نشریه پژوهش های مابعدالطبیعی
سال چهارم شماره 2 (پاییز و زمستان 1402)

The Theology of Event" is a new approach to theology that is rooted in postmodern philosophies. The concept that John D. Caputo, the American philosopher of religion, based on the ideas of her teacher Jacques Derrida, has established to negate the theological systems based on traditional western philosophy and seeks religion minus metaphysics. Event Theology tells about a kind of instability in meaning, and depicts a threshold and indeterminate situation in theological concepts. This attitude denies the permission of any absolutism and systematization, and in a word, metaphysics-centeredness in theological concepts from human thought. The Theology of Event talks about concepts that are continuously being realized, an open, unpredictable, and uncontrollable future, and instead of epistemological strains, it emphasizes the pragmatic and existential features of religion.  In the Theology of Events, instead of dealing with religious knowledge, which is necessarily a metaphysical matter, serious attention is paid to religious rituals such as altruism, good deeds, seeking justice, and ethics. But from a critical point of view, one should ask whether theology minus metaphysics is conceivable in principle? In other words, is it possible to enter the field of theology without philosophical interpretation and formulation? This article is an answer to this basic question against the concept of the Theology of Events.

Miracles have often been used as evidence for the existence of God. In this article, we attempt to answer the question of how miracles can be epistemologically justified as a proof of God's existence. In other words, can a miracle alone prove God's existence to an impartial audience, without taking into account the issues related to historical evidence and by either assuming the reliability of historical evidence or assuming direct perception? Before addressing the main question, we discuss the concept of miracle and critique David Hume's famous definition (Violation of natural law) and then present our preferred definition. Next, we provide an overview of the types of reason and argument. First, we examine the types of arguments in which the miracle may be considered as a proof of God. Second, we demonstrate the inability of the miracle to prove the existence of God as a deductive argument. Third, we propose the inference to the best explanation as the most suitable argumentative form for miracles to prove God and review its challenges. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical, which involves the study, review and analysis of concepts, propositions and arguments.

Kierkegaard’s aim was to understand Christianity and act according to it. To reach this aim, he first rejects official Christianity and then explains his version of Christianity, that is, the genuine one. Official Christianity has shown itself in the form of academic Christianity and ecclesiastical one. The academic Christianity, whose leading figure is Hegel, on the one hand tries to prove the Christian doctrines with rational arguments and make Christianity reasonable, and on the other hand seeks to justify Christianity with the help of historical evidences. The ecclesiastical Christianity, on the one hand, has a collectivist approach towards Christianity and therefore sacrifices the Christian individual, and on the other hand, transforms Christianity into a social institution and by reducing it to some rites and rituals tries to simplify Christianity. But genuine Christianity walks in an absolutely different way. It rejects reason, collectivism and simplification and puts emphasize on faith, individuality, suffering and passion.

Teaching and researching the philosophy of religion in Iran has faced many challenges and obstacles for three or four decades up to now. Some of them are as follows: 1. Atheistic, western, and Christian backgrounds of the philosophy of religion have caused a kind of pessimism in Iranian religious society. 2. No restraint of philosophy of religion towards theological presuppositions of Islamic tradition that has led to critical approaches to teachings of Islamic tradition, meantime, worries of some religious scholars concerning spreading disbelieving in the result of developing the philosophy of religion due to the role of its rational debates and taking critical or meta-religious approach to religion, has its special importance. 3. Low levels of people’s religious knowledge and dominance of imitation aspect of religious beliefs that are led to more vulnerability of their religiosity due to developing a philosophical approach to religion. 4. Theological presuppositions of religious scholars that have been prevented from welcoming to philosophical approach to religion. 5. Dominance of an exclusivistic approach to our religious tradition has led to deny the merits of other religious traditions that can be possible based on the philosophical study of religion. 6. Historical dominance of jurisprudential approach in Islamic tradition and religiosity that has been caused by the negligence of philosophical and rational approach to religion and to reinforcing imitation of it. The result of the mentioned obstacles is the slow development of the philosophy of religion and its thinkers to many problems and challenges regarding teaching and doing research. Should be added to these obstacles the dangers resulted from misunderstanding some subjects and questions of the philosophy of religion which led to some religious deviations and striking people’s religiosity. There are some ways to remove such obstacles. The best is to separate the theological approach to religion from the philosophical one.

