نشریه الهیات و فلسفه معاصر
پیاپی 1 (بهار و تابستان 1400)

The fourth century AH is considered as one of the most prominent periods of Islamic history and civilization in terms of intellectual diversity and committed free thinking. This period can be called the age of free scientific and philosophical councils away from the traditional prejudices and demarcations in religious societies, which, however, differs from some of the intellectual circles of the current age that consider free thinking as opposed to the commitment to religion and revelation. If we know the essence of liberal thinking as humanism and rationalism, we should consider the fourth century AH as one of the most liberal-minded periods in human history, which was associated with human concerns before the renaissance of the West and left the field open to human intellect. Yet it never maintained a discrepancy between open and free thinking about human concerns and religious attachments. Hence, the words of some fourth-century thinkers is noteworthy stating that the humanism of this period was religious humanism, and that its rationalism, as it employed human heritage and the early sciences, also believed in and relied on revelatory teachings. In addition, it did not hesitate to communicate and talk with atheists and apostates. The purpose of this article is to explain the dimensions of the religious free thinking and to show its characteristics and theoretical foundations, the most important of which are humanism and rationalism. This period is known as the era of scientific meetings and circles. This paper seeks to show the relationship between these assemblies and basically the relationship between the parliament-orientation and dialogue-orientation of this period with free thinking.

This article first explores Augustine's view of the subject of time and proves that from Augustine's point of view the nature of time is mental not objective. According to his explanation of time extension, it is indeed our mind that, given the passage of time, imagines the extension for the present. According to Augustine, the fact is that the moment that comes and destroys the previous one has no extension. Future, whether long or short, is nothing but our expectation which is attributed to time by mind. After proving the subjectivity of time, the place of time in theology and also the relationship of time with God are examined from Augustine's perspective. Given the negation of the objectivity of time, what is related to man as time is not related to God, and therefore God takes precedence over man's time.

Describing the nature of care ethics and analyzing its superior performance compared to previous theories in the field of ethics, this article raises a critical discussion about the difficulties faced by this type of ethics. The result of the discussion and critical consideration is that the care ethics is initially designed based on a situation-oriented perspective and against theories based on justice, that is, in the theory of care there is a kind of privatization of ethics compared to general justice. Of course, the controversial point of care ethics is in the uncontrolled development of the field of behavior (from personal, lenient, and compassion-oriented ethics) to the field of social justice, exchange, and calculation. Therefore, using Rawls' efforts in the theory of justice, as well as its extension to political liberalism, it seems that the theory of care can be considered as a complement to justice-oriented theories, later than these theories, and also as the criterion for maximum separation between law and ethics.

Explaining Sadra's principles based on psychology and using descriptive analytical method, we propose an illuminating explanation of death and try to deal with the fact that the soul has "light" essence in the higher world and "fiery" essence in the lower world, and that the origin of material and physical forces for everything is in the Hereafter. By generalizing the meaning of death, Sadr al-Din Shirazi introduces a new concept, which is the annihilation of the inferior being in the higher being. He expresses the flow of death in the whole body of the universe, and finally concludes that the universe inwardly has a constant variety of decay and actuality, and that the truth of death is the separation of the attributes, not the essence. In addition, he believes that the basic rule in the emergence of death is the destruction of the apparent structure of the world, according to which, the fiery existence of the soul is extinguished by Azraeli blowing and the soul enters the holy world.

This article is the answer to the question: What path has Islamic philosophy taken in the face of polemical issues? The importance of this question and the need to address it becomes clearer when the bilateral polemical issues are considered as the reason for the inability and impermissibility of the nature of intellect in the cognitive transition beyond nature. In Western philosophy, this was done by Kant, and the light of metaphysical knowledge or the first philosophy was reduced to extinction. Islamic philosophy, like all other philosophies that have sought to discover supernatural beings, their rules and effects, is confronted with a philosophy that, based on its system, lowers the mentioned concepts from their cognitive level. Thus, based on the position of bilateral polemical issues in Kant's critical philosophy, this article recounts the encounters of Islamic philosophers with such issues to finally explain why what became part of Kant's reason for rejecting the cognitive nature of metaphysical knowledge did not happen in Islamic philosophy. Philosophers of Islamic philosophy, unlike Kant, did not attribute the bilateral polemical issues of this knowledge to the nature of intellect.

The subject of "body" is one of the topics that was not taken seriously before Merleau-Ponty, but he made it the basis of his thought with the phenomenology of sensory perception, and since then good studies has been done on the body whose number is increasing every day. In the present article, using a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, we try to examine the capacities of Islamic philosophy on the subject of body while describing the views of Merleau-Ponty and Mulla Sadra. The research concluded that Mulla Sadra's intuitive-argumentative method not only covers to a large extent the achievements of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological method about the body, but also has additional attainments that show the depth, breadth, and explanatory power of his approach and view. Both Mulla Sadra and Merleau-Ponty, in their special statements, refer to the body as being knower, towards the world, active and constructive. But unlike Merleau-Ponty, Mulla Sadra, due to believing in the innate knowledge of the soul for the body, was able to consider bodies other than the material body, such as the analogical body. In addition, he not only did not consider the world to be limited to the empirical and phenomenal world, but he did not even limit it to being in relation to the body, and for example he considered a rational world which is in relation to and united with the level of human intellect.

