نشریه متافیزیک
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 32، پاییز و زمستان 1400)

This paper studies Ervin Yalom's strategies in the treatment of death anxiety and his philosophical foundations. Yalom is a Sartre-type