فصلنامه پژوهش های فلسفی - کلامی
سال بیست و دوم شماره 4 (پیاپی 86، زمستان 1399)

The argument that free will and indeterminism are incompatible is known as the Luck Argument. This argument has been put forward against the libertarians who deny determinism to prove free will. The basic idea of the argument is that in an undetermined world, free will cannot be imagined. There are various formulations for this argument. They all seek to explain why, if the choice is undetermined, it is by chance; but the focus of this article is on the explanatory formulation. The basic idea of this formulation is that in undetermined situations, there is no contrastive explanation and in this case, there is no free will. This argument is formulated as follows:  If a choice is undetermined, it means that it is possible to make a different choice by assuming the past before the choice is completely identical.  If it is possible to make different choices (different futures) with the same past, it is not possible to provide a contrastive explanation for the choice.  If there is no contrastive explanation for choice, then that choice is by chance.  If a choice happens by chance, it's not free. Therefore, if a choice is undetermined, it is not free. Libertarian responses to this argument can be divided into three main categories. The first group confesses that the argument is question-begging. The main contention is that since only in determined situations is it possible to have contrastive explanations, it is impossible to seek them for undetermined situations. However, this is not the case in this particular case, and the claim is another form of the combination of the first and second premises. The second group of responses to the Luck Argument focusing on the third premise of the argument argues that although there is no contrastive explanation for undetermined choices, another type of explanation which is non-contrastive is possible. In this case, the choice is no longer by chance and it is free. But it seems that non-contrastive explanations are not sufficient for explaining undetermined choices. The third answer claims that it is not that we do not have contrastive explanations for all undetermined situations, and that there is a contrastive explanation at least for some undetermined choices. In fact, this group argues that the combination of the first and second premise of the Luck Argument – that if a choice is undetermined, there is no contradictory explanation - is wrong. Among the different perspectives of this category, is the focus on describing and evaluating Clark's response. He proposes different scenarios to answer this argument. Their evaluation shows that in the first and second scenarios, there was a different definition of indeterminism and although at first glance, they were considered a response to the Luck Argument, the evil consequence of this presupposition and its incompatibility with free choices has been explained. Clark's third scenario is consistent with the definition of indeterminism that the Luck Argument had in the first premise, but Clark himself also acknowledges that we have no contrastive explanations for such situations. Taken together, with all of these scenarios, Clark's attempt to illustrate the contrast between undetermined choices seems to have failed. In conclusion, Evaluation of the three responses presented in the explanatory formulation of the Luck Argument shows that they have failed to solve the problem and explaining free will in undetermined situations continues to be challenging.

General Justice is a virtue that leads people to the community order and goods through which they can achieve well-being. This article explains the theory of general justice from the perspective of Aquinas and examines the common good and its role as the subject of general justice in directing and regulating the law. Aquinas counts general justice with the influence of Aristotle and Christian theology as a general virtue that has a particular subject, i.e., the common good. General Justice is the same as virtue which is the same in substance but different in concept. The theory of general justice according to Aquinas is both a kind of legal debt that obliges a person to obey the law and a kind of moral debt that obliges a person to observe the virtue of moral virtue. Aquinas’ theory of general justice finds meaning in societies that meet the criterion of general justice if the ruler formulates a positive law according to divine law and natural law. Thus this theory ultimately depends on the intentions of the ruler and the type of government that lead individuals to a common good in society and well-being. The purpose of this article is to explain the theory of general justice from the perspective of Aquinas and to examine the common good and its role as the subject of general justice in the regulation of law. To achieve goods, we can consider three types of command in the community, which correspond to three types of justice. One commands the components among themselves; another commands the whole to the components and command the components to the whole. Commutative justice is a virtue that regulates the goods of the components among themselves. Distributive justice is a virtue that regulates the goods of the whole into its components. Finally, general justice regulates the goods of the components into the goods of the whole. General Justice is more important than these two virtues of justice because the subject of general justice is the common good. The common good is a kind of order that is necessary for human society so that human beings can achieve their moral, political, and legal goals. The virtues that are private to the individual when they occur in society are directed to the common good through general justice; therefore, general justice is a general virtue. In Aquinas’s works can find different interpretations of general justice being a general virtue. In this article, it is shown that Aquinas’ theory of general justice finds meaning in societies that meet the criterion of general justice if the ruler formulates a positive law according to divine law and natural law. When the rulers and the government are properly instructed to act according to the principles of this society, both the government and the rulers achieve their goal of common good and well-being. When we consider God’s commandments to be the criterion of the common good, then the ruler must be able to interpret the divine law correctly.

