JOURNAL OF HUMAN SCIENCES
Year:2006 | Volume:- | Issue:50 (SPECIAL ISSUE ON PHILOSOPHY)|Papers Count:18

Aesthetic object has always been a challenging theme for philosophers of art. The overall aim of this paper is to revise a very specific phenomenological approach to this theme. It includes a talk about artwork and its relationship with aesthetic object and ends with a reconsideration of the being of aesthetic object which is vital for the phenomenology of art.

The present paper is an attempt to show the origin, development and nature of Chomsky's linguistics. It will be indicated that Chomskyan linguistics is a Lakatosian research program which marks the beginning of the Second Cognitive Revolution. Therefore, its origin is the Rationalist thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The nature of the program constitutes three problems, namely those of Humboldt's, Plato's and Descartes's and its development passes through two stages: rule-based and principle-based and three periods: derivational, representational and again derivational.

In this article first the most common ideas on the issues of sense, reference and signification (e.g. Saeed 1997, Lyons 1977, Safavi 2004) will be reviewed and critically evaluated. Then I will try to give another perspective on the issue based on Stratificational Semiotics (sojoodi 2004). In this discussion any positivist relation between language and world will be rejected. Confusion of the concepts of signification and reference from one side, and confusion of the concepts of signification and objective "reality" from the other side will be reviewed critically, in and attempt to show that meaning is formed in the formal systematic network of linguistic relations and then it extends to the context of discourse through its interrelations with other semiotic systems, and of course one of its functions may be reference to the outside world, and references is only one of the linguistic functions made possible through inevitable interaction with other semiotic systems.

The basic concepts of the philosophy of Nietzsche are: becoming, the eternal return of the same, will to power, and nihilism. Nietzsche for bringing about a logical connection between these concepts reduces the concept of being to that of becoming. This reduction occurs from the man's point of view and he believes that the meaning of being is given by man. In this paper the quality of the reduction of being to becoming and its connection to will to power and the eternal return of the same has come into inquiry.

Nearly, all philosophers are concerned with Moral or Practical Philosophy, but the ones who have a rational ordered system of the theoretical philosophy usually think about the reliance of their Practical Philosophy upon their theoretical Philosophy as a certain duty. Spinoza (1677-1632) has a distinguishable position among this group. In the present article we will try to have an inquiry about the Practical Philosophy of Spinoza and its reliance upon its reliance upon his theoretical Philosophy, besides some explanations and critical points, according to the capacity of one article. The more inquiry about this matter and the relation between his detailed Ethics and his own Philosophy of Ethics has been left for another opportunity.

The article seeks of explain some of the general characteristics of Heidegger's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This interpretation challenges all epistemological interpretations of Kan's first critique which is undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophical works in modern epoch. A general glimpse to the general characteristics and distinctions of the two kinds of interpretations of Kant may help us to understand both Kant's philosophy and Heidegger's thought better.

According to Merleau- Ponty, the wonderment of being attracts the philosopher to itself. This wonderment is based on what Merleau- Ponty calls "contingency". The truth of being is devoid of any necessity. Nothing in this world, including the human being, is necessary and it is this contingency that has made man into an unexplainable and free being. Man, by using his freedom, creates meaning and value. He is condemned to create meaning because only in this way can he continue his life. The philosopher is not seeking to find the final answer to the problem of being. He knows that the world has begun and, with all its obscurity, is going on, but he doesn't know why and how, and cannot guarantee removing its wonderment and obscurity. The philosopher can only look at the wonderment of being and partly describe it, but he cannot explain it because any explanation removes the wonderment. During the history, men, by resort to the absolutes, have attempted to take away the wonderment of being but, from Merleau- Ponty's point of view, the task of the philosopher is to preserve the wonderment of being and to prevent it from any attempt to take it away by resort to the absolute.

On the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, physical processes are, at the most fundamental level, both inherently indeterminisic and non- local. The ontology of classical physics is dead. There exists in the laws of the fundamental physical phenomena an essential and uneliminable indeterminism or probability which is not, like the probability of classical physics, based on our ignorance. According to Copenhagen school, indeterminism or non- causal picture of nuclear phenomena is an essential feature of nature. We are, here, encountered with an inherent limitation in principle, not just in practice. This is what has been advanced by David Hume, some centuries ago. He argued that "what is may not be". There is no logical necessity in the natural phenomena. What we take to be a logical necessity is just a psychological expectation based on our habit of mind. The belief in the universality of the principle of causality is a superstition.

