فصلنامه قبسات
پیاپی 49 (پاییز 1387)

There are many differences between ‘ijtihadgara’I’ and ‘the idea of the possibility of different readings’ in terms of their bases, claims and effects; ijtihadgara’i means a systematic effort to discover religious statements and teachings using valid evidences; on this base religious knowledge is possible and systematic. ‘The idea of the possibility of different readings’ is to believe that there are different and even contradictory readings of religion due to the nature of the text, the essence of mind, the mechanism of understanding and …; and different understandings appear from one single text. As a result it is not simple to reach to a final objective understanding for a religious text. The researcher of this article has divided hermeneutic theories into three groups: 1. author-centered; 2. text-centered; 3.interpreter-centered. He believes ‘the idea of the possibility of different readings’ is based on text-centered and interpreter-centered theories and ‘ijtihadgara’i’ is author-centered, especially on the basis of his suggested methodological pattern. He counts ten differences between the two discourses and then briefly criticizes ‘the idea of the possibility of different readings’.

Theism is one of the fundamental bases and foundations of religious knowledge and understanding. There are different kinds of theism and different perspectives regarding God’s attributes and their meaning which play an important role in the organization of religious knowledge. This role can be seen in different shapes and fields such as the following cases: 1. It organizes our macro-perspective to religion, 2. It determines the rejection or acceptance of the sources of religious knowledge; 3. It explains the holiness or non-holiness of religious knowledge and its stability or reformation; 4. It effects our understanding and interpretation of religious narrations and teachings.The result of this research shows that only the monotheistic religions, among theistic theories, can answer the fundamental theological questions and solve their problems. On the other hand understanding a great deal of religious teachings depends, directly or indirectly, on revising the bases of God’s attributes and its semantics. The only theory that solves the problems of this field is the univocal view and Molla-Sadra Shirazi’s graded being.

This article will try to analyze intra-religious cognitive discussions from an intra-religious perspective. The first question mentioned is what religious scholars mean by knowledge and how much is it rational. It is said in this section that it is necessary to differentiate between common religious people and religious theoreticians and scholars. In the next section, we will discuss the possibility of achieving knowledge, as the Islamic scholars say, and will review the different ways of achieving knowledge. Another discussion is the obstacles and factors effecting knowledge from the perspective of religious sources; for example piety has a great effect on achieving knowledge and sensuality is a big obstacle. The following points are briefly mentioned as well: knowledge has different levels; there are some luminous curtains in the higher degrees of knowledge; and the lower degrees of knowledge are curtains for the higher degrees.In the next section religious statements are discussed in two parts: beliefs and jurisprudence. It is said in the belief section that all the statements should be scientific. It is the same in the jurisprudence section except a few cases which are excluded. The important point is that the author believes jurisprudential statements have two aspects: belief-wise and jurisprudential; and the first one should always be scientific. Considering this point has some good results.

Some new and important questions have been raised regarding religious knowledge and epistemology; on the other hand it is necessary to organize these questions and answer them fundamentally and logically. As a result it is essential to establish some interdisciplinary sciences to regulate the lacks and flaws of contemporary religious studies. The other religious study sciences such as philosophy of religion and modern theology do not cover these fields as well.We have therefore seen a kind of revolution in organization of these needs and consequently establishment of new sciences in this filed. One of these new sciences is “the philosophy of religious knowledge” which can help to achieve this goal and play an important role in the borders of contemporary knowledge and religious studies only after passing through the process of becoming systematized and coherent.This science is a branch of attributed philosophies and has some similarities and differences with other similar sciences such as logic, discovering and understanding religious statements and …. Some of the discussions that show these characteristics are the discussions explaining what it is which I have tried to explain and clarify its aspects in this article.

Two outstanding fields of human knowledge are religious knowledge and historical knowledge which have a long background as well. This article will try to mention the differences between the two mentioned fields and also investigate their similarities. Some of their similarities are their common methods such as being narrated, occurrence of their subjects in the past and relying on narrations. On the other hand religion has an outstanding position in history and vice versa. They also depend on each other in some cases. These relationships show that it is necessary for the researchers of the two fields to be related with each other.

One of the crucial questions in philosophy of religion is the question of the criterion of the rationality of religious belief. The most influential response since the Enlightenment is the evidentialist approach to the rationality of religious belief. In this paper, the view of W. K. Clifford as a paradigm of the extreme evidentialism, and the pragmatist view of William James as a serious critic of evidentialsm will be discussed. Clifford claimed that "It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for any one to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." On the contrary, James attempted to reject Clifford's Maxim. He defends the idea that in many cases, like belief in God, one still has a right to believe in the absence of sufficient evidence. Although there are fewer problems in James's thesis, and Clifford's thesis entails more painstaking problems, but the modest evidentialism is still defensible.

Historicism is one of the subjects that effect epistemological studies and I have elaborately discussed in another article. Since the contemporary German scholar, Gadamer (1900-2002), following his professor Heidegger, has presented his last and main sayings regarding historicality of the essence of human’s being, followed by historicality of his understanding, we will investigate and criticize his ideas in this field. After inspecting Gadamer’s ideas, this article has pointed out about twenty seven problems and ambiguities in his words.

This article will investigate all the articles published in the field of Islamic studies between the years 1376 to 1383, and will categorize their subjects to clarify the ones which were the main questions of the researches in this period. These subjects will be sorted according to their importance. Also the course of increase and decrease of religious studies in different periods is researched and the factors which may affect this rise and fall are mentioned. The newspapers and magazines’ attentions to Islamic studies are compared as well. Another comparison which may be done is comparing the attention of society’s scholars to religious studies and mentioning the ones who have written more articles or books in this period.