NAMEH-YE-MOFID
Year:2001 | Volume:7 | Issue:1 (25 POLITICAL SCIENCE)|Papers Count:17

This article has been written with the purpose of investigating one of the null-hypotheses for the rejection of and skepticism towards the party system. The party system in Iran faces a lot of theoretical and practical obstacles and difficulties the investigation of each of which as well as how they are related requires extensive studies. The present study is confined in scope only to investigate the current assumption inferred from some Quranic verses in rejection of party. The article showing that party is basically used in Quran in its general religious sense and borrowing from jurists' formula of free domain (Mantegh-al-faragh) concludes that party as a method in Muslims' political, social and economic organization is a free domain method.

This paper has as its aim to draw the outward appearance of political participation in the Islamic state. Political participation in Muslim society is, for theoretical and technical reasons, reduced to political pluralism, which is meant the formation and legitimacy of political parties in that society. Political parties are divided in two major groups according to geographical and ideological domains.As to the former group, political parties are in turn subdivided into regional and ones, and as to the latter, political parties and wings constitute two main Islamic and non Islamic parties. Islamic parties are also divided into theological and jurisprudential groups. The paper attempts to briefly explain the advantages, disadvantages and the rules governing the activities of jurisprudential political parties taking into account the conditions of Muslim society.

One of the manifestations of the participation of people in the political arena is their turn out at the polling stations. This conduct - people's participation in political affairs and their voting have any precedent in the far past, especially in the early day of Islam or not? The purpose of this study is to prove the point that today's concept of voting is the same as allegiance of the early days of Islam and that has confirmed it and Muslims have been practicing it since the advent of Islam, though it was deviated from its main course and there is no conceptual difference between voting and allegiance. Thus the article critically investigates the viewpoints which consider the concept of voting to be different from that of allegiance and finally present the conditions under which voting and allegiance are considered to be the same.

Inseparability of writing and democracy in classic Greece as an historic fact, drew Plato's mind to introducing his own narration and interpretation of the association between the two notions in the framework of the two fields of philosophy of language and political philosophy. Through identifying the spirit of the era and the transition of Greek civilization from an oral and speech phase to that of writing, he demonstrates in the most manifest layer, its meta-linguistic relation with a special kind of police or citizen-city-state.In other words, writing speech in beginning and throughout its course is closely tied with democratic regime or political order, and cannot be separated there from . In this context it seems that we can reach the common points through two aspects of origin and characteristics of writing and democracy: the two's affiliated and auxiliary origin to a maker and father called oligarchy and writing and their shared point in the two characteristics of equality and liberty (where appropriate) in reaction to inequality, confinement to exigencies and necessary needs.

Modern political thought is a substratum of modern thought and affected by its results. What referred to as modern political thought is, in fact, in many respects a reconstructed form of modern insight in the field of politics. Thus we cannot speak of modern politics unless the philosophic aspects of modem affair is considered.In the present paper, one of the features of modern thought, that is, the tendency to a constant reconstruction of order and the concern for substituting the new order for the old one in order to prevent crisis has been studied. The absence of this doctrine among Postmodern scholars is one of the important factors in this philosophic shift of Postmodernism. In Postmodern discourse, the perpetuity and inevitability of crisis are accepted as a principle, while the political administration for regulating and establishing the new order is overlooked.This distinguishes the Postmodern approach to politics from that of the modern. This article examines the consequences of this attitude for the Postmodern political thought and discusses political participation as an illustration of the issue beforehand.

Participation takes different forms in different countries based on their economic and cultural structures. Since 1970s on developing countries have faced debt crises. On the one hand, this has reduced their relations with and international participation in capitalist in situations. On the other hand, it has created the conditions for social tensions.Political protests have reduced the legitimacy level of the states. Social groups have been looking for pluralistic democracies. But due to dependent on international capitalism these goals have not been realized.African countries are similar to Latin American countries in this regard. Ethnic and racial crises will pave the way for identity crisis in these countries. Accordingly, in the political future of the African countries, there will be more potentiality for ethnic tendencies than for development and political participation. And this by no means will result in increase in participation rate.Deterrent factors of political participation in African countries include:a. Lack of government control over geographical domainsb. Insufficiency of facilities for the economic welfare of the citizensc. Lack of prevailing participation cultured. Strength of local national edentity

This article aims at investigating freedom from the standpoint of one of the great thinkers of the West who has had a great influence on the frame of thought of the philosophers after him.1. First different viewpoints concerning human freedom especially in a scientific framework including: (a) strong determinism, (b) moderate determinism and (c) voluntarism have been examined.2. Different definitions of freedom.Then freedom from Kant's standpoint has been investigated in the realms of both pure reason and practical reason. He believes that freedom in the realm of pure reason is one of the contradictions of pure reason and thus it is a disputed issue. But Kant proposes his fundamental theory of freedom in the realm of practical reason and present the principle of morality which manifests itself in the conception of autonomy as follows: act in such a way that the will can consider itself as the legislator of the general law by the command of the will. Kant calls this principle autonomy as opposed to heteronomy. Autonomy means that one makes a law for himself while heteronomy means that a law is made by an external force or someone other than the self.Following these, various issues concerning the principle of freedom and the natural need for the imperative concept of freedom, different kinds of heteronomy and the presupposition of freedom as the characteristic feature of the will of rational beings have been investigated. Kant come up with some conclusions which can hardly be believable since he believes that only the laws which have been made by man are congruent with human freedom. Finally, in this article freedom has been examined from Islamic point of view.