A large part of Richard Rorty’s works focus on criticizing the received view about philosophy. He argues, in his historical reconstruction of philosophical activity, that there has always been a misconception about philosophy in the history of philosophy. This misconception assumes that philosophy aims to grasp the ultimate knowledge, so it desperately engages in an attempt to achieve “truth”. In this view, which he calls representationalism and points to it by the metaphor of the mirror of nature, knowledge aims to represent something out of mind, and the duty of philosophy is to put forward a theory about the representation. According to Rorty, based on this popular view philosophy is a foundational discipline that aims to evaluate epistemological claims of other disciplines. Rorty attempts to criticize and reject this Cartesian epistemological agenda for philosophy. Rorty’s approach to philosophy is therapeutic, that is, he tries to resolve philosophical problems rather than solving them. By adopting a historical method, Rorty seeks to show that “philosophy as epistemology” is a result of the dominance of what he calls the metaphor of the mirror of nature. From a critical rationalist perspective, the present article intends to critique Rorty’s views on epistemology. In this paper, Rorty’s historiographical approach is criticized in several ways. First, Rorty offers a one-sided and biased reconstruction of the history of philosophy to fit the abovementioned metaphor. Secondly, he treats history as rigid data from which it is possible to draw doctrinal conclusions. Whereas, as critical rationalists have said time and again, history by itself has no meaning. Moreover, Rorty's justificationism is criticized. Rorty maintains that knowledge needs to be justified, and since it cannot be justified through representation, it must be justified by the consent of a society. In other words, agreement in a group of people can provide an epistemic authority. Thus, both Rorty’s view and foundationalism, despite their differences, share on justificationism in epistemology. That is, they both believe that knowledge needs to be justified. On the other hand, as critical rationalists have shown, justification in any shape and form, whether internal or external, is neither possible nor necessary. We also attempt to illustrate how Rorty’s epistemological approach results in confusion between epistemology and psychology; moreover, his epistemological behaviorism still suffers from some sort of justificationism. In conclusion, Rorty expresses his critique of epistemology with the metaphor of the mirror of nature. According to him, foundationalism is the result of the conflation of the Platonic conception of knowledge as something unchangeable, with the Cartesian mind that seeks certainty. However, his ignorance of the main crux of the matter in epistemology causes his own suggestion of epistemological behaviorism to suffer from the same problem, that is, justification, which now appears in another form, i.e., social consensus. While, as critical rationalists repeated time and again, justification is neither possible nor necessary and not even desirable. They have shown that a non-justificationist approach to knowledge aimed at truth as a regulative idea could be a better suggestion.

Nietzsche and Levinas are the most prominent contemporary philosophers who have emphasized on the necessity of passing over rational subjectivity. They tried to rethink the meaning of ethics in a world where neither religion nor other moral philosophies could create a strict and reliable source for the crisis of the contemporary human being. In an attempt to overcome rational subjectivism, Nietzsche and Levinas redefined concepts such as morality and the subject. The purpose of the paper is to describe the attitudes of Nietzsche and Levinas towards their critiques of rational subjectivism. Then examine Nietzsche’s naturalistic reading and Levinas’ transcendental reading of the subject and their encounter with the other and also introduce their critiques of traditional ethics and propose a new kind of ethics in their thoughts. We will then evaluate their alternative concepts in the problem of overcoming rational subjectivism and finally, we will compare these two attitudes. Although Nietzsche and Levinas initially adopted common points of view for the critique of subjectivism and traditional ethics and common criticisms in the field, they presented different results, goals, and methods. Based on these approaches, each has proposed different principles and conclusions about ethics and overcoming rational subjectivism. Nietzsche’s problem is the genealogy of values, and Levinas’s question is the possibility of a moral condition. The answer to the first question is not related to the second question. The present paper shows that both Levinas and Nietzsche have presented different insights into the meaning of subjectivity. Their efforts to find the meaning of subjectivity have also been accompanied by the necessity to destruct the meaning of morality. Accordingly, by focusing on the overman (Nietzsche) and the other (Levinas), they have sought to reevaluate values ​​(Nietzsche) and asymmetric moral responsibility (Levinas). In this regard, they have adopted a completely different view from the traditional view of ethics. Although both of them start with a common point of view, their methods, interpretations, and results are different. With a genealogical approach, Nietzsche considered the will of power in the active subject and the birth of the overman to be desirable and practical to end the history of the development of nihilism. And Levinas, with a phenomenological approach to the concept of asymmetric responsibility in the passive subject, has put an end to the history of neglect of the other and rational subjectivism. The final suggestion is that Nietzsche and Levinas are both looking for a new meaning of morality that resides not in the mind but in the body. In Levinas, the relationship between the body and morality is evolving and transcendental, with concepts of responsibility and suffering, but in Nietzsche, this kind of connection fluctuates between naturalistic and transcendentalist views and considers the concepts of power and instinct important. Nietzsche’s attitude about the human being is a combination of a naturalistic and over-humanist approach, and with the precedence of selfhood, he has expressed a negative view of the other. However, Levinas’ philosophy is more humanistic and inter-subjectivity because of ethical ideals, and ethics begin with recognition of the priority of the other.