Heidegger and Gadamer return to Plato to find a way out of the meaningless crisis of Western civilization. Heidegger believes that Plato by proposing the doctrine of ideas is the initiator of the forgetting of Being and responsible for the crisis of the West. He returns to Plato's allegory of the cave to clarify the nature of this forgetting. In this allegory, dialectic means passing from the sensible world to the reasonable world. In his interpretation of Plato, Heidegger pays attention to this meaning and ignores other meanings of dialectic such as the method of conversation, the method of collection and division, etc. Of course, in Plato's Sophist, he connects dialectic with logos and criticizes it. In general, Heidegger considers dialectic as a problem for philosophy. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer pays attention to the different meanings of dialectic in Plato's philosophy and considers its development. Gadamer's emphasis on conversation in Socratic dialogues, as well as the method of collection and division in later dialogues, makes him consider Plato's philosophy as a dynamic and living philosophy. According to Gadamer, dialogue and dialectic in Plato's dialogues can save us from the current crisis of the West. This article tries to investigate and explain with descriptive-analytical methods how dealing with different meanings of dialectic causes Heidegger and Gadamer to present two different interpretations of Plato.

The main issue addressed in the present study is whether Mullsadra, as a sage and philosopher, has a philosophical statement about art. The importance of the discussion of art is such that it has been discussed since the time of the early Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Plato, until the present time, and reflection on the nature of beauty and art has been part of the preoccupation of great philosophers. The Greek equivalent of art in ancient Greece was techne; the word techne in ancient Greece referred to techniques and crafts, both artistic and applied crafts. In this research, the thought of the founder of sublime wisdom, Sadr al-Din Shirazi, is investigated with a descriptive-analytical method based on the library method.

Mill's emphasis on the denial of a priori knowledge caused him, as same as empiricists like Hume, to put a psychological account to explain many of his beliefs. In his opinion, the intellect is a whiteboard on which observation and experience draw patterns. In the next stage, the human psyche gets to work and forces a person to accept repetitive phenomena. This belief is reconfirmed over time and after repeating the monotonies in nature repeatedly; it is as if the discovery of any new law not only proves that law itself but also helps to establish other laws that have been obtained using this method. This research aims to reveal the place of induction in the logic of John Stuart Mill and also show that his efforts to justify induction were not enough. For this purpose, Mill's book” The System of Logic” has been studied and the opinion of some commentators has been expressed about it. During the discussion, Mill's opinion on analogy has been tried to be expressed and finally, a general picture of John Stuart Mill's logic has been presented.

In the present paper, one of the most applied topics of philosophy, that is, wise living, which promises happiness, has been discussed. This issue is traced and investigated comparatively, especially in the thought of Ghazali and Schopenhauer. That humans have always been concerned about living well can be witnessed in ancient texts and advice from ancestors. In this regard, wisdom guides humans in a way that they can have happy and peaceful moments. Here, both Ghazali and Schopenhauer described self-knowledge as prior knowledge and necessary for happiness. They both believed that human wisdom could guide them to the blissful. However, there is a difference between Ghazali and Schopenhauer in that Ghazali emphasizes religious elements and proposes practical methods such as implementing Sharia’, seeking knowledge, and striving for a living. In contrast, Schopenhauer has paid attention to other issues like anthropology and understanding the nature of human life, based on which he described health and planning as useful methods.

In their understanding of the God of the Qur'an, Those who agree with the appearance of the text, consider Him to be a superman who resides in the sky and sits on the throne. He breathed his soul into the body of Adam, and He appeared to Moses in the middle of the fire, He will come on the cloud with the angels on the Day of Judgment, and for the people of faith, it will be possible to see him on that day.
However, the opponents of appearanceism do not believe these types of propositions and suggest more distant meanings for the verses expressing them. In this situation, the present research aims to use the image of God in the Bible to understand the God of the Qur’an and seek help from that historical background in the judgment between the apparentists and the interpretationists. The hypothesis is that the Holy Bible supports the humanistic conceptions of God in the Qur'an and weakens the approach of opponents of the appearance of the text. Based on this, the human-like understanding of God in the Qur’an is the only correct understanding. Of course, in the end, it can be concluded that what the Qur’an says about God is a picture of Him for humans and is in accordance with their human understanding of God.

