نشریه جاویدان خرد
سال دوازدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 28، پاییز و زمستان 1394)

The issue of death is more tangible in some of Plato’s works such as Apology, Crito and Phaedo. But as far as life is concerned, the purpose of human happiness can be found in itself, a happiness which can be attained by acquiring virtues. What does Plato mean by “virtue” which leads to the human happiness in life? This paper seeks some parts of this answer in Alcibiades and some parts in Philebus.
Generally, in Plato’s viewpoint awareness and contemplation on Reality is not separable from life and person’s happiness and consequently the happiness of society is dependent on the level of awareness to virtue and Reality. Human nature has been discussed in Alcibiades and it has been suggested that differences in human is not due to the beings and existence but is in becoming. Human beings are variant in their endeavor to purification and self-knowledge but all of them are seeking happiness, in that respect they are connected to each other spiritually. Philebus is about “Goodness”, “Beauty” and their relation to “Pleasure”. We can come to this conclusion about the Plato’s viewpoint that life is realizing the accommodation between the mundane world and the Ideas which everything is according to the mere Goodness. The life is not being but is becoming.

Shaykh al-Ishraq in his work “Al-Mashari' wa Al-Motarihat”, considers himself in the possession of the spiritual heritage and the ancient command that have originated from the sacred-eternal nature (primordial) and have continued to exist in the form of Oriental (Persian) branch centered on intuition and contemplation and western (Greek) branch centered on discussion and demonstration and ultimately manifested in the mixed wisdom of Oriental sages and then came down to Suhrawardī.
Earlier, some scholars on Suhrawardī studies proposed their understandings and interpretations of this allegorical and historical lineage in a way which in some aspects are not true. This article is seeking to present the critiques on the various readings of this lineage regarding the arrangement of its proper nouns and its mythological and historical figures such as Hermes, Qaṣṣāb Āmulī and Oriental sages of Persia.

The problem of self-consciousness is one the most controversial issues in the history of philosophy. Avicenna is one of the first philosophers who discussed the issue in a philosophical and not merely moral or religious approach. In his Flying Man, he puts forward an intuitional situation. Some scholars have compared Avicenna’s Flying Man with Descartes’ Cogito and attempt to show close resemblance between them. Even some of them maintain the former influenced indirectly on the latter. In this paper we will show that Avicenna's Flying Man is in close relationship with his ontological foundations specially the one which is usually called the metaphysical distinction between being and quiddity. Using this distinction, in his philosophical analysis of self-consciousness, Avicenna opens a new sphere of the “self ” to philosophers, the sphere which he calls it Innyyah of “self ” and we call it existential sphere of the self. Since we don’t face such a distinction in Descartes’ philosophy, we can claim Avicenna has gone beyond Descartes in his analysis of self-consciousness.

Religious language is one of the most prominent issues in the contemporary religious studies. In this paper, I tend to clarify Allameh Ṭabatabaei’s view on religious language. Pursuing in his epistemological, ontological and Quranic approaches such as clear and allegorical revelations, esoteric commentary of Quran is our center of attention. Some authors believe that although Quran uses ordinary language, it isn’t sufficient for deep understanding of it; therefore they have suggested new theories such as synthetic language or specific ordinary language. But it seems that if the ordinary language be construed rightly, there would be no requirement to those theories. It can be said that the Quranic language is ordinary one and the way of attaining to the deep layers of Quran is the purification of the soul. In this paper I attempt to show Allameh’s realistic point of view on religious language.

On the basis of moral realism, moral values are independent of human mind and also have a factual reality which humans attempt to discover them. This approach has faced critical challenges in contemporary philosophy, that’s why most of moral philosophers have put it aside.
This paper offers a version of moral realism on the basis of philosophical analysis of free human behaviors. In Islamic philosophy, human is an intentional agent, i.e. bodily behaviors are always done to achieve to some goal. In these behaviors - which moral actions are included in them either – the goal has a fundamental role in behavior since the primary desire of agent is to achieve to a specific goal, but since achieving to the aforementioned goal won’t be realized without doing an action, the desire of that goal will be the final cause of realization of the action.
The conclusion is that since action is done as a preliminary to the goal, therefore value of each action will be determined by the following goal.

In Shāh Nimatullāh Wali‘s view, the cognition of Divine Essence is impossible by perception, imagination and also by intellectual power, yet the knowledge of Divine Essence can be reached by revelation, intuition and vision. The only path to achieve the knowledge of Divine Essence is through Divine Essence itself. It means the Essence of Divine cannot be perceived by others since there are no others whom can be Divine Gnostic. By annihilation in Divine, Human being is emancipated from himself and becomes subsistence in God. In this situation, the union of the bounded existence and the Absolute Existence can be revealed to man. The result of this vision is the elimination of the duality between the human and the Essence.
Since the human’s essence is united to Divine Essence, the knowledge of Divine Essence is possible. In fact, the Essence of Divine in human being knows the Essence of God and the man only observe this unity and become Divine Gnostic. Therefore, the existence of human remains while the knowledge of Divine Essence is possible.

One of the fundamental issues in Islamic philosophy is the primacy of existence or essence. Its outcome will be manifested in attributes, cognation and the existential relationship between creator and creature.
It is known that Mirdamad is opponent of primacy of essence. There are evidences in his books that he is opponent of primacy of existence such as effusion of existence by God, homogeneity between the existence of God and the existence of contingent beings, proof of the truthful, equality between existence and individuation, the state of the contingent beings as connective, the unitary system of the word and... .
We can draw the conclusion that their differences are a verbal one. In his work, we should distinguish between the consideration of infinitive and real existence. In his philosophy, there is a difference between existence and establishment (tagharor). Establishment in his philosophy is equivalent with the existence in Sadra’s philosophy and by substituting them the difference will be disappeared.

Silence has a prominent position in mystical journey. The reason of being silent and denial of inner thoughts is due to superficial influence of these two on the successful mystical journey.
In this paper, we attempt to answer this question: Why mystics are so talkative in spite of their recommendation to silence? Of course all of the mystics are not so talkative but eminent figures in Islamic mysticism are often so and they have left lots of verbal and written works. The abundance of eminent Islamic mystics’ works is undeniable.
In this paper we attempt to discover the motivation of mystics’ talkativeness and show the reason of the abundance of their works.
It should be noted by “mystic” we mean a perfect instance of this word, i.e. a person who has ended the journey towards Allah, and after annihilation in Allah has reached the position of persistence in Allah. Reminding this point is important in that in the journey towards Allah, there is no escape from silence and denial of inner thoughts, and silence is an inherent consequence of annihilation circumstances. Therefore a mystic who has the position of annihilation in Allah, is the manifestation arena of the divine names and attributes and can be orator and speaker.