arguments are concerned his main claim remains under question.

The truthmaker principle – which looks to be based upon a seemingly plausible intuition – faces a number of troubles, including that of negative truths. According to the truthmaker principle, true propositions are true in virtue of what exists. But, intuitively, negative truths are true in virtue of what does not exist. Adding negative facts to one’s ontology isa metaphysical cost that has been paid to solve the problem of Negative truths. In this paper, I firstly mention some preliminary issues about the truthmaker principle. After enumerating possible solutions to negative truths, I will deal with the solution which appeals to negative facts. Then I will argue that which kind of negative facts does better its jobs. In the rest of the paper, I will disallow some propounded difficulties with this solution. Afterwards, I will illustrate that negative facts face three new problems.

In arguing for realism and true knowledge, Sohrawardī's point of view neither resembles his Muslim predecessors nor does it portray Platonic and Aristotelian impact on settling the notions. Unlike Platonists, he tends to ground knowledge in sensation, and in contrast to Aristotelians he regards knowledge as direct and immediate; therefore sensation should be his departure point to construe realism. Having primarily addressed Muslim peripatetic so as to criticize their school's three main pre-suppositions, he strives to put forward a novel theory by which one can sketch realism within his system of thought. After exposing this negative and critical aspect of his viewpoint, this paper will proceed with the analysis of his positive approach. The approach will be formulated into six pre-suppositions while adopting them ultimately sheds light upon realism within Suhrawardī's thought.

The variety of answers to the unit of selection problem threatens scientific realism both methodologically and ontologically. In this article, I argue that the account developed by Elizabeth Lloyd just solves the problem from methodological point of view and leaves the ontological side unsolved. I will show that getting rid of mereological metaphysics and replacing it with ontic structural realism solve the problem ontologically.

General limits of knowledge is one of the important discussion in epistemological studies. In the matter of human knowledge, we confront with determining general limits of this knowledge. Most philosophers have regarded human knowledge as a limited one, and considered different limits for it. Ibn sina takes limited human knowledge too and excludes some of the affairs from cognitive realm of human. One the one hand, he accepts possibility of knowledge and therefore opposed skepticism. On other hand, he restricts this knowledge to the different limits and hence disagrees with absolute dogmatism. He takes into account different limits for human knowledge such as human limitation in recognizing the essence of things, human limitation in knowing God, human limitation in perceiving resurrection, cognitive limitation resulted from accompanying with material and body etc. He presents various arguments for proving these limitations and interesting discussions about these. Studying these limitations due to recognizing Ibn sina’s general viewpoint about human knowledge has been very important and will grant great assistance in understanding his philosophy.

In this paper, I try to give a clear reading of Carnap's conventionalism against the prevalent philosophical back ground of the day. The background had been painted in Wittgensetinian colors, which were deemed by Carnap to be rusty, dogmatic and unacceptable. It begins with the primary satisfaction of logical empiricists with Wittgensteinian approach to truth and the status of logical sentences (a satisfaction which ended to a deep dissatisfaction soon enough). Then I attend to Carnap's remarkable criticisms of Wittgenstein's absolutist point of view, which is devoid of necessary conventional elements. At the end, we will see that Carnap's attempt at suggesting an alternative scheme for explaining the status of logical and mathematical sentences, as it is put forward in Logical Syntax of Language (1934), suffers from similar shortcomings. This does not need to debase the brilliant points which emerged out of Carnap's critical reading of Wittgenstein's philosophy, though.