فصلنامه معرفت فلسفی
سال هشتم شماره 2 (پیاپی 30، زمستان 1389)

Some people think that Surhavardi has done nothing in philosophy but changing technical terms; otherwise, his philosophy is not different from that of peripatetic. The authors in this article go through ShaykhIshrāq’s ideas about the world of intellects and compare them with those of IbnSinā in order to establish the claim that Suhravardi, despite the fact that he benefits from a peripatetic context, and was one of its adherents at the outset, takes a distance from them in the process of his philosophical development.On the basis of his philosophical principles, ShaykhIshrāq establishes some levels of being such as the world of horizontal intellects. Moreover, those elements common to his philosophy and that of peripatetics find new interpretation in his homogeneous ontological system. According to the authors, although Suhravardi’s theory suffers from some shortcomings, his analysis seems more accurate in general.

MullaSadra as a comprehensive thinker, reviews various philosophical, theological, and mystical approaches to the problem of revelation and its essence, and tries to assimilate all the different elements in his predecessors’ interpretations into his own epistemological view in this regard. This is why one encounters three approaches in Sadr al-Muta’allihin’s various works that he works toward their unification and solving their inconsistencies.The authors in this article try to show that Mullah Sadra connects different approaches with diverse foundations into the geometry of his Transcendental Philosophy in order to argue for the idea that the essence of revelation is an existential fact, rather than a quiddity. As a result, it has a gradational character which begins with the Imperative Qur’an (Qur’an Amri) and ends with the Created Furqān(FurqānKhalqi). Such an understanding of revelation brings with it a special understanding of the Qur’an with an existential flavor. His attention to diverse levels and dimensions of revelation has prevented him from falling prey to reductionism by reducing revelation to one of its features, such as its verbal discourse or rational understanding.

In the Islamic philosophy, common sense is conceived as a cognitive faculty that perceives sensual, conventional, and intuitive concepts. This article deals with the issue of common sense ontologically and epistemologically. Muslim philosophers, since IbnSina, have adopted an ontologically reductionist approach to common sense by suggesting the unity of nafsand by reducing its faculties to mere concepts and names. In this article, common sense is epistemologically investigated. The question of whether common sense provides knowledge by presence or be presentation is examined first, and then IbnSina’s idea is explained with regard to the issue of correspondence. At the end, the authors study the problem of substantial motion in IbnSina to answer a challenge to his theory concerning lack of any pivot for absolute knowledge. The conclusion is some sort of epistemology, called gradational epistemology.

The problem of “knowledge by presence” is a multidimensional issue, one of which concerns its historical background and searching for the ideas of the preceding philosophers in this regard. The main questions that this article wants to answer are: is this issue a new idea in Islamic philosophy or does it have a history, and if it has a history, what is the role of the preceding philosophers in this regard?The author in this article has pursued this objective through reviewing and analyzing main works of some of the prominent Muslim philosophers. Evidently, his interpretation of them rests on the new findings in the Islamic philosophy. The conclusion is: Muslim philosophers, from the outset, have distinguished knowledge by presence from representational knowledge on the basis of their distinctive features, though under different rubrics. Another finding is that philosophers, at least in some instances, have equated “ta’aqqul” (reasoning) with knowledge by presence.

Falsifiability was one of the influential theories in the field of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. However, its success is mostly due to its negative role, namely, in criticizing the opponents. The author in this article reviews Popper’s critiques of such theories as positivism and determinism, while reflecting on the consequences of rejecting Darwin’s hypothesis of evolution as scientific. At the end, the article concludes that falsifiability enjoys no acceptable success on thepositive side, and is unable to correctly explain the role of observation in science and its relation to theory.

Kant suggests reflective judgment (imagination) as the aesthetics taste. When imagination, independent of understanding and reason, abstracts pure forms of objects on the basis of subjective purposiveness, then “free beauty” is produced. On the other hand, when it combines these forms with the concept of the perfection of an object (objective inner purposiveness), then it develops “dependent beauty”. Kant considers such a combination in dependent beauty to be a combination of good and beautiful. This point has caused a great ambiguity in Kant’s idea about beauty, so much so that some interpreters do not deem dependent beauty as a genuine beauty, but a product of reason.This article argues for the falsity of this interpretation by explaining Kant’s understanding of free and dependent beauty, and his emphasis on the independence of aesthetic judgment.

Scholars of the first period of the ancient Greece used to consider natural law as a universal, eternal, and unique law. It was taken to be the most basic source for deciding about the best criteria for human life. Epistemological problems of the Sophists left a lasting effect on the philosophical ideas of the next generations which led to a debate about the credibility of natural law. Greek philosophers who believed in rational judgments as firm basis for human knowledge defended natural law phenomenon, and Stoics, who had a great role in the development of the debate over natural law, interpreted it as “living according to nature”.The present article has a critical approach to the idea of natural law as depicted in Ancient Greece. The critiques are divided into two categories: a) general critiques which include all ancient Greek philosophers such as: the conceptual ambiguity, uncertainty in the instances, and doubt about the term “natural law” in that period; b) Specific critiques which targets individual thinkers.