فصلنامه تاریخ فلسفه
سال ششم شماره 3 (پیاپی 23، زمستان 1394)

The term Peripatetic is used in contemporary philosophical literature to exclusively refer to the philosophical method of Aristotle, his followers, Ibn Sina, and a number of Muslim philosophers. On the other hand, Ibn Sina himself, who is considered to be the leader of Peripatetic philosophers among Muslims, has advanced certain harsh criticisms against Peripatetics and denounced them. Presently, the questions that arise in this regard are as follows: Has Ibn Sina criticized Aristotle or his followers? If his criticism of Peripatetics are not related to Aristotle, does it equally target the Greek, Alexandrian, and Roman advocates of this school and the Peripatetics of Baghdad during the Islamic Period? Can we consider his criticism of the Peripatetics to be a reason for his deviation from the Peripatetic philosophy and turning to a kind of Oriental wisdom? In the present paper, while providing a historical and semantic review of the word “Peripatetic”, the author argues that three groups of Peripatetics (friends of Lyceum, Peripatetics of the third to sixth centuries, and the friends of the House of Wisdom) can be identified in the history of philosophy. Ibn Sina criticizes all the three groups, particularly the third one. Moreover, in his view, one can remove all the defects of the Peripatetic philosophy and then define its modified version in a way that everyone not only accepts it but also pays attention to and emphasizes it. This can be a good strategy for justifying the essence of his Oriental wisdom.

Each field of science demands its own particular conditions for growth; likewise, philosophy is a science the seed of which does not come to fruition in all kinds of soil. The ups and downs of the growth of philosophy in the history of Iran testify to this fact. During the Buyid Era, this discipline experienced such a considerable growth in the writing and translation of related books and in the attention to philosophers and training philosophy students that one inevitably inquires about the underlying factors of this phenomenon. In order to provide an answer to this question, the authors of this article have explored and analyzed the background of the growth of philosophy in this historical period of Iran. The findings of this research, which was carried out following the descriptive-analytic method, indicate that various scientific-cultural and political-religious factors affected the trend of this growth both directly and indirectly. Here, the authors have tried to examine the influence of these factors over the growth of philosophy in the Buyid Period.

Happiness is one of the key terms used by philosophers, in general, and by Islamic sages, in particular. From ancient Greek philosophers to the thinkers advocating monotheistic religions and Islamic philosophers, all have dealt with the issue of human happiness. In the view of the majority of philosophers, the ultimate goal of politics and establishing a government is attaining happiness. However, this concept has been defined differently by different thinkers. In this paper, the author has tried to explore the place of happiness in the philosophy of ‘Allamah Tabataba’i, the distinguished contemporary philosopher and interpreter of the Qur’an. In his view, a society attains happiness when it moves in the line of human primordial nature (fitrah) and the system of creation. A religion which has been sanctioned by God is the extension of a detailed primordial nature which exists in our nature. Thus religion – Islam – is the criterion for distinguishing faith and good deed. Accordingly, a society will attain worldly and otherworldly happiness if it is ruled by a religion which conforms to Man’s primordial nature.

The present paper deals with the background and causes of the rise of the problem of method and its importance in the 17th century, particularly, in Descartes and Spinoza. The criticisms advanced against the different aspects of Aristotelian philosophy (such as the discussion of the universals, the re-emergence of Pyrrhonian skepticism, functionalism in sciences, and the development of exact sciences) wavered the foundations of previous philosophical schools and gave rise to discussions regarding the criteria for the truth and the correct methods of thinking. As a result, some logicians such as Zabarella and Eutyches decided to revise Aristotelian logic and began speaking of methods of analysis and synthesis, definition processes, and the cohesion and coherence of matters of discussion. Following the same tradition and, of course, under the influence of Aristotle’s critics, Descartes and Spinoza advocated the geometric method of analysis and synthesis. In this way, they tried to provide a guarantee for the truth of their words and transform the infertility of the Aristotelian categorical syllogism into an invaluable, fertile, and methodic kind of thinking.

In early Islamic texts, no accurate and clear description of Buddhist thoughts and teachings has been provided, and most of the related statements in such texts are very general and incomplete. In most sources, some beliefs or acts are attributed to Buddhists which are either basically incorrect or not at all related to Buddhists but followed by other Indian religious sects. In order to find the reason behind this problem, one should refer to the pre-Islamic period and explore the dissemination of Buddhism in those regions which later turned to Islam. Apparently, a defective knowledge of Buddhist teachings is not restricted to the Islamic period; and it was also the same case at least in the western and central regions of Iran before Islam. However, in the eastern parts of Iran and alongside the Silk Route, there were some very important Buddhist centers. Nevertheless, after the rise of Islam, the Buddhist monasteries of these regions were gradually destroyed, and nothing remained from them except a vague memory. Accordingly, when Islamic historiographers decided to speak of Buddhism, they had access to no authentic sources. The present paper is intended to shed some light on the above issues.

The epistemological approach to Empiricism in the Modern era is opposed to the rationalist approach of Descartes and his followers, who believed in the existence of certain innate ideas prior to experience in Man’s mind. The thinkers advocating this approach explored rationalists’ metaphysical problems through denying innate ideas and considering sense experience as the source of knowledge. The results of such investigations had nothing to say, even at their peak, about substance except when trying to deny it. Accordingly, given the process of the development of empiricism by the pioneers of this approach and its consequences, the authors of this paper have tried to deal with the following basic question: After accepting the specific reading of some empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume from the process of attaining knowledge, would it be possible to accept the existence of substance? Here, the writers respond that, based on their studies of the above thinkers’ views of substance, the acceptance of substance is not consistent with empiricism. This is because substance is a meta-empirical entity which sense experience cannot grasp. What follows sense experience in the end is nothing but a collection of impressions which can never explain the existence of substance.