The purpose of the present study is to combine the two theories of Shabah al-Mohaki (the representative image), and Wojud al-Zehni (the mental existence). In the context of Islamic philosophy, the relationship between mental and external realities has been a controversial issue among philosophers. It is well known that proponents of Shabah al-Mohaki believe that there is a dissimilarity between mental and external realities, and their rivals, the proponents of mental existence, believe that there is an essential identity between mental and external realities. This group claims that objects have two types of existence; "objective" which is the same reality in the external world, and “subjective” which is called "mental existence". It seems that in their view, subjective and objective realities are numerically identical. The representative theorists on the other side reject this claim. By investigating and analyzing the texts of the two theories, the author found that the two speak of identity but qualitative and not numerical identity. As far as the mental existence theory is concerned, when we analyze the claim of mental existence theorists and numerical identity, it turns out that they do not say anything better and more than what representative theorists claim. This analysis is done through the two principles of indiscernibility of identicals and identity of indiscernibles. According to the first, if two things are identical then they must be not be different from one another with respect to all of their properties. The principle speaks of numerical identity. The second principle (although it is controversial) states that if two things have the same properties in every respect then they are identical. This principle does not have the logical truth and speaks of qualitative identity.  If one considers the case of mental existence, the claim that mental existence and objective reality are numerically identical, then he identifies that these two are not only identical but they have different properties. For instance, the subjective reality such as the image of a book or fire has the property of being mental and the objective reality of that image, the book or fire in the external world, has the property of being external. This shows that they are two different things because they have different properties. Therefore, the only way to say that these two are the same (identical), is that they are qualitatively but not numerically, identical.   On the other side, the identity claim (qualitative identity) between subjective and objective realities is found in the texts of proponents of representative theorists. For instance, Shamsuddin Isfahani argues that what is ascribed to mental existence is an image of objective reality and the image of that particular object is contrary to the objective reality itself, although in some respects it is identical to that external reality in such a way that what is obtained from the object in the mind is the same as the external reality. This shows that representative theorists also accept the claim of identity in some respect but qualitative and not numerical identity between subjective and objective reality.

In this article, we try to study Clark Pinnock’s point of view in explaining the methodological foundations of the Open Theism Theory with a descriptive-analytical method so that we can have a fair critique of the strengths and weaknesses of this theory while also understanding it correctly. Pinnock can be considered one of the most important theorists and founders of Open Theism. In his view, Open Theism is one of the theological-philosophical theories that have emerged in the critique of the teachings of traditional Christian theology and consider its claims to be logically and narratively contradictory. Pinnock believes that open theists (unlike traditional theists) sanctify God as acknowledged in the Bible and that some of the attributes of God in traditional theology should be revised and modified based on the text of the Bible. They believe that God is the God of the Bible; someone who is truly connected to the world, a relationship that requires the most mobility, not immobility. In this view, God is portrayed as a triune relationship-oriented truth, which seeks romantic relationships with human beings and thereby grants them true freedom. Finally, since open theists believe that theology should be understood by the people of the present age, a better explanation of theology depends on reliance on modern philosophy (rather than ancient philosophy) and its effects. In modern philosophy (considering the idea that the truth of things does not appear to man), method and methodology have become very important. In general, methodology is the knowledge that recognizes “how to go” and the fundamental methodology reveals the hidden principles of each theory and creates the basis for its basic critique. Of course, the purpose of this article is specifically to examine the “basics” of Pinnacle’s method, not his “method.” In fact, the report presented by his method is a platform for examining the basics. From the author’s point of view, most of the mistakes that have been made in traditional theology are also reflected in Open Theism; leading in another way! That is to say, most of the objections that Pinnock made to traditional theologians also apply to him. For example, why is it bad to be influenced by (ancient) Greek philosophy, but Open Theism’s claims can be influenced by modern philosophy? Do ancient philosophy and modern philosophy have precise and acceptable boundaries at all? On what basis do open theists claim that modern philosophy is more acceptable to modern people than ancient philosophy? Can mere simultaneity justify it? If we take as a basis the claim of open theists – that every thought comes “from somewhere” and that no thought is pristine – the encounter of open theists with the text of the Bible is also done with the presuppositions of modern philosophy, and their pivotal mindset has influenced their understanding of the Bible. How can one be sure that the path taken by theology is more correct than the path taken by its predecessors? Since a better understanding of each theory is gained by reflecting on its foundations, in this article we intend to examine the methodological foundations of Open Theism by looking at the book Most Moved Mover. In general, from Pinnock’s point of view, the method of open theism can be based on the three main bases of the critical study of the interpretation of traditional theologians, return to the Bible and overcoming Hellenism, and attention to modern philosophy, which we will describe and critique.