thought experiment

Swinburne needs to present a coherent picture of the immaterial person because it is the foundation for accepting truths in his philosophy, such as God, angels, and the soul. He believes that the existence of an immaterial person is possible and that accepting such a being is reasonable, based on the same thought experiment as Avicenna's "floating man". In contrast to his opponents, he believes that an immaterial person can have attributes like hope and desire. However, these attributes may remain hidden in the immaterial person or manifest through the body. According to him, those theories that deny the existence of an immaterial person based on the inability to distinguish them from one another are hasty and that using memory and brain as the criterion for personal identity is false. He claims that the memory and the brain can be regarded as epistemological criteria for personal identity, but they cannot be considered metaphysical due to many issues. Swinburne's view encounters many problems, including the conflict between its various principles, the inconceivability of a bodiless human, and the need for a brain for any thought experiment. This article analyzes the foundations of Swinburne's theory, summarizes his arguments on the coherence of the immaterial person, analyzes his critical view of opposing theories, and comes to the end with some critiques of his theory.

In this article we examined the conflicts of Avicenna as an Aristotlian philosopher and two groups of Islamic theologians on the applicability of mathematical idealizations in natural philosophy. for our aim, we considered two ideal thought experiments suggested by theologians in which the geometrical idealization was emphsised. by considering the reactions to theses cases, we found that there are two different views on applicability of this method in the theologians' side, their metaphysical assumption, atomism, led them to a limitless method which could make their theory satisfactory and one of the ways among this boundless domain is mathematical idealization. in the other side, Avicenna and the other prepatetic philosophers didn't require this method for proving their metaphysical assumption and also believed in some bounded method in natural philosophy, in which hypothetical possibilities weren’t allowed. according to this limited method, mathematical idealization counted as an abstract hypothesis and may noy be used in concrete natural inquiries

This paper explores the significance and the status of thought experiments in philosophy. In the first step, we briefly survey the history of how the term "thought experiment" emerged and its role in the history of thought. In the second step, we analyze two important definitions of thought experiment offered by Sorensen and Gandler, and after pointing out four general approaches to thought experiments, we examine the role of intuition in them. We also discuss the difference between the experiments with apparently similar status, such as science fictions, ideal experiments and mathematical arguments. After analyzing the role of imagination in thought experiments, we further analyze the role of thought experiment in philosophy and argue that there are four main functions for thought experiments namely, explaining defective examples, theorizing, confirming a theory, and explaining essential connections. At the end, the floating man of Avicenna has also been briefly analyzed as an example of a thought experiment offered by a Muslim philosopher.