This article tries to analyze the issue of religious experience and its role and place in the philosophy of education. The issue of religious experience is one of the important issues in the education process in the educational system of a country. Necessarily, in order to understand this issue, one of the methods or philosophical analysis to investigate this issue is the phenomenological method. Religious experience in the field of education and training is a fundamental thing in the education process, but the phenomenological method describes the lived experience from the first-person perspective, and therefore, it is possible to describe and analyze the religious experience of people in the field of education and training with this approach. Basically, learning as the core of education itself is an experience, and phenomenology as the science of analyzing and describing experience is closely related to this. For this purpose, it is necessary to raise the issue of the place of religious experience in education and training, the characteristics of the phenomenological method or approach as well as the types of religious experience and its role in the philosophy of education in general have been mentioned. The main question of this article is how this method can lead us to a better understanding of a person's religious experience in the process of education.

The present article attempts to explore two principles out of four literary and poetic principles with the centrality of Kant's conceptual turn concerning the concept of time that Deleuze opted for treating Kant's philosophy. In order to reformulate the Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuze exploits two literary principles. The first one is taken from Hamlet according to which time is out of control, the second one is taken from Arthur Rambo as he said, I is another. For appreciating such complicated statements and explaining Deleuze's particular reading of Critique of Pure Reason, the author proceeds to explore Deleuze's writings and seminars on Kant in order to show that the presupposition of having a good command over Deleuze's philosophy is to study his confrontation with Kant's philosophy. For achieving such an end, the author accompanies Deleuze's treatment of Kant's philosophy step by step in order to shed some light on the concept of time in his reading of The Critique of Pure Reason from various perspectives so to apprehend the two poetic principles concerning the time.

Allamah Tabatabaei is one of the theorist philosophers in Transcendent Philosophy, whose viewpoint of the soul, including the human personal identity, has not been discussed. This article deals with Allamah Tabatabaei’s viewpoint of monism or dualism about the human personal identity. In this case, we should discuss on the relationship between the soul and body, and their mutual influence on each other, and the personal identity resulting from that. It seems that those who believe in the causal relationship between soul and body, including Allamah Tabatabaei, should believe in dualism about the soul and the body. But, according to the ontological foundations of Allamah Tabatabaei and his acceptance of substantial movement, it is concluded that the soul and the body are two levels of one gradual and fluid reality. Allamah’s ontological view of the human personal identity is the main characteristic of the structure of debate and differentiates it from other views of the way of the relationship between soul and body in the philosophy of mind. In this article, it will be clarified that Allamah’s viewpoint, in spite of its fundamental difference from other viewpoints, is nearer to substantial monism and quality-dualism.

Plato, the renowned Greek philosopher, expounds a multitude of ideas within his works concerning the problem of evil. These ideas have exerted a profound influence on ancient and medieval philosophers. However, Plato's theories regarding the origin of evil are fragmented and lack coherence. In his dialogues such as Timaeus, Laws, and Statesman, he references several metaphysical entities as evil principles. Nevertheless, the dialogues do not stand as the sole source for comprehending Plato's views on the problem of evil. It seems that certain teachings of Plato did not manifest explicitly in his dialogues and were orally conveyed to his disciples. These teachings are referred to as the "Unwritten Doctrines," and our understanding of them primarily derives from reports provided by Plato's disciples. Among the first disciples of Plato, the Unwritten Doctrines held equal importance to the teachings contained in the dialogues, and our principal source of information about these teachings comes from Aristotle's reports in Metaphysics and Physics.

Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Ibn-Masrah Andalusia (269-319 A.H.) is the founder of a movement and changing the philosophical view in the West of the Islamic world. At a time when the prevailing view in Andalusia was dominated by Ash'ariism and extreme legalism, he made a Copernican revolution in his era by adapting his unique attitude to a mysterious ruling based on Neoplatonic ideas, Esotericism, Sufism and Rational theology.
Ibn Masrah is the earliest Muslim philosopher in Andalusia, who has remained unknown to Muslim historians and contemporary scholars for centuries. Although his role in the study of the history of Andalusian thought is undeniable, there is no agreement about the foundations of his thoughts and their acceptance. Ibn Forzi in the book Tarikh al-Hikma (the oldest work that mentions Ibn Masrah and his biography). It is given as follows: "People divided into two groups regarding the thoughts of Ibn Masrah: some sects considered him as an Imam and leader in asceticism and knowledge, and another group because of the heresies that appeared in his words in the field of promises and scariness and because of his departure from Common sciences in Andalusia, which were based on the two principles of imitation and submission, mocked him, disbelieved and condemned him”.
The publication of two treatises on the Khavasol-Horof and Al-Eatebar of Ibn Masrah by Muhammad Kamal Ibrahim Jafar in 1978 and 1982 in the Chester Beatty collection of Ireland drew attention to Ibn Masrah again. It seems that it is necessary to present a deep and comprehensive analysis of Ibn Masrah's thoughts with regard to these two treatises. Mystical philosophy in Andalusia, which is now well known, brought extraordinary fruits; In the Islamic world, it created the impressive and influential work of Ibn Arabi (1240 AH) and in the Jewish tradition, it reached its peak with the appearance of Qabalah (12th and 13th centuries onwards). It is impossible to understand the nature and development of these two traditions (Ibn-Arabi's mysticism and Qabalah tradition) without following their path in the past, i.e. the works of Ibn-Masrah.
The mystical school of Ibn Arabi (according to his own testimony) and the maturation of Sufism in the West of the Islamic world; it is indebted to the al-Muriyya school, which Ibn Masra started, although this issue has been disputed by some researchers to some extent. For example, some people, including Palasius, believe that such a school existed, but on the other hand, another researcher named Afifi doubts the existence of such a school. Ibn al-Abar in his book about Ibn Masrah and his thought process has expressed some things that prove that he has a series of unique thoughts about him and his followers. Ibn Farzi and Ibn-Bashkwal also mentioned people who belonged to the religion of Ibn-Masrah, and also Ibn-Hazm, in his treatise on the virtues of Andalusians, mentions the multitude of followers of Ibn-Masrah.
 The establishment and launch of a multi-faceted mystical philosophical system based on theological principle from the point view of the Mu’tazili theology, which is based on the originally of reason and the thoughts of Mukhtar Ismaili and pure Eastern philosophy, led to the formation of a school known as al-Maria.
 The outputs of this established system of Hekmi are such things as belief in the issue of destiny and belief that the knowledge and power of the Almighty are just two attributes of the Muhaddith and the created, as well as the unity of the essence and divine attributes and the agency of the world through the throne, the acquisition of prophet hood and It is a denial of physical resurrection.
In a general summary, we should say that he is one of the early rationalist thinkers and theologians in the Islamic world. He considers all theological matters based on Sharia to lead to reason. In the field of destiny, divine destiny, he does not consider all matters to be pre-determined and he values the power of human choice and free will. However, in the topics of resurrection and Prophethood, he has important differences with Ash’areh and the famous and dominate view of that period which is also the cause of Taqiyyah and lack of sufficient reliable information about him.
The profound and all –round effect observed in the formation of his thoughts and opinions is due to the intellectual and theoretical elements related to Neoplatonic philosophy. If this influence of Empedocles ‘opinions can be observed in him. Another sources from which it can be claimed that Ibn Masrah was influenced in the field of mysticism and asceticism is Priscilla’s mysticism.
Nevertheless, the most important factor on the contradiction and ambiguity in the historical and philosophical foundations for exploring the foundations of Ibn Masarah’s philosophical and mystical thoughts is the existence of different and sometimes conflicting interpretation and traditions. This importance originates from the fact that the main sources related to Ibn Masrah have either been lost or have been changed due to Taqiyyah.
Finally, we are still facing a serious challenge in the clear and reasoned answer as to which theological or philosophical approach he follows.
This paper aims to explain and analyze the mentioned claims using the qualitative-library method.