نشریه فلسفه تحلیلی
پیاپی 21 (بهار و تابستان 1391)

In his magnum opus Perceiving God, William Alston has tried to showthat one can be justified in believing some religious beliefs on thegrounds of some religious experiences. According to his theory, thosereligious experiences which have -phenomenologically- perceptualcharacters are entitled to play the role of ground for some other beliefs.This paper examines some of the main criticisms of this view, as wellas Alston's replies to them. Evaluating the arguments of two sides ofthe debate, the author puts forward his comments and criticism. It hasbeen finally concluded that as far as Alston's arguments are concernedhis main claim remains under question.

AbstractThe truthmaker principle – which looks to be based upon a seeminglyplausible intuition – faces a number of troubles, including that ofnegative truths. According to the truthmaker principle, truepropositions are true in virtue of what exists. But, intuitively, negativetruths are true in virtue of what does not exist. Adding negative facts toone’s ontology isa metaphysical cost that has been paid to solve theproblem of negative truths. In this paper, I firstly mention somepreliminary issues about the truthmaker principle. After enumeratingpossible solutions to negative truths, I will deal with the solution whichappeals to negative facts. Then I will argue that which kind of negativefacts does better its jobs. In the rest of the paper, I will disallow somepropounded difficulties with this solution. Afterwards, I will illustratethat negative facts face three new problems.

In arguing for realism and true knowledge, Sohrawardī's point of viewneither resembles his Muslim predecessors nor does it portray Platonicand Aristotelian impact on settling the notions. Unlike Platonists, hetends to ground knowledge in sensation, and in contrast to Aristotelianshe regards knowledge as direct and immediate; therefore sensationshould be his departure point to construe realism. Having primarilyaddressed Muslim peripatetic so as to criticize their school's three mainpre-suppositions, he strives to put forward a novel theory by which onecan sketch realism within his system of thought. After exposing thisnegative and critical aspect of his viewpoint, this paper will proceedwith the analysis of his positive approach. The approach will beformulated into six pre-suppositions while adopting them ultimatelysheds light upon realism within Suhrawardī's thought.

The variety of answers to the unit of selection problem threatensscientific realism both methodologically and ontologically. In thisarticle, I argue that the account developed by Elizabeth Lloyd justsolves the problem from methodological point of view and leaves theontological side unsolved. I will show that getting rid of mereologicalmetaphysics and replacing it with ontic structural realism solve theproblem ontologically.

General limits of knowledge is one of the important discussion inepistemological studies. In the matter of human knowledge, weconfront with determining general limits of this knowledge. Mostphilosophers have regarded human knowledge as a limited one, andconsidered different limits for it. Ibn sina takes limited humanknowledge too and excludes some of the affairs from cognitive realmof human. One the one hand, he accepts possibility of knowledge andtherefore opposed skepticism. On other hand, he restricts thisknowledge to the different limits and hence disagrees with absolutedogmatism. He takes into account different limits for humanknowledge such as human limitation in recognizing the essence ofthings, human limitation in knowing God, human limitation inperceiving resurrection, cognitive limitation resulted fromaccompanying with material and body etc. He presents variousarguments for proving these limitations and interesting discussionsabout these. Studying these limitations due to recognizing Ibn sina’sgeneral viewpoint about human knowledge has been very importantand will grant great assistance in understanding his philosophy.

In this paper, I try to give a clear reading of Carnap's conventionalismagainst the prevalent philosophical back ground of the day. Thebackground had been painted in Wittgensetinian colors, which weredeemed by Carnap to be rusty, dogmatic and unacceptable. It beginswith the primary satisfaction of logical empiricists with Wittgensteinianapproach to truth and the status of logical sentences (a satisfactionwhich ended to a deep dissatisfaction soon enough). Then I attend toCarnap's remarkable criticisms of Wittgenstein's absolutist point ofview, which is devoid of necessary conventional elements. At the end,we will see that Carnap's attempt at suggesting an alternative schemefor explaining the status of logical and mathematical sentences, as it isput forward in Logical Syntax of Language (1934), suffers from similarshortcomings. This does not need to debase the brilliant points whichemerged out of Carnap's critical reading of Wittgenstein's philosophy,though.