PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
Year:2012 | Volume:7 | Issue:20|Papers Count:7

The theist philosopher, Richard Swinburne, believes that the emergence of “consciousness” in human as an immaterial substance is an argument for God. He also believes that scientific explanations cannot explain consciousness and thus intrinsic dualism of brain events and mental events is unavoidable. In contrast, J. L. Mackie, another British philosopher, confirms that materialistic explanations of consciousness are faced with difficulties, but it is simpler from theistic explanation and thus he denies the dualism of brain events and mental events and Swinburne's argument for God from consciousness. In this article it is tried, by stating the reasons of explanatory inadequacy of Mackie's materialistic explanation of consciousness, to consider theistic explanation of consciousness as most reasonable and simplest explanation for consciousness and it is an inductive argument for God.

Essentialism like many philosophical subjects is rooted in the ideas of Greek philosophers. This theory is related to the stability, motion and change. In fact, a reasonable explanation of the motion and change was interest of philosophers. Aristotle's theory is in this field. This theory that concerns to laws of nature was the most notable philosophical achievements and metaphysical foundation for the science of that time. Aristotle was able to study species of plants and animals as a natural kind because of variety and apparent difference between them. In his view, any natural kind acts in goal-oriented. From this perspective, Aristotle's essentialism has been criticism, so was not a serious activity on this topic till 20 century. Brian Ellis is formulated his scientific essentialism with offers to natural kinds and dispositional properties. He offers a variety of criteria for natural kind but he does not accept biological kind because it does not satisfy some of the criteria. He claims that his scientific essentialism is realistic. The natural kinds of this theory are in transition and interact to each other. What appears depends on a variety of roles of natural kinds that participating in the process. The paper presents two ideas of Aristotle and Ellis' essentialism and pays to new essentialism functionality. This study presents why Ellis does not accept natural kind in biology even genetic structure and unlike the traditional view, according to close relationship between the definition and explanation, there is no such connection in Ellis's essentialism.

Harry Frankfurt construes a different conception of love. He does not recognize love as a response to the perceived worth of the beloved, because one may love something with no value at all. In contrast to the common belief that only valuable things are to be loved, Frankfurt argues that we, by loving anything we want, make valuable what we love. Anything we love will necessarily be valuable to us because we love it. Frankfurt believes self-love to be the purest form of love. We all see self-love as one of the goods that we care about. Love has four main necessary features. First, love is a disinterested concern for the well-being of what is loved. Second, love is personal and there cannot be an alternative for the beloved. Third, the lover identifies her or him with her or his beloved, that is, they take the interests of their beloved as their own. Finally, love requires volitional necessities and we cannot choose what to love. By loving we always pursue the final end, an end which has intrinsic value for us, it is valuable for its own sake, and that's why we always know which way to take and which desires to follow. With love, then, we will not be affected with mental confusion, instead, we will feel a sense of freedom. The present article discusses Harry Frankfurtt s view on concept, significance and characteristics of love. In spite of having a description format, the article includes in conclusion critics on Frankfurtt s view.

The phenomenology of time attempts to investigate how is constituted the internal time consciousness. In fact phenomenology of time consciousness concerns itself with the structure of the act of perceiving that allows us to apprehend a temporal object as unified across its manifold moments. In this approach time is no longer the measure of motion, the psychological characters of soul and even the transcendental presuppositions of cognition. Husserl distinguishes three levels of time for our consideration: (1) world [ly] or objective time, (2) personalistic or subjective time, and (3) the consciousness of internal time. According to Husserl our experience of temporal objects consists of three aspects: 1. protention, 2. retention and 3. primal impression. Protention is a process by which anticipations are formed concerning what will shortly be experienced (in primal impression).2- Retention is a process by which something that is experienced-as-present remains in consciousness and sinks back.3- Primal impression which is the component of consciousness that is narrowly directed toward the now phase of the object. The primal impression cannot be thought independently of its temporal horizon. Thus all experience entails a temporal horizon. This article attempt to explain Husserl's account of time-consciousness.

Explanation is one of the most important issues in the philosophy of science, which many attentions have been paid to it since Aristotle. The unification account of explanation, first presented by Friedman (1974), is one of the most discussed contemporary models. According to this conception, scientific explanation has to show that many separated argument patterns have basic similarities and via these similarities we can understand related phenomena deeper. Philip Kitcher has extended this idea and has argued that scientific explanation aims to represent a maximum of facts and natural regularities in terms of minimum of theoretical concepts and assumptions. According to Kitcher, a few of argument patterns can be used in the explanation of many beliefs, and so we can show that how scientific explanation amounts to understanding. However, the unification account of explanation faces some problems, including the point that the relationship between unification and understanding is not clear. Another difficulty concerns the relationship between explanation and the causal direction. In this paper, after presenting the main features of the unification account of explanation and its merits over the classical D-N model, it will be argued that due to some problems in the unification account it seem that the best way to round about these problems is to adopt a kind of explanatory “pluralism”, depending on different philosophical and scientific contexts.

Rawls’ thoughts can be divided into two significant periods. In his first period, he is impressed by Kant's ethical philosophy but in second period, he goes far from abstract philosophy and tries to make his theory pragmatic, scientific and methodological. Most of philosophers in enlightenment and after, try to applied metaphysical presuppositions for establishing their philosophical frameworks. Many Philosophical schools have been established by these presuppositions. Even some states have been applied some of that schools same as utilitarianism. For instance: Immanuel Kant had been established his philosophical framework by applying ethical doctrine or Lock had been established his philosophical theories by different interpretation of Christianity. But is Rawls that he called himself as follower of named philosophers, imitate their method? Or same as his claim that: he tried to establish his theory without depending of any metaphysical presuppositions and just call it merely political concept. In this article, firstly, introductory about Lock's theory of justification and Kant's effect on Rawls has been considered then, I just try investigating of Rawls claim of justice as fairness is political concept, not metaphysical.