فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال هجدهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 69، بهار 1392)

The concept of fittingness and harmony is closely related to that of goodness and in many cases it is taken to mean goodness. The goodness of a means for its purpose is its fittingness for the fulfilment of that purpose and the goodness of something for humans is its fittingness for them. In this paper, I claim that value-goodness, and in particular moral goodness, arises from fittingness and ontological harmony, and the most fundamental fittingness and harmony that are the origins of value are the ontological fittingness and harmony between God and His creatures. There are other theories that accounted for moral value in terms of a notion of fittingness, but since they did not consider a comprehensive notion of fittingness, they failed to explain value in its most basic levels. The fittingness that I count as the origin of value is a general and absolute fittingness that obtains among all creatures and above all, between creatures and God, and in such fittingness, any creature has its own ontological place in the world and admits the ontological roles of other creatures. Such an account of value is both consistent with our common sense and can provide a compelling response to many questions.

Incommensurability is one of the main concepts in contemporary pluralistic approaches that has played a central role in developing and establishing relativism in both epistemology and ontology. In this paper I will first examine the place and function of this notion in contemporary philosophy and then, focusing on Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability of plural paradigms throughout the history of science, I will discuss historical and logical arguments for this view and its relativistic scope. In final assessment, I take issue with the anti-realistic presupposition of this view and I will argue that with incommensurability, rationality and critical dialogues will be impossible.

Many Islamic philosophers hold that it is impossible for immaterial beings to have motion. Their arguments for this claim are based on the principle that matter is a condition for motion. In this paper I seek to explain the nature of motion and then show that according to the theory of substantial motion, the existence of matter is doubtful and the arguments for the existence of matter or hyle—such as the argument from potentiality and actuality and the argument from attachment and detachment—are problematic. In this case we should revise our definition of immaterial beings. One move is to say that a being is immaterial if it does not have a position and space, since its definition should be such that both proponents and opponents of hyle might share. Moreover, if we deny hyle, we cannot talk about the concomitance of matter and potentiality. On the other hand, I will review and criticize five rational arguments for the immobility of the immaterial beings followed by some evidence from religious texts, and I shall show that these arguments are not sound enough. Therefore, I think that the motion of immaterial beings is possible and there is also evidence from religious texts to this effect.

Descartes, as a prominent representative of traditional foundationalism, starts from a general methodological doubt in order to achieve certainty and as the first step, he achieves certainty about his own existence whereby he explains knowledge of God and of the world. In his intellectual path, Descartes tries to reduce the credibility of senses and give more credit to intellectual intuitions. He takes clarity and distinctness to be criteria of truth and takes immunity to any doubts as a criterion of certainty. BonJour—a contemporary epistemologist—defends foundationalism but he modifies the Cartesian view in order to save it from objections and provide a new criterion for the infallibility of beliefs. BonJour’s ‘constitutive awareness’ theory seeks to account for infallible beliefs. Constitutive awareness is a level of non-conceptual awareness that can be transformed into a conceptual belief through a descriptive process. BonJour’s view might be compared with the theory of knowledge by presence in Islamic philosophy, though in BonJour’s view, there is fallibility in the beliefs formed from non-conceptual awareness, but it is not rational to care about such fallibility.

A key concept of various humanities such as social sciences, politics and ethics is ‘justice’. There are difference notions and definitions for this term. In this paper, I shall investigate the notions of justice in Islamic ethics. Following Plato, some Islamic philosophers developed a psychological notion of justice in terms of harmony among faculties of the soul. On this notion, justice is a general, comprehensive virtue of the soul that results from three virtues of the soul—wisdom, courage and moderation. Some others followed Aristotle and defined justice as average or intermediary between doing injustice and tolerating injustice: a just distribution of properties and facilities between others. Some others define justice as a virtue of practical reason whose moderateness leads to the moderateness of all faculties. Finally, it seems that a comprehensive definition of justice is in terms of giving everything its appropriate position. It is to this definition that all other definitions such as the psychological, social and political ones refer. Also in this paper I have dealt with other issues regarding justice such as the determination of vice in contrast with justice, types of virtues that are included in justice, and the simplicity or complexity of this notion in Islamic ethics.

In this paper we shall investigate the views of last century scholars of Isfahan seminary school with regard to Imam’s knowledge and we seek to envisage the views of different strands. We will deal with their arguments and accounts of these scholars and we classify them into three intellectual strands: (i) a philosophical and mystical strand that takes Imam’s knowledge to be absolute, actual and comprehensive, (ii) a hadithi (traditional) strand that takes Imam’s knowledge to be conditional, though comprehensive, (iii) a theological (kalami) strand that takes Imam’s knowledge to be conditional and restricted. Within the first group we can mention Sayyed Ali Aqa Najaf Abadi and his pupils such as Sayyed Ali Allameh Fani, Banu Amin and Sayyed Hassan Modarres. Among the second group we can mention Shaikh Muhammad Taqi Najafi Masjedshahi and Mirza Yahya Bidabadi. Finally, Sayyed Abdulhussain Tayyeb, Ata’ullah Ashrafi Isfahani and Sayyed Muhammad Javad Gharavi Isfahani are among the prominent figures of the third group.

The soul-body relation is one of the most significant issues of Mathnavī by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi—near one thousand verses of Mathnavī are devoted to this issue. The terms soul (nafs), corpus (tan), body (badan), flesh (jism), spirit (rūḥ), psyche (ravān), life (jān), and death (marg) are frequently used in Mathnavī. The term soul has a moral use and terms such as spirit, life and psyche function as the philosophical terminology of the soul, and in most verses, the terms ‘corpous’, ‘flesh’ and ‘body’ are used in contrast with life and psyche; and the distinction between their roles might signify Mowlavī’s dualistic position about soul-body relation. Given his allegorical use and his employment of similes and metaphors with respect to soul-body—which is a method for talking about complex issues—the best way to know his view about the soul is via the metaphors and images. Therefore, in this paper I shall introduce his metaphors of the corpus, and talk about its presuppositions and implications for soul-body relation. Mowlavī talks about the corpus as a veil, cage, thorn, solid, pity soil, weak light and timber. These metaphors show his negative perspective to corpus and flesh in contrast with life and psyche. According to him, the only way for human salvation and the only way to eternal and spiritual life is to abandon the body and this can be obtained by abandoning lusts, greed, vices and achieving divine attributes.