This article deals with two questions:1- what is political philosophy? According to the text, political philosophy is a branch of philosophy which analyzes political issues-like government, power, sovereignty, legitimacy and Justice - by abstract methods. political theology-in spite of political philosophy-relys on revelation, and tries to prove revelatory statements by rational, narrative and empirical methods.2- what are the political philosophy kinds? political philosophy is divided into classic and modem approaches. Furthermore, it can be differentiated according to the various kinds of philosophy-like phenomenologism, structuralism, Marxism, etc... . Analytical political philosophy analyses the language and the conceptions of political philosophy by am analytical and second-order approach. If we consider political philosophy without any help of revelation, it can not be attributed by "Islamic", however, we can speak about "Islamic political philosophy" by considering four other considerations - as we see in the article.

"Is truth or expediency superior?" is one of the serious questions dealt with in theoretical works and debates. The question rests on the assumption that in some cases truth and expediency are seemingly contradictory, one of which must be taken and the other put aside. But is this conflict not a paradox to be solved by a slight patience and analysis and to remove the apparent contradiction?The paper attempts to show that, first, when we speak of truth, we are in fact offering a theory of truth and, second, expediency is one of the theories of truth in the field of value cognition and hence it falls under truth and not in conflict with it (to be more precise, it is the ought truth). It is of course the claimants of the theory who must present their justifying reasons in defense of it. The paper has as its aim to elucidate, albeit in a passing way, the background and structure of the issues relating to truth and expediency.

Political participation in different societies manifests itself in a variety of ways and means. One of the most visible manifestations of political participation is considered to be voting by eligible voters of each society. Political participation in election arenas by peoples of varying societies may offer different insights into politics, history, social organization and ideas and ideals of the political regimes in question, and their citizens. During the last 40 years, political participation by American people in electoral process has sharply declined. This decline may be viewed through the two prisms of historical - structural and changing goals and ideals and aspirations.In this article, first, statistics regarding declining political participation of American people in electoral arenas in the last 40 years (1960-2000) will be presented and then henceforth analyzed by applying a historical and a changing ideals and aspirations approach.

Imanuel Kant, the German philosopher of the enlightenment era (18th century), who holds a deserved fame in Western philosophy, enjoys little weight and authority from the point of the history of political thought. The historians and exponents of political thought, who report the developments of this branch of human knowledge, often do not give an account of his political thought or content themselves with the briefest one. Examining this heedlessness of Kant as a political philosopher, determines the background and direction of this paper.

Cosmology and the issue of the origin and the end of the universe are the shared topics of three fields of human knowledge, namely science, religion and philosophy, and are dealt with since time immemorial, though before the Renaissance and even till the early twentieth century, physical cosmology stood below the religious and philosophic cosmologies. This paper deals with fundamental principles and bases and the most important modern scientific cosmological models followed by a review of their scientific problems and shortcomings and, where necessary, their philosophic bases and problems.

According to Muslim philosophers, what distinguishes human soul from that of animal are theoretical and practical reason. But there is more than one interpretation of theoretical and practical reason among these philosophers and sometimes even in the works of a single philosopher.The paper aims at clarifying the meaning of practical reason from the viewpoint of Avicenna (ibn -Sina).Referring to Avicenna's works four terms and expressions as to the practical reason can be identified. In some of these expressions, the practical reason has only the function of conceiving general or particular practical propositions. In some others, it has, besides conceptual function, a practical one. Examining these four expressions, it becomes clear that none of them comes in accord with the two expressions prevalent among Muslim philosophers. The article ends with an attempt to bring back the four expressions to a single comprehensive one.

There is growing awareness of the need for continuing initiatives for dialogue among the world religions. What is new is not the fact of several religious, but the internalization of this awareness of fundamental plurality on the part of religious adherents. With the increased awareness of diversity we can no longer regard the co-presence of other believers as that of mere "outlanders" who follow "odd" ways. This profound diversity poses a problem for relations between the adherents of different religions. This paper examines the present practice of three approaches and strategies of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism in this regard. There are four preconditions for an effective dialogue. And finally three characteristics of human knowledge are pointed out.