نشریه متافیزیک
سال نهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 23، بهار و تابستان 1396)

Descartes is famous for his various innovations in philosophy. He has been rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy. His writings are taught at philosophy departments in all universities all over the world and different aspects of his thought are the subject-matter for so many books, articles, and dissertations and treatises which make among the epoch-making philosophers in the west. Among his predecessors, he has mostly been compared with St. Augustine, and among the past schools of philosophy, his system has been contrasted against the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition. In Islamic world, Descartes and His Meditations on First Philosophy, compared with Al-Ghazali and his Deliverance from error. The present paper tries to make a comparison among the Cartesian system and that of a roughly unknown Persian philosopher that, though being unknown, most of Cartesian innovative heritage in Western philosophy is preceded by his philosophy. The similarity among his teachings and Descarte's ones is so great that reader may supposes that Descartes or his medieval or renaissance predecessors have had some access to his writings or even read them. This philosopher, Afdal al-Din Kashani known as Baba Afdal, against the Islamic philosophical mainstream in his times that was in Arabic language, has written all of his works in simple, eloquent and accessible Persian prose. He not only in Persian-writing for the first time but also with regards to the subject-matter and the goal of philosophizing is such an innovator that no other Muslim philosopher can precede him.

Although Presocratics in 600 B.C founded new research ways in science and philosophy, wrote the first scientific essays, introduced basic conceptions of deduction, and abandoned mythological explanations, all we have of their works is but the fragments in the works of further doxographers, biographers, historians or philosophers who brought their statements between their own words. This would sometimes result in misunderstanding the presocratics’ purposes. Hermann Diels in his Doxographi Graeci raised a new method for dealing with doxography tradition. Diels’ new approach to doxography returned all this tradition to Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus. Some scholars like Jaap Mansfield criticized his disregard for the sophists like Gorgias and Hippias, and the successions of philosophers. According to his criticism, some matters like the Sophists’ influence on Plato, Aristotle’s definition of Doxa in the Placita and the influence of the succession and interpretation tradition on doxogtaphy are more noteworthy than Diels has thought.

The notion of free harmony of faculties is very important in Kant's aesthetic. Kant puts this notion for reply to this question how we can believe in universality in aesthetic judgment, if we perceive it subjectively. Kant claims that pleasure in aesthetic judgment arises from subjective statue which is called free play or harmony of faculties. Since Kant believes that only cognition is communicable, his efforts to bring in cognitive faculties in aesthetic evaluation, justifies universal validity of aesthetic judgment. Kant cannot clearly explain the notion of free harmony, then some his interpreters effort, by separating this judgment from any concept, and by considering natural and unconscious characteristic for the aesthetic experience, connect the area of cognition with aesthetic and by this justify universality of aesthetic judgment (Precognitive interpretation). Second, interpretation believes in interference conception in aesthetic evaluation. They make efforts to provide direct similarity between cognition and aesthetic. There is no valid document in supporting of tow interpretations. First, interpretation by believing to unconscious characteristic for aesthetic experience cannot depict the distinction between usual objects and aesthetic objects. Second, interpretation by believing to interference of indeterminate conception in aesthetic experience, not only cannot eliminate interest of universality but also generally neglect it.

Many ordinary things are made up of material things. For example, the statue of Ferdousi in the University of Tehran is made up of a particular piece of bronze. Calling the relation between the statue of Ferdousi and that piece of bronze material constitution, many philosophers have claimed that this relation between a material thing and the thing that it constitutes is identity. Baker, in contrast, believes that these things have genuine unity without necessary identity. In this article, I first illustrate the principles of Baker’s theory and his explanation of this relation. Then I will assess the theory against objections. I will conclude that this theory can successfully explain relation between many of material things, but concerning things belonging to human beings, the theory fails to introduce a criterion for constitution.

Conatus, the law of self-preservation, is an inherent striving of beings to persist on its own being.. Spinoza, after explaining the conatus and justifying the problem of self-destruction (suicide), rejected many of common concepts of his predecessors’ philosophical tradition and redefined them in a different way by conatus doctrine. Spinoza denied teleological interpretation of world events and offered a nonteleological explanation of them by “desire” and “appetite” that rooted in the conatus principle. Spinoza Presents special interpretation of Ethical act root and lays the ethical good in the “Human will” and in the “nature of the objects”. For Spinoza, the ethics rooted in philosophical necessity, therefore, he tries to establish his own ethics on a strong foundation- that is individual egoism (self-interest) - which is rooted in the conatus doctrine

Naturalism is an important kind of Ethical Reductionism. It holds that all evaluative properties can be reduced to natural properties; in plain language “they are natural properties”. Such an ontological doctrine has also an epistemological side to the effect that our ethical beliefs can be justified empirically, and through such a justification ethical knowledge is at the same footing as scientific knowledge. This essay is a fulfillment of a promise I made before. This essay concludes that (a) explaining particular ethical beliefs as observations, drawing on the idea of “inferential chain,” is unsuccessful; for firstly it cannot explain how our belief in ethical properties as distinct from natural properties is justified in the first place and secondly it has the unacceptable implication that in scientific identities we know base properties through mere knowledge of supervenient properties. (b) “ethical explanations of non-ethical facts” is also unable to accomplish empirical justification of ethical beliefs: although according to the naturalist it is possible to ascribe the explanatoriness of natural facts to ethical facts, this is of no epistemological benefit; in order to have epistemological benefit it has to explain an observable fact that the base natural hypothesis cannot explain. So ethical hypotheses do not contribute to explanation and it is impossible to justify them via explanatory inference.