JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Year:2020 | Volume:22 | Issue:1 (83)|Papers Count:7

God’ s limited and conditioned attributes of action are the manifestation and expression of His essential absolute attributes of action; however, their limitedness is due to their simultaneous working with each other and in relation to creation. Among the attributes of action, the attribute of wisdom – the manifestation of the essential attribute of knowledge – is dominant over other attributes and constraints them. John Schellenberg, in the Divine Hiddenness Argument, has been heedless of the distinction between these two categories of attributes; something that has resulted in firstly, that he assigns Divine love to an absolute form of human love by employing an analogous approach and secondly, by confusing the different forms of love, i. e. agape and eros, that he have an incorrect understanding of Divine love and the level of their absoluteness and thirdly, even with the validity of Schellenberg’ s emphasis on the distinction between the Hiddenness Argument and the Argument for Evil, his use of the former as a disaffirmation of Divine infinite love somehow takes a person’ s mind to the Argument of Evil and is an incorrect use of it. Based on the action attribute of wisdom, one can show that in contrast to Schellenberg’ s claim, Divine hiddenness does not only not disaffirm Divine love; rather, it is a manifestation of God’ s wise love for man and we will be indicating some of this wisdom in this paper.

Religious exclusivism is one of the essential properties and historical characteristics of the Christian tradition. This approach has some significant theological and historical elements which include: 1. Bein referenceable to the New Testament, 2. Relying on historical facts of Jesus Christ’ s life, 3. The necessity of direct Divine interference, 4. Centrality of some theological teachings, 5. The central and prominent place of Jesus, 6. The significant place of the Church and the Pope, 7. The secondary role of legal laws and the centrality of faith and grace, 8) Ignorance of other religions realities and values. Christian exclusivism has resulted in some important consequences during its history some of which are as follows: negligence of other religions’ values and the needlessness of learning from them; extreme belief in the sacred and avoiding rationality; a positive approach to one’ s own identity and a negative to others’ ; ideological thought, threatening peace and extending war. The solution is to put aside exclusivism, and to be open to truths that other religions introduce which is attainable through dialogue and listening to other’ s voices.

We all have the intuition that self-knowledge is a special kind of knowledge that is distinct from the rest of our knowledge. The motivation of philosophers for addressing this issue as a philosophical issue is often the mentioned distinction. They have tried to explain the nature of this particular knowledge. Among their self-knowledge theories, rationalist theories have explained this particular knowledge based on its relation with rationality. According to them, rationality has an important relation to self-knowledge and to its distinctive nature. In this paper, after the general introduction of the rationalist theories in the debate of self-knowledge, we will analyze Moran's Transparency Theory as one of the most successful rationalist theories. After that, we will mention one of the most important challenges that this theory always faces, and then we will introduce and analyze an interesting solution that Boyle has suggested to solve this challenge and, in fact, to complete the Transparency Theory. Finally, we will mention some of the weaknesses of this solution and, ultimately, we will suggest two proposals to improve this solution and for the progress of the Transparency Theory.

The matter of God’ s Unity is addressed in three capacities: 1. necessity, 2. Divinity, and 3. real existence. Regarding unity in the position of real existencevarious beliefs exist; for example, the beliefs of the common people, thePeripatetic philosophers, the ignorant from among the Sufis as well as their elders, the Pahlavi scholars, Mirdamad and Davvani, the great mystics the Pahlavischolars and the transcendental philosophers. Mulla Sadra also has many views inthis regard in different periods and discussion of his The Transcendent Philosophyof the Four Journeys of the Intellect. This paper compares the aforementionedbeliefs and views with each other and ultimately, introduces the pure and sincereUnity of God from among them which is free from all other errors as well. Puremonotheism is monotheism that is not polluted with any type of polytheismregarding real existence and this is only the view of the mystics and transcendentalphilosophers; this is also the final view of Mulla Sadra. The aforementioned viewis based on the view of the unity of existence and existents while preserving theplurality of both and according to that, existence and existent is limited only toGod’ s essence and at the same time it has real and various manifestations andilluminations; on the other hand, even though existence and existents havedifferent and real manifestations, at the same time, they are one and limited toGod’ s existence. It is clear that this study is descriptive-analytic.

Conceptual change and its effects of the history of science has always been one of the challenges issues in historical and philosophical discussions of science. In this paper, we will first introduce Paul Thagard, one of the advocates of Philosophy of Computational Science regarding the essence and circumstances of conceptual change; based on this, we will indicate his approach to the history of philosophy in respect to its being accumulative or revolutionary. According to Thagard, evidence and methods are the least common things which are common in scientific revolutions between an existing and replacement theory. In this article, we will show that this claim does not seem to be compatible with Thagard’ s semantic holistic approach. Similarly, through historical case studies regarding Quantum Mechanics scientific revolutions in the history of physics, we will show that contrary to Thagard’ s theory, gradualness and overlap of an existing and substituent theory is not proof of cohesion between the two because even though one cannot find a precise boundary between them; this, however, does not mean that there is none and principally, the existing theory has been set aside and the replacement theory has been established.

One of the key issues in the philosophy of Descartes that is very important today for researchers of the philosophy of the middle Ages and the New Period in the West is Descartes’ approach regarding the causal relation between different things in the world. Descartes’ view on the relation between soul and body is an Occasionalistic view. According to this view, it is God that is the final causation in the relation between soul and body. But in this article, the key question is whether Descartes’ view on the relation between all things in the world, material or immaterial an Occasionalistic one. And can we call him the founder of Occasionalism; or should we trace this view back to the books of Medieval Age philosophers? Therefore, in this article we will try to show that, based on Descartes’ different books, and according to some Medieval Age texts, we can ascribe to Descartes a Quasi-Occasionalistic, according to which, besides God, we can ascribe a causal faculty to material and physical things in the world.

This paper seeks to explain and study a new approach by Fischer in solving the possible conflict between God’ s fore and infallible knowledge with the moral responsibility of the agent. Even though, on one hand, Fischer considers attributes such as knowledge to be essential and infallible Divine characteristics and also attributes temporal non-Thomistic eternity to God within the temporal framework of material existents and ultimately accepts the Fixity of the Past Principle and man’ s lack of control over temporally expired events and at first glance is faced with the conflict between such foreknowledge with man’ s free will in his actions; however, his type of view regarding the essence of man’ s free will frees him from this challenge. In Fischer’ s Frankfurter explanation, free will is not a factor preceded by man’ s ability to attempt an alternative act in the opposite course and therefore, even if Divine knowledge is synonymous with the one-sidedness of action, such a consequence would not be equal to man’ s loss of volition and free will. In this article, after presenting a short explanation for Fischer’ s view regarding Divine foreknowledge and addressing the Fixity of the Past Principle and the possibilities of alternatives and Fischer’ s Frankfurter approach in encountering that, we will assess Fischer’ s solution and observe that, anyway, envisioning the existence of an alternative for actions to actualize the free will of the agent is unavoidable.