نشریه فلسفه تحلیلی
پیاپی 30 (پاییز و زمستان 1395)

The crisis of modern man and its emergence in modern art is one of the themes that the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset has addressed. He believes that crisis is unique to mankind, and human being manifests it in different aspects of his life. One of the critical aspects of human life is art. The dehumanization of modern art, distancing from traditional aesthetic aspects, emancipation from objective reality, and shifting towards abstraction and new concerns, have altered the art. Dynamism and the features of modern art are characteristics of the modern world where the speed of change and transformation of the phenomena caused instability of existing values, so that the history of art throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was accumulated by various manifestos and isms. Such acceleration and fundamental changes can make any situation unstable and subject to crisis. From the standpoint of Ortega, an artist in such critical and unstable conditions shifts to another style, and this would appear through his action, i.e. the artwork. This appearance alters the boundaries of the definition of art. In other words, this process of changing begins in the artist's view, influences his artwork, and thus changes the meaning of art.

According to the causal theory of knowledge, there mustbe a causal connection between the knower's belief and the fact known. On the other hand, Platonism requires accepting the things that have not causal power, and so mathematical entities cannot be objects of our knowledge. This conflict is called “the problem of accessibility”.  Brown, contemporary American philosopher, claims that he has solved this problem. First, he appeals to EPR experimentation, as a counterexample, and argues that the causal theory of knowledge is not correct. Then, he concludes that the condition of the causal connection is not necessary for knowledge. On the other hand, he assumes that there is a perceptual faculty, called “mind’s eye", and tries to show that there is a non-causal access to the mathematical entities. But neither of these two arguments is tenable. Because even if “the results of EPR cannot be explained on the basis of causal relation between the knower and the known” we cannot conclude that the causal theory of knowledge is not correct. We can only draw that the realm of scientific knowledge is divisible into two sub-realm: causal and quantomic. Therefore EPR, although may not be explained by theory of relativity, have another scientific support. While, there is no similar scientific theory for mathematical entities. On the other hand, mind’s eye only has explanatory role, not justificatory. It is clear that the access problem cannot be solved by appeal to unwarranted supposition of perceptual faculty.

In physicalism and its various types, it is often tried to explain the mind-body relationship scientifically and philosophically; but the main problem arises when two general and scientifically accepted principles, namely the completeness of physical world and the causal closure of physics, are considered along with the mental causation problem. In this paper, Kim's objections to non-reductive physicalism regarding mental causation problem will be discussed. These objections include casual exclusion and overdetermination of the mental. The former is the first problem with which, in Kim's sight, physicalism encounters. Kim also argues that mind-body supervenience is an accepted concept in all kinds of physicalism. Then he argues that non-reductive forms of physicalism, given that the mind-body supervenience is valid, lead to epiphenomenalism and even to its radical forms. He then argues that the same problem exists for physical realism. Moreover, Kim talks about various aspects of Anomalous Monism which had tried to solve the mental causation problem.

Massive Modularity Hypothesis of Mind assumes that the mind is composed largely, or perhaps even entirely, of modules. Since the publication of Modularity of the Mind (Fodor, 1983) modularity has occupied a central role in the studies of mind and cognitive science. But in philosophy there is no agreement about this role. In this paper, first I propose that many of these problems are the effects of the Fodorian base of Massive Modularity Hypothesis, and then I suggest taking Simon’s works on complexity as a proper base for modularity. In the last section of this paper, I consider two common characteristics of mind, i.e. domain- specificity and encapsulation, and argue that in shadow of Massive Modularity Hypothesis these characteristics can be explained better.

There is a shared premise in Avicenna’s Sidiqin Argument (and its formulation in our previously published papers) and one of the arguments against the possibility of regress (Taftazani, 1049). This premise is a metaphysical presupposition: for any contingent existent there is a chain that consists of its possible causes, and the chain, as a whole, is an in-itself contingent existent. In Asfar, MullaSadra quoted Taftazani’s argument and criticized this premise. He argued that the existence of the chain is not consistent with the equivalence of real existence and real oneness. If MullaSadra’s objection were penetrating, it would destroy Avicenna’s Sidiqin Argument (and our formulation). We shall argue that not only MullaSadra, in a sense, begs the question, but also his position in this objection is not consistent with its comments on ash-Shifa under the subject of number and his general view about the relation between a cause and its effect.

Theodor Adorno is one of those philosophers who give a high position to art in their thought. That is, without having a true conception of his ideas on art, one cannot capture very much of his thoughts. The same is true for other philosophers like Kant and Hegel. I believe that Adorno's most important concern regarding art was its dialectical relation with the empirical or everyday-world and the status quo. The reason is that for Adorno art is the only sphere of life which has escaped the ossified relations of the capitalist world and has been a shelter for qualified freedom. It is only in artworks that one can hear of the real pain and suffering, the pain of living in a reified society where no room is left for true life. This paper is not a comprehensive discussion of Adorno's ideas. I have just tried to present the most important discussions in Adorno's writings on the relation between art and the empirical world. The leading thread of this paper is the ways through which art criticizes the status quo. In the first section, I will focus on the concept of Culture Industry in order to give a clear description of what Adorno contrasts with the autonomous art. In the second section, I will investigate the dialectical relation between artworks and the empirical world. And in the last section, I will put forward the discussions concerning the form and content of artworks and their relation to social criticism.

This study will survey the significance of theatre in the philosophy of the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou. He is probably the only philosopher in the contemporary world who still regards philosophy as a search for truth. He first mentions four domains of science, politics, art, and love, which are, in a way, reminiscent of Plato’s divisions regarding human and the world. He claims then that truths are produced only in these four domains. As regards the art of theatre, he has theses and ideas unconventional and uncommon to the worlds of art and philosophy, whose understanding requires, to a great extent, an acquaintance, even though elementary, with the main concepts of his intellectual and philosophical system. For Badiou, the event of true theatre is a kind of collective and communal creative act which creates its own specific subject, and in each staging of the theatrical text, the inner idea of the text completes. Badiou believes that theatre thinks, and, even though it is to a great extent dependent on the state, it can and should try to reveal its limitations, to create its own theatrical subject, and to form a new change by creating something new. In the end, it must be noted that the starting point of this discussion is philosophy, and this essay proceeds from Badiou’s philosophy toward the art of theatre.