نشریه فلسفه تحلیلی
پیاپی 11 (بهار و تابستان 1386)

Creation is one of the fundamental beliefs in Islamic world-view,playing an important role in all aspects of religious thought wherehumankind is told to contemplate the whole creation of God. In linewith this view is the unavoidable participation of philosophers,theologians, and mystics in a contest where each group has taken aparticular position in accordance with their world view, throwinglight on particular aspects of being.The Ash’arites committed themselves to the creation from nothing(creatio ex nihilo) thesis in order to glorify the status of Godthrough expanding the realm of Divine will and power. Theyclaimed that this thesis was based on their reading of religious texts.However, this view resorts to certain unproved presuppositions andsuffers from serious intellectual problems.This paper offers a critical study of the above- mentioned thesis byexamining the textual bases of its premises and showing theintellectual problems in their consequents. In the end the writer setsforth the combination of the Ash’arite view with Sadra’s ontologyas a defensible outlook towards Divine creation.

One of the major issues in modern methodological discussions isthe method of justification in different schools of thought, whichwas formerly called “the why of justification”, that is, the reasonwhy something is justified. Defying the limiting methodologies ofhis predecessors in justification, Mullā Sadrā makes methodologicaluse of his intuitive findings, on equal footing with demonstrativesyllogism. He resorts to methods of mystics in justifying thetranscendent theses in his philosophy. Moreover, in listing the basicpropositions, next to the first principles of the past philosophers, healso includes intuitive propositions acquired through the faculty ofillumination.Since Mullā Sadrā sought to found a novel system of thought, heconcerned himself with analyzing and criticizing otherphilosophers, employing logical methods in dealing with theirprinciples, arguments, and conclusions

This paper is an attempt to provide a clearer and deeper view ofmystical experience. First, it catches a glimpse of this concept fromabove and finds it possessed of different instances, realms, anddimensions. It then delimits the subject to the common applicationof this concept in order to examine the four-fold dimensions of thisstate of disclosure, that is, the epistemic, epistemological,subjective, and emotional dimensions.Giving a brief survey of the descriptions of this state by some wellknownresearchers in this field such as James, Underhill, Suzuki,Stace, and Otto, the writer tries to show that the four features ofmystical experience, that is, epistemicity, intuitivity, subjectivity,and love-centeredness are together qualified as the essence of thisexperience due to their foundationality and universality.Employing a phenomenological approach, the writer tries to provethat the quintessence of middle-path mystical experience consists inthe immediate and direct knowledge of Reality( reality stripped ofall modes), while in the final step of mystical experience, it is thedirect and immediate knowledge of the unitary reality of being(Absolute Reality).The article has dealt with mystical experience from aphenomenological point of view.

Scientific realism is the thesis that the claims of scientific theoriesabout the facts in the world are literally true. That the theoriessometimes even go beyond our sense data and experience in orderto give us an understanding of natural phenomena and their causes,and that if we accept a theory as true, we are also committed to theexistence of certain undetectable things as the causes of thosephenomena.Although scientific realism as an independent area in philosophy ofscience is almost recent, as a general idea it can be detectedthroughout the history of western thought where it meets withoppositions mainly coming from the empiricist quarter.Searching through the history of thought and focusing on scientificexplanation as the main goal of science, this paper shows thephilosophical roots of these two approaches as well as their gradualdevelopment since antiquity through intricate evolvement into moresophisticated and systematic forms which emerged almost whenphilosophy of science came to be known as an autonomous field,the period within which the dominant approach is scientific antirealism.The writer is therefore concerned with three majorphilosophers of science, Mach, Poincaré, and Duhem, emphasizingthe main features and trying to come into certain conclusions aboutthe two approaches at issue.

In this paper, I offer a view of laws as descriptions oranalyses of fundamental dispositions. As analyses of dispositions,laws are metaphysically necessary truths. In the first section Iexplain what I mean by laws being property description. In thesecond section, I consider the possibility of being some necessarytruth can be known a posteriori and I claim laws of nature have thisepistemic status. In the last two sections, I try to accommodate myview on laws of nature with the modal intuitions about physicalnecessity that have lead many to reject necessary laws.

It is a simple, though ancient, mistake in the theory ofknowledge to think that justification, in any degree, is central torationality, or even important to it. We must cut for ever the intellectualapron strings that continue to offer us spurious and unneeded security, andreplace the insoluble problem of what our theories are based on by thesoluble problem of how to expose their shortcomings. The paper willoutline (not for the first time) the critical rationalism of Karl Popper,taking account of some recent criticisms. A brief discussion of the statusof the laws of logic provides an illustration of the power of the criticalapproach.

After briefly reviewing a well-known problem aboutKant’s ethics, a resolution is offered by way of an appeal to certainof Kant’s epistemological ideas. The resulting view – a version of adialogue-based approach – is explored, and a further resolution isoffered by way of suggesting that the initial problem then becomesone which may be addressed empirically. While Kantian ideas areused to set the scene, and as a point of reference, the paper’sconcerns are with the view to which the argument leads, rather thanwith the exegesis of Kant.