FALSAFEH (THE IRANIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY)
Year:2012 | Volume:39 | Issue:2|Papers Count:8

This paper presents the most important features of Peirce's semiotics, including the emergence process of signs, their ways of signifying, as well as their practical dimensions. The study of Peirce's three philosophical categories as well as the issue of "abduction" underlines the central role of Peirce's semiotics in his ontology and in his epistemology, in such a way that all thoughts and all kinds of process of signification can be considered to be stemming from his conception of signs. According to Peirce, signs are the structure of all thoughts and on this basis, life of every king of knowledge and even the relations between human beings depend on signs. In this regard, a brief comparative study between Peirce's three categories and the different kinds of perceptions in Islamic philosophy is also mentioned. As a means of analysis of human thoughts and their practical consequences, Peirce's semiotics has also a pragmatist dimension, even though we cannot consider him to be a strict follower of pragmatism. Peirce's semiotics has been used in various fields including philosophy of media, arts… In this context, one of the practical applications of his semiotics in the interpretation of a work of art is also tackled.

The first conceptions of intellect are a beign and an essence; we must begin exploring how they are related to each other. Everything that receives something from another is potential with regard to what it receives and what is receives in it is the actuality. Thus St. Thomas returns to the doctrine of potency and act of being to explain the relation of a being and an essence by developing in their meaning to be no longer confined to the concept of motion St. Thomas is doubtful between equivocal meaning of being and univocal meaning of it and therefore he uses the term analogy. This article tries to criticize doctrine of existentialism of St. Thomas.

Gadamer considers understanding as an event which is the result of the fusion of horizon of interpreter and horizon of the text. From his point of view, understanding has a fundamental connection with the concept of horizon and in fact horizon is the central point in the process of understanding. Horizon for Nietzsche is a limiting concept which is not able to be transitive. Husserl draws his attention on developing and the opening feature of horizon. Horizon consists of all co-given that has not been given in intuition; however in percepting of an object plays a fundamental role.Like Nietzsche, Gadamer believes in the limiting role of horizon, though like Husserl believes in the possibility of development and openness of horizon. In his point of view, prejudices as internal horizon and historicity of Man as external horizon, are effective in constructing the understanding as well as limiting it.Unlike enlightenment thinkers, Gadamer not only does not consider prejudice as an obstacle of understanding but also believes that prejudice is the condition of any understanding. Understanding is historical. It is the result of effect of history on the Man. In Gadamer’s view, tradition or prejudice, history, and language are the main factors which play a role on the constitution of interpreter’s horizon and limiting his prospective.

Martin Heidegger, the originator of fundamental ontology, considers the analysis of human as facilitative measures to investigate the meanings of existence. He calls it the fundamental ontology. In Heidegger’s view, the precise investigation of existence primarily depends on elucidating what resolves the existential questions namely “Dasein”. Heidegger is an existential philosopher who believes that the world of metaphysics in Descartes’ analogy of tree identification achieves consistency as the root of the trees in the soil. Accordingly, the foundation of all sciences, including humanitarian and physical considerations, relies on existence and its openness to Dasein. In addition, explaining the unique characteristics and features of science in each course of history is based on the understanding of the relationship between existences with that era. Humanities in each of the periods and human communities are directly related to existential philosophies and their systems. Hence, attempts in association with the science of these communities have taken different forms. This study, with reference to some of the works of Heidegger including the book of “Being and time”, has focused on the point that western civilization and science have emerged from an inner state that approaching and then passing it depend on the understanding of this conscience and its destruction analysis. According to Heidegger’s criteria, this study is aimed at examining the possible conditions of gaining access to western humanities. Further, it investigates the process of a useful and beneficial interaction with western humanities in order to explain it to the culture and the civilization of our country, considering its relationship with specific ontology, which has been the origin of scientific works in the construction of different eras.

Rawls’ theory of Justice is expressed in a constructivist procedure. He holds that his constructivist procedure is free of metaphysical presuppositions. His constructivist procedure is here pursued in three stages: (1) in a theory of justice, Rawls intends to come to moral principles regarding the original position which could even result in other moral principles as well. He also asserts some metaphysical conceptions of human nature in regard to the original position. (2) In “Kantian constructivism in moral theory”, the original position is blurred and the intuitional ideas of democratic societies come to center. (3) in political liberalism, change in the procedure becomes more obvious and the procedure is surveyed considering public reason and overlapping consensus; finally, it is deduced that even in Political Liberalism in which Rawls wants to suggest political, not metaphysical justice, he cannot maintain any concept of the justice without any metaphysical presupposition and, contrast to Rawls’ view, it followed that his constructivist procedure is incomplete.

Aesthetics, nowadays, is regarded as a branch of philosophy which studies Beauty and art. This research is about aesthetics from Mulla Sadra's viewpoint. In the works of this philosopher, Beauty in general means possessing all the good properties. The special definition of beauty, which includes only sensible objects, is possessing the factors of order, good combination, moderation, and so on. According Mulla Sadra's viewpoint the origin of beauty is absolute beautiful, although their interpretations are different. Creating pleasure and love and wonder are some of the consequences of beauty on the rcipient soul. According to him, beauty is an objective thing, although it may have a stable existence in conception. According to Mulla Sadra, some of the origins of art are manifestation of some of God's names, inclination to beauty, love of beauty, revelation, relation with transcendental world, imitative image and so on. Imitative image is According to Mulla Sadra, imagination is the first origin of the work of art.. Mulla Sadra believes in the imaginary world to which people relate through sleep and mystics through divine inspiration. People and mysticy can realize what they have observed in that world into art and create works of art. This Muslim philosopher has also discussed poetry as a kind of work of art.

A controversy among the Muslim philosophers about the domain of the extensions was that is the subject of the verity-propositions contained the impossible extensions or only all of the actual and possible ones. From Ibn-Sina to Al-Khunaji, there are explicit texts to the former view; but later logicians, starting with Athir Al-Din Al-Abhari, were inclined to the latter. In this paper, we attampt to support Ibn-Sina and Al-Khunaji's view versus Al-Abhari's. For this, we take the extensions as sets of concepts. If an extension is a set of inconsistent concepts we'll regard it impossible and name its logic ‘the logic of the concepts’. For systematizing the logic, we introduce semantics similar to that of predicate logic and construct a formal system in the first-order language. We show that the logical system can be collapsed to a fraction of the second-order logic, concluding that Ibn-Sina and Al-Khunaji's view can be supported by the second-order logic.