The present article, in addition to an introduction to the nature of the soul, consists of three main sections. In the first part, after referring to different views on the nature of the soul, we identify Ibn Molahemi's position and show that he believes in the materiality of the soul. In the second part, his two arguments for rejecting the immaterial soul are explained. And in the third section, we present seven arguments of philosophers about the immateriality of the soul and analyze and examine them from Ibn Molahemi's point of view.

"Intentionality" is a central concept in the philosophy of mind and contemporary philosophical discourses. How it is possible and also how to determine the mental content are among the important issues in this regard, the explanation of which differs based on different philosophical principles. For this reason, this article explains intentionality from the perspective of Mohammad Hoseyn Tabatabai and the contemporary philosophers namely Fodor, Dartsky, and Millikan. Philosophers, who believe in the causal and ultimate theories of content in explaining intentionality, try to naturalize intentionality and mental content based on physicalism in their opinion. The author believes that according to Tabatabai's philosophical foundations, a new answer can be found to the problem of the possibility of intentionality and determination of mental content. This answer, which is a kind of causal statement, is not possible without denying the materialist view of science. In this article, we have shown that the proposed response derived from Tabatabai's principles can be reconstructed by a kind of integration with content theories, and it can be said that the mechanisms explained by content theories are material processes that play a preparatory role in determining content and intentionality.

The idea of ​​intuition, which is expressed in Suhrawardi's philosophy to explain the ontology of the soul and perception, can comprehensively justify perceptual phenomena. Muslim philosophers and Western thinkers have given various answers to the question of what perception and consciousness are. Among the answers, the two traditions of dualism and monism are more famous and efficient. The tradition of dualism, which is the belief of Muslim philosophers and conforms to religious teachings, has been expressed in various ways. Meanwhile, Suhrawardi's view, which is based on intuitive empirical perception of the soul and uses intuition as a method of studying the problems of the soul, has a greater ability to solve the problem of perception. The intuitive feature of Suhrawardi's view allows us to approach the issues of the soul with a direct understanding and offer an acceptable explanation for each of the problems. In this study, we try to answer the main question of what perception and consciousness are based on the illuminating attitude. Using descriptive-analytical method, this research has used the idea of intuition to understand and study the problems of perception.

The typology of the existence of God and the existence of possibilities is one of the ambiguous issues in philosophical theology. One of the Islamic philosophers is Mirdamad. In his works on explaining the relationship between the existence of God and the possible existents, there are issues that sometimes seem contradictory. Many of his philosophical principles such as ontological ones, objective proportion of cause and effect, the principle of "the giver of an object cannot be without it", the rule of "nothing can be issued from a single object except one", the closeness of creatures to God and their distance from Him, divine knowledge and the union of the knower and the known, are consistent with being of the same type. But some of his other principles, such as the famous utterance of the principality of essence, are more closely related to the contrast between the existence of God and the existence of possibilities. The study and analysis of Mirdamad's theories on this issue led to the conclusion that he accepted the similarity between the existence of God and the existence of possibilities and did not consider the contrast between them to be absolutely correct. Similarity has consequences that Mirdamad's works are consistent with.

Cognitive science is the study of the brain, mind, intelligence, and related processes. The two main tasks of this science are: 1. To produce models that describe the function of the human brain and cognitive functions, 2. To compare the complex three-factor of the mind, brain and computer. The main and dominant hypothesis of this science is that thinking is a representative and computational phenomenon, and of course this hypothesis has been criticized by Western scholars. Using analytical-rational method, the present article seeks to explain the relationship between cognitive science and Islamic philosophy and show that some common principles and approaches of cognitive science, including: 1. materialism and naturalism of mind or soul, 2. exclusivism in experimental and scientific methods in the studies on mind, 3. determinism in human actions, 4. relativism of cognition, 5. materialism of cognition, are all in conflict with the psychology and epistemology in Islamic philosophy. However, such contrasts should not be considered negative, but rather in a positive way, it can be understood that cognitive scientists need to pay more attention to the rational issues of Islamic philosophy, and conversely, researchers of Islamic philosophy need to consider the findings of the cognitive science.

Theists believe that God has various perfection attributes such as knowledge, power and life, and just as his being is the highest and most transcendent existence, the perfection attributes are also ascribed to God in their highest level. There are differences among Muslims about how the attributes are ascribed to God. It is stated that the Mutazilites deny the attributes of God and consider His essence as a substitute for the attributes. The Asharites consider the attributes of God to be superfluous to His essence, and the philosophers consider them to be identical to His essence. Accepting the fact that the attributes of God are identical to the essence, the question arises: how can the many attributes that are one with the essence of God not lead to multiplicity in His essence? Various answers have been given to this question. These answers seek to prove the attributes of God and to unite these attributes with His essence, while accepting the assumptions in the question. In this article, these answers are quoted and evaluated, and finally the view of mystics is preferred.