ETHICAL RESEARCH (RESEARCH JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR ISLAMIC THOUGHT)
Year:2005 | Volume:1 | Issue:3|Papers Count:7

Among different ways of perceiving God the Subjective one, namely knowing Him through self knowledge, is preferred by nearly all of Muslim thinkers especially the mystics.  This way, according to them, enables human being to reach the depth of Divine manifestation and also to understand more and more about Divine's names and attributes by making himself as a mirror of God.  Muslims mystics according to Quranic verses and some Hadiths such as the one related to the prophet "Every one who knows himself he will certainly know his Lord" have proposed different ways for explaining the relationship between self knowledge and perceiving God. This essay discusses the attitude of Ibn Arabi to this matter. He offered and studied ten version of relationship between them.

There are different views about the goodness of human nature, which four of them are discussed here. Our discussion here limited to only moral goodness and did not include the existential goodness or badness. Some philosophers believe in essential goodness of human nature while according to some others the nature of humanity is not wholly good and has twofold character. The third groups of the thinkers take the nature of human being to be essentially bad and wicked. According to forth groups the nature of human being is not good or bad essentially and it only becomes good or bad with the influence of external conditions. In this paper the first view, the goodness of human nature is discussed in more details and the arguments pro and against it is considered and finally is defended by the author.

This essay discuses the role of Mullah Sadra's especial view i.e. the theory of substantial motion on his exegesis of Qur'an. According to Mullah Sadra two basic elements of the interpretation of Qur'an are the explicit and apparent traditions and the complete and inclusive mystical intuitions. He uses the theory of substantial motion to explain the resurrection of the human bodies and the transformation of the human beings from one level to another. Mullah Sadra, with respect to his theory of substantial motion, takes human being as having influence essence which can be shaped with respect to his voluntary movement. He also offers new interpretations for the concepts such as death, the way (Serat), resurrection and the mystery of immortality. This paper, appealing to some examples, will show the influence of his theory about substantial motion on his interpretations of religious concepts.

One of the most important problems in the philosophy of religion is the question of religious realism. Religious realism was and still is defended by many philosophers but in the contrary some philosophers such as Frazer regards religious propositions as false hypothesize which only have instrumental value. Ludwig Wittgenstein's view in this regard, at least according to an expressive interpretation of it, is different from both of them. He thinks that religious sentences are not cognitive propositions so they could not be true or false and also they are not instruments for achieving some goals. They only express our sentiments and emotions. This paper discusses the expressive interpretation of religion and then considers Wittgenstein's view in the light of what are been said by his commentators in this regard.

One of the must difficult problems in the philosophy of religion is explanation of God's will. There was and still is a hot controversy about this problem so that some Muslim scholars take it as an attribution of God's essence and others take it as a property of God's action. Among the first group some identify it with His essence but others take it an added property to the essence of God. Some scholars reduced the will of God to His knowledge or His love and so on. We, in this paper, discuss and criticize the theory of essentiality of God's will and will show that this is one of His attributions in the level of the action. Also we show that the property of God's will can not be reduced to any of other attributions of God.

There was and to some extent still is a good habit in some of the authors of text books. They begin their books by explaining different constitutive elements of the Science in question. The idea of explaining the subject matter, the conceptual and propositional primary principles and the problems of that field of the study is so important that without them we will not be able to understand it fully. In this paper, explaining Avicenna's view on the constitutive elements of the science, we try to show the importance of the subject matter in distinguishing a specific branch of knowledge from others.