PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Year:2016 | Volume:12 | Issue:29|Papers Count:7

This paper mainly aims at providing a critical exposition of Critical Rationalism’s solution for the so-called “Problem of Induction”. The first section of the paper is dedicated to a historical overview of the development of induction, as both a method of logical inference and a method of scientific discovery. In the next section, it addresses the solution for the problem of induction, which was first proposed by Karl Popper and developed by David Miller. Some of the objections to Popper’s solution and the replies to them (as developed by Miller) are also discussed. Finally, the discussions in the earlier chapters will be evaluated and the dispute between the Critical Rationalists and their critics will be adjudicated.

With the new found importance of the epistemological discussions in the new era, studying the epistemological views and ideas of the Sophists as one of the most influential intellectual movements of the Greek’s golden age has become increasingly more important. Although we mostly know the viewpoints of sophists through their prominent opponents, namely Plato and Aristotle, ironically despite this conflict of ideas, the most creditable and valid reports on the mental school of the sophists, has reached us through these same opponents. This paper aims to study the critical aspects of the Sophists’ ideas from Plato’s viewpoint as evident in his writings, especially his Protagoras, while presenting relevant viewpoints of famous sophists on episteme. By expanding Heraclitus and Parmenides’s skeptical view points as well as the transmission of the object of knowledge from nature to human, they have essentially reduced episteme to sensory perceptions and furthermore, to the “individual” range and being subjected to being self-refuted. To confront this idea, Plato, through critical analysis of the relativism that emerged from the sophists’ “impressionism”, demonstrated the possibility of acquiring true knowledge and, through that, saving religious and moral values and beliefs. This effort would perhaps allow us to regard Plato’s philosophical doctrine including the creation of “Idea” as a reaction to the epistemological teachings of the sophists.

This paper aims to demonstrate the relation between territory, state and terror in the contemporary world as concrete terms which represent the territorial aspects of sovereignty. Using a historical conceptual analysis, it tries to illustrate that sovereignty is an issue at the intersection of terror and territory because it operates as the crucial bridge between terror and state and is integral to territorial state. To this end, territory is defined as the spatial extent of sovereignty based on the “the concept of space”. Subsequently, it becomes clear why the apparently univocal national borders which serve as the absolute model of the border institution, in fact constitute only a part of the government’s institutions. These borders could never exist independent of other alignments that allow them to function on a local as well as a global level; the very alignments that delineate sovereign territories. Building on these bases, this paper endeavors to show how to control a territory is to exercise violence within the boundaries of the modern nation-state and through this tries to prove the relationship between terror and territory. In this framework, it seeks to add a corrective approach to the modern political theory which is based on geometry: the Political geometry of inside and outside. The paper concludes that the fundamental concept of political philosophy is neither freedom nor political power, but borders; i.e. the very borders that construct the territory of a country. The final aim of the paper is to determine the political space of the “refugee” within the Topos of politics; because it is he/she who reveals the main aporia of the modern political theory: “borders”.

Rorty's goal is to criticize the Cartesian conception of philosophy that has led to its increasing specialization and departure from the other aspects of culture; a view that in his opinion is the end result of accepting the Cartesian mirror-like mind. According to Rorty, this point of view is the culmination of accepting the mind as a mirror that reflects the external affairs and philosophers as the guardians of this mirror act as judges who try to recognize the factual reflections of the mirror. Philosophy Claims that this judgment is based on its understanding of the mind and knowledge. In other words, culture is a combination of multiple cognitive claims which are judged by philosophy. Rorty as a neo-pragmatist endeavors to set aside the mirror concept of nature and its corresponding philosophy with the aim of entering philosophy into a dialogue with other spheres of knowledge.

In the contemporary Iran, logical study suffers from a poverty of historical studies. Most prominently, the lack of an Islamic history of logic is an indication of this poverty. Writing such a history must start with surveying the transformation of Porphyry’s Introduction. The doctrines of this work not only changed functionally, but also developed and deepened in the Islamic period. It may be well observed that its development pivots on: 1) the addition of eight headings, and 2) the addition of the prerequisites to understanding of the universals’ five-fold classification. Restricted to four logicians, namely Farabi, Avicenna, Ibn al-Tayyib, and Razi, the present study focuses on the first pivot, researches its historical background, studies the queries regarding it, and presents the attempts which were made to resolve these queries.

Edmund Husserl has been called the father of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a method which emphasizes on description and meaning, instead of prediction and measurement which are common in sciences. Primarily, Husserl has consciousness as the main subject of his phenomenology, so many of the phenomenologists consider his phenomenology as a kind of epistemology. This paper maintains that although Husserl takes notice of consciousness in some of his works, he transcends epistemology or Egology in his recent works, and considers the concept of lifeworld, i.e. world as lived by an individual not separated from human being, as the main concept of phenomenology. Accordingly, we will first offer a brief review of phenomenology; then, we will clarify the necessity of proposing the concept of lifeworld as the main subject of phenomenology, in view of Husserl’s last works, Cartesian Meditation and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

The fundamental question of the difference between living and non-living remains unanswered to date. Unlike most physical and chemical systems, living systems must, at the very least, be endowed with function, a concept that to this day remains indispensable to biology, yet is effectively missing from the vocabulary of physics and chemistry. Accordingly, we need an account of the evolution of function out of simple physical and chemical dynamics, which we do not as of yet have. Evelyn Fox Keller's argument requires the fundamental transformations of the conventional approaches in both physics and chemistry fields. John Dupre argues that the properties of constituents cannot themselves be fully understood without a characterization of the larger system, which they are a part of. This claim is elaborated through a defense of the concepts of emergence and of downward causation; causation acting from a system on its constituent parts. Although much of this argument can be read as having only epistemological or methodological forces, the final section of this paper defends a more robust metaphysical reading: even purely metaphysical understandings of reductionism such as are commonly represented by supervenience theses are misguided.