فصلنامه فلسفه دین
سال هفدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 47، تابستان 1399)

The examination of the semantic miraculousness of the noble Qur’ān needs the investigation of a chain of letters, diacritics, and combinations. Semantics considers discourse as a coherent and cohesive set of meanings. In order to accurately know and understand these meanings, it is necessary to break down the text and then juxtapose the separate sections that have been semantically analyzed. The study at hand aims at examining the combined values and the interpretive dimension of the genitive cases of the Cow chapter. According to association relations, the congruence of these cases with the verse context and the chapter context is examined. The findings of the study show that the genitive cases in the Cow chapter are directly used to give the meanings of the verses to the audience, in a way that any case – either in the letters or in the words – is in the complete coordination with the verse meaning. Moreover, in some cases, the aforementioned genitive cases create secondary meanings in the verses. In suchlike situations, the figurative, ironical, and metaphorical forms or certain words with multiple meanings provide the foregoing contribution.

The intelligibility of the belief in the existence of God is the most important issue in religious epistemology. Zagzebski’s conception of virtue-based epistemology both criticizes the externalist and individualist viewpoints of reformed epistemology and emphasizes the voluntariness of the belief and its influence by the community. In this stance, the authoritativeness of the religious belief is explained based on the virtue of “epistemic trust” on oneself and other members of the epistemic community. Therefore, the believers’ belief in the existence of God at different times and places can be the basis of the authoritativeness of one’s belief in the existence of God. This issue has been explained via an argumentation that indicates the superiority of epistemic universality over epistemic self-determinism and epistemic self-centrism.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard is one of the founders of the Existentialism school. He criticizes on the one hand the existing approach to Christianity and on the other hand the application of rational method to religious studies, and eagerly looks for a ardent sense of life. In his view, the meaningful life is deeply interwoven with the religious life, i.e. the life and death of the human are in the celestial sphere of faith. It is precisely through this lens that he is considered an avid explorer of the original and meaningful theme of life in a new manner, one which finally leads him to the attainment of a zealous belief in God. Embarking upon a religious reflection and floating in a profound thought which revolves about “death”, he addresses the three domains of preference, ethics, and religion so as to achieve the celestial sphere of religious faith through a dialectic path. On that sphere, the human only interacts with the Absolute Being – or as he puts it, in a “one to one” life – at the highest point of meaningful life (which is the true/existential life) in the safe beach of the religious faith, where he achieves peace like his great hero Ibrahim (a). This article aims at explaining and critically analyzing this Danish theosophist’s thoughts about the relationship between the two foregoing substances, and to specify this foundational point that the only outcome of the human’s “thinking about death” can only be the creation of the possibility and capacity for him to achieve the religious domain. In fact, only attaining and gripping of the divine values and innate disposition (which are entrusted to the human in his essence) can present Kierkegaard with the original themes he intends. Another interesting point is that his tendency to “the generation of meaning” rather than “discovering the meaning” in the specification of the meaning of life can bring about a domineering approach for the contemporary human, as the domineering history of the modern human is a proof for this claim.

In this paper, we examine the question of whether the conceptualization of the Necessary being has been historically present in the Neo-Platonist (Proclus) thinking before Farabi and Avicenna. With his four-part design comprised of the First Cause, being, reason, and self, Proclus explains his philosophical foundations about topics such as pure goodness, the self-sufficiency and the supreme being of the First Cause, grace, the First innovator, I-ness, reason and its characteristics and degrees, soul and its characteristics and degrees, and divides the creatures based on eternity. Farabi and Avicenna agree with Proclus in issues such as the self-sufficiency and the supreme being of the First Cause, grace, the First Innovator, the contingency or simplicity of reason and its freedom for corporeality, and the soul and its role in the circular movement of the celestial bodies, in a way that in some cases, Proclus’ words and phrases are directly used in the book al-Khair al-mahz.

Mulla Shamsa Gilani, one of the shining and famous figures of the 11th century LH in the Isfahan school of philosophy who – like other notable philosophers of his era such as Mulla Sadra and Mir Damad – was skillful in using the qur’ānic verses and Islamic traditions to prove his philosophical discussions. As one of the outstanding students of Mir Damad, he was greatly influenced by him and learned the peripatetic style and foundations from him. Mulla Shamsa opposed many great philosophers – especially the head of the largest school of philosophy in his era, i.e. Mulla Sadra – with regard to some philosophical issues such as the principality of existence, substantial movement, God’s a priori knowledge, and God’s knowledge of Himself. With regard to the relationship between the essential attributes and the essence, Mulla Shamsa adopts a view similar to Mu‘tazila, peripatetic philosophers, and Mulla Sadra, and believes in the sameness of the essential attributes and the essence. Concerning God’s a priori knowledge of the creatures, he believes in a third form (that is, not acquired nor direct), which is the pure and simple Being of God, and considers the existence of creatures as irrelevant and ineffective in God’s knowledge. Mulla Shamsa takes God’s knowledge of Himself as the most direct and does not deem permissible the application of the commonly used conception of the collective knowledge to God. The article at hand adopts a library research method to clarify Mulla Shamsa’s viewpoint about God’s knowledge.

The quiddity of philosophy has been a hot topic for discussion since the time of Aristotle, and discussions about it have continued in the ensuing periods of the history of Peripatetic philosophy. This is evident in the disputes between the two famous Muslim Peripatetic philosophers, Avicenna and Ibn Rushd. This discussion was revived in the second half of the 20th century, in particular in the German studies of Aristotle. The questions here regard that if there is only one primary philosophical science in the eyes of Aristotle which has come to be called both Ousiology and ontology/substanceology, or both of them do exist separate from each other. If the latter is the case, the next question regards their relationship with each other. In this article, which is a review the opinions of modern Aristotle researchers about the foregoing questions, we conclude that Ousiology is the ultimate realization of substanceology. This way, we call Ousiology as the cornerstone of the philosophical theory as viewed in substanceology. This line of thought requires that the extended foundational concepts in Aristotelian substanceology need a kind of Ousiology. Meanwhile, God is a “specific nature” as the Cause of all non-God (as one of the “principles and causes). With such a premise, a person who acts as a substanceologist based on Gamma book to find the principles and causes of Ousia is at the same time an Ousiologist.

The discussion on compulsion and volition is one of the most important issues in the history of human thinking. It has always been a point of dispute for a wide range of scholarly opinions. The main question here is that if the belief in the a priori coordination principle does not in a way reject volition and primacy of necessity. How is the eternal Divine volition congruent with the human volition? As one of the greatest philosophers of the pre-Kantian era, Leibniz tried to establish the human volition by distinguishing the absolute and conditional necessity as well as adopting the “Best of all possible worlds” theory. On the other hand, Allamah Tabataba’i considers volition as an innate matter and maintains that the principle of “any possible being is in need of another being for its existence” does not contradict the human volition. In this study, in addition to expressing the principles adopted by Leibniz and Allamah Tabataba’i, the viewpoint of the former is criticized. The important considerations here are the presentation, comparison, analysis, and examination of the viewpoints of these two thinkers.