The divine knowledge is one of the most prominent philosophical and theological issues that Islamic philosophers proved wisdom in. But because of the fact that common practice was based on puncitilitiousness and objection to the predecessors thoughts, a renovation or completion of the demolished structure often initiated afterward. Avicena proposed the imprinted forms in the divine separative knowledge. These forms were firmly critisized by Tusi. Despite Sadra's acceptance of the critiques, he defended Avicenna's proposal. This article is an effort to rationally analyze Sadra's first critique on Tusi's thoughts in brief.

In An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm, Ibsen forms the structure, characters and figural aspects of each play with an emphasis on the discourse of the Enlightenment. This article analyses Rosmersholm in the light of subjectivism, historicism and hero- worshipping/ epoch- making- three tenets of the discourse of the Enlightenment- and argues that the play casts doubts on these strategies employed in social contexts. The article further suggests that the emergence of the grotesque in this play targets both the illuminati and Ibsen himself as a thinker and a dramatist.

Given the hypothesis that the Kant's principal preoccupation, or one of his preoccupations, in offering and expressing "critical philosophy" was focused on the problem of "metaphysics" and that the major part of the "Critique of Pure Reason" and "Prolegomena" envisage the principles, structure, method and problems of metaphysics, one can ask whether the Philosopher of Kongsberg's speculative plan to establish what he calls "the metaphysics of metaphysics" has been achieved or not. And whether his spiritual successors (German Idealists), and the last two centuries of European philosophy in total have welcomed this plan or not. After all, can Kant's philosophy liberate itself from the spirit and essence of European metaphysics and its subjective standpoint? Apparently the distinction between "reason" and "understanding" and, subsequently, between "phenomenon" and "noumenon" could lead to the inauguration of a metaphysics in accordance with Kant's ideas. However by considering and pondering upon the philosophical changes that took place less than a century after him, the result of that and the replies to these questions can be seen.

In the domain of epistemology, the outcomes of the Enlightenment can be summarized in two main points: 1) the critics on the ground of reason, 2) mechanical approach to nature. Thus, the Enlightenment encountered crisis. Skepticism, on the one hand threatened the critical thought and materialism, on the other hand, emerged with naturalism. Therefore, saving critics or critical thought from Skepticism and naturalism from materialism became the main issue. Kant's transcendental idealism sought to overcome the problems though relating objectivity and causality. Kant's great endeavor was questioned in his time. This paper is an effort to describe Kant's endeavor and its critics.

Experience is indeed a matter of thinking and judging. Judging means using logical concepts in order to think about appearances. The subsumption of particular appearances under universal concepts is realized by the power of judgment. But concepts and intuitions are heterogeneous and in order that a successful subsumption takes place, there must be certain homogeneity between the objects and the concepts. The schema as the transcendental determination of time is held to be the "third thing" which mediated between the objects and the concepts.

Discussing the transcendental dialectic, Kant explains that based on pure categories, understanding produces a priori synthetic judgments, though it fails to bring about unity and connection among them. Therefore, reason contributes to understanding, so that, on one hand, it fosters unity among the dispersed judgments of understanding by establishing three series of categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms and, on the other hand, it bestows the maximum unity and extension on the judgments and conditional knowledge of understanding by allowing three ideas of reason, that is soul, world and God at the end of the three syllogisms. God or the ideal of pure reason is considered one of the a priori ideas of the pure reason which comes at the end of the series of the disjunctive syllogisms of reason as a transcendental concept and the ultimate unconditional condition. In this way Kant shows how things are logically constituted in mind. He believes that, as "the sum- total of all realities" or "the sum of all possibilities," the ideal of pure reason is the transcendental material and the precondition for determination of all things. In fact human mind is so wired as to produce everything, it first considers the concept of the ideal of the pure reason that is "the sum- total of all realities or possibilities" as the conceptual constitutive material and then carves out the share of every single concept from this undetermined material by adding negative limitations and negations. The present article seeks to elaborate on the way things are organized in mind, using the a priori concept of ideal of the pure reason.