FALSAFEH (THE IRANIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY)
Year:2013 | Volume:41 | Issue:1|Papers Count:8

The eighteenth century enlightenment is one of the most important foundations of the modern culture and the contemporary Western philosophy can be regarded as a dialogue between the Enlightenment and its critics. Although the roots of the Enlightenment can be traced to the Late Middle Ages and even before, but it is in Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (and implicitly in his critical trilogy and political works) that the Enlightenment and the modern situation are formulated philosophically.Foucault, French postmodern philosopher, has written three essays on kant's “What is Enlightenment?” They are as follows: “What is Critique?” (1978), “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution” (1983), and “What is Enlightenment?” (1984).These works indicate a considerable shift in his approach to the Enlightenment.This essay tries to explain this shift by analyzing and comparing Kant’s and Foucault’s views of the Enlightenment. For Foucault, the Enlightenment is not a historical period which has its own general principles but is a continuation of the critical tradition, philosophical ethos and ontology of the present and, as such, has been one of the main currents of Western philosophy from Kant until the present time.

Human free acts have always been one of most difficult but important issues in philosophical debates. In this Paper, I will try to provide an interpretation of these acts and argue for human free will and freedom. To this end, I will first, disucss the distinction of necessary acts from free acts, and then will argue for the free will, and its relation to free acts and freedom. Finally, some considerations will be concluded concerning the implication of our discussion for human emotion.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in Four Aspects Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, criticized Kant’s interpretation of causality, which is written in the Second Analogy contained in the section of Principles of Pure Understanding. These criticisms express themselves along three main axes. By considering these criticisms, this article seeks to defend Kant’s account and to show that Schopenhauer didn’t understand properly the arguments that Kant has given. In this article, on the one hand, Kant’s position, in contrast with Schopenhauer’s view, is confirmed, but on the other hand, it is argued that Kant distorted the genuine meaning of causality and meant causality so that it was not consistent with the main aim that philosophers have taken at establishing causality, hence the criticism of this article of Kant’s explanation of causality.

Descartes' absolutist rationalism makes a gap between human perception and the physical word. As a result, there will be a separation between his rational approach to the word and that of sensory-emotional. Now, the problem is that whether there is any place for beauty and aestheticism in the Cartesian rationalism. In this paper, we will deal with sense and sensory perception in Descartes rationalism, the place of aestheticism in his Philosophical system and the question that whether it is possible to have a reliable knowledge of beauty on such a basis.The basis of Cartesian philosophy is on “I think therefore I am” and subjectivism, as a result of this principle, is an absolutely new concept at the center of his philosophical system. This is a viewpoint in cognitive, ethical, pragmatic, aesthetic and artistic areas in which the basis is on subject, the doer of an ethical act, a judge of aestheticism and the creator of an artistic creation. Hence, the question is: what is the relation between aestheticism and subjectivism as one of the essential and important issues in western philosophy ' in the modern era'.After briefly going through the classical aestheticism of Plato and beauty in the context of Descartes’ subjectivism, this paper adopts a comparative approach to argue that Descartes, as the father of modern philosophy, would revolutionize the philosophy of art and aestheticism, influenced by Plato, by a different interpretation of existence, reality and knowledge. Based on this view, we can recognize him as the founder of modern philosophy and an estheticism.

One of the most important questions in epistemology is the nonphysical realities, like phenomenal consciousness. The main claim of physicalism is real explanations of events and properties are only physical explanations and representationalists are agree too. Thus these realities can explained by the rule of biases of physical and objective events. On the other hand, phenomenalists maintain that conscious experiences and aspect of subjectivity of phenomenal consciousness are not. In this article I attempt formulated the problem of phenomenal consciousness based on the Perspectival Subjectivity and next proposed the solutions of theories of representation of mind then declare objections on the theories of representation of mind. There is a question as can be the theory of representation of mind the frame for causal explanation of the problems of phenomenal consciousness?

The major problem of the present article is to investigate relation between epistemological behaviorism and epistemological pluralism or relativism. Can we believe in epistemological behaviorism and set aside representationalism and the same time we reject relativism and believe that the concept of truth plays the key role in our understanding of the world and of the mind of agents. In this article, Davidson’s positive answer to this problem is considered and his critical attitude to Rorty is explained.

This paper, in its first part, analyzes the status and history of the principle of “maximization of the good” and the different meanings of “maximization” and “good.” After explaining and analyzing this principle and its different interpretations, in the first part, this paper, in its second part, categorizes Rawls’s criticisms on it, step by step, by extracting and mentioning their premises. It should be noted that, prior to Rawls, similar objections to the principle of “maximization of the good” had already been raised by David Ross, Brian Barry and Nicholas Rescher. Rawls was the first person who provides a systematic and comprehensive alternative to this principle as well as coherent and systematic criticisms on it. However, most works on this topic – esp. Persian works – have a very important defect: They do not distinguish Rawls’s different (and sometimes parallel) criticisms. This paper, distinguishes Rawls’s criticism. Then, it shows that: 1. Rawls’s criticism on “total good/utility” is different from his criticism on “average good/utility,” and 2. Rawls uses two different strategies for criticizing the principle of “maximization of the good” which one of them is totally independent of his positive theory (justice as fairness) and the other one is dependent on it.