Society needs ethics constitution to continue its living; but why should “I” live an ethical life? What is wrong with the fact that all people behave ethically and I pretend to be ethical without being committed to ethics? Socrates was faced to this question by Glaucon and many people have tried to find a proper answer for it. In addition to the Socratic answer to this problem, existentialist and farsighted responses which are a kind of sophisticated egoism have been proposed, too. In addition to these responses being featured by strong and weak points, a religious response could be given to this problem. Religious response to the reason of living ethically has been exposed by some criticisms and drawbacks being emerged from its specific assertions. Reviewing this problem historically and separating the two main questions from each other, the author of the present study put four responses forward and then the Islamic response is supported because of its strong explicative strength. Finally, an assertion of award and punishment phenomenon is given to be responsive to the common criticisms.

Exegesis was flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries (A.H.) and some outstanding exegetical works on the Holy Quran were written then. Amin al-Islam Fazl ibn-e Hassan Tabarsi is one of the many characters who has left behind several exegetical works. He wrote three exegetical works on the Holy Quran, one of which isTafsir-e Vasit. This work is also called Javameh al-Jameh. The present article gives a detailed account of the characteristics of this exegetical work and discusses Tabarsi's approach in it. A discussion on the advantages of this work over Majma' al-Bayan and Zamakhshary's al-Kashshaf constitutes another part of this paper. At the end, different editions of this work are reviewed and various features of the late Professor Abul-Qasem Gorji's edition are discussed.

Following the transformation of man’s attitude during the last few centuries, various perceptions have been given about the ‘comprehensiveness’ of religion. Three groups of scholars have offered three types of evaluations in this context. Two groups have taken extreme positions with one of them claiming that religion has all the answers to all the questions including the detailed ones and another maintaining that religion only deals with issues related to the Hereafter. According to the third group, the comprehensiveness of religion needs to be evaluated considering the goal and mission of religion. The present paper offers a criticism of the first two views and rejects them and substantiates the third view drawing on logical and narrative reasoning.

This article tries to explicate and analyze a couplet from Manteq al-Tayr that has been left unattended and unexplicated or has not been understood by all explicators of Manteq al-Tayr. The first hemistich of this couplet refers to a tradition and the second to a Koranic verse, both widely reflected in Persian poetry. In the first hemistich, a dog is regarded as a criterion for acceptability before God. The second hemistich refers to a famous pious man who is inflicted with vanity. The details have been studied with authentic reasons.

The article explains the basic principles of the epistemological developments of postmetaphysics (or poststructuralism) and accordingly presents a systematic study of textual understanding and interpretation per se. The developments and the study are mainly considered as some part of a wider academic change called The Linguistic Turn in methodological studies of the late twentieth century. The focal point is the fact that textual understanding and interpretation are purely linguistic acts -no matter what approach is appropriated to interpret the text. Meanwhile, it is also deduced that the meaning is a combination of signifiers which belongs neither to the author, nor to the text nor the reader, but to language. This knowledge helps the appreciation of recent methodological developments in the field of methodological studies.

The Explication of the role of fire in, and its profound impact on, human communities throughout history requires multiple ranges of knowledge such as history, psychology, sociology, physics, ethnology, anthropology. While the present paper does not utilize all these principles, it argues that fire may encompass a broad range of meanings that enable this element to possess a receptacle of diverse and contradictory senses and symbolic concepts. To address some of these symbolic characteristics, the authors try to analyse its varied meanings through an analysis of some of the dichotomies it has obtained, two of which are fire as destructive/ constructive force and a life-/death-giving element. In order to do so, the authors base their argument on a tradition which, compared with other cults, reveals the symbolic characteristics of fire more conspicuously and more succinctly, namely, Zoroastrianism.

Ecological data combined with the applied knowledge of the ecosystem modeling are the building blocks of policy making and planning efforts for the conservation of ecosystems. The ecological modeling is considered in this paper as the process of transforming ecological data and information (produced through empirical investigations and scientific observations) into a level of general knowledge. This capable of representing and forecasting the key patterns, processes and functioning of ecosystems. Within the past decade, the use of ontologies for explicit specification of conceptualizations within the knowledge systems has been widely adopted and employed by many research communities in the domains of biology and life science to enable automated reasoning using the semantically annotated data models. This paper presents and introduces application of knowledge is semantic annotation and ontologies to elucidate the knowledge of desert ecosystems within the domain of conservation planning in Iran.

One of the most important topics in the field of educational sciences is the trainer’ s being a role model for the trainee. In general, if we categorize the whole Islamic issues into the three areas of beliefs, morality and prescripts, a look at the holy Quran and the teachings of the Infallibles will reveal that these three areas are so closely interrelated that one cannot exist without the other, and an individual who is faithful to only one of the three can be not only a role model teacher, but an example of a perfect and successful human being. An important part of the verses of the holy Quran deal with these three areas, which are also regarded as the realms of faith and the practice of righteousness, and they have long been the subject of debate among Muslim scholars. In this article, we have dealt with the most important features of role model teacher aiming to explain the approach of explaining the role model teacher as a Quranic trainer based on Quranic verses and narrations and referring to commentary and hadith sources. The result of this study is that the role model of a perfect Islamic trainer can be realized only if the teacher always considers the three angles of the triangle of religion, i. e. ma’ refah (spiritual knowledge), Shari'ah and morality, and believes that disregarding any one of these three does not make him/her suitable for a perfect role model trainer, and consequently his teachings will not produce sufficient outcome for the trainees.

Due to their occurrence in language, metaphors are linguistic tools for the emergence of ideologies in texts. They essentially mirror ideological discourses. Employing metaphors as a stylistic component permits literary writers to fashion their works by highlighting, dimming, and hiding feelings, inducing false perceptions in their readership. Accordingly, drawing on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s insights about conceptual metaphor, the current study seeks to explicate the ideological metaphor of up/down in socio-critical narratives: Varaghhaie Pare Zendan (Torn paper from the Prison), Az Ranji Ke Mibarim (From the Pain we Suffer), Azar: Mah-e Akher-e Paeez (Azar: The Last Month of Fall), Sag-e Velgard (A Wandering Dog), and Kheim-e Shabbazi (Puppetry). The conceptual metaphor is one of the new approaches in semantics. The orientational metaphor is one of the conceptual metaphors by which the system of concepts is structured based on orientation/ direction (place) such as inside/outside, center/periphery, and up/down. The present study is carried out in the descriptive-analytical approach. It initially introduces its conceptual framework along with the selected narratives. Then, it identifies statements containing up/down metaphors in the narratives. Afterwards, the study will analyze the relationship between the detected metaphors and the ideology of the narratives to explore the role of up/down metaphors in power relations within the narratives. The findings of this work demonstrate the writers (of the selected narratives) have benefitted from the up-down metaphors to represent the abstract concept of power and its relations, to reflect their ideologies, and to show the confrontation between the oppressor and the oppressed which is the most important constituents in socio-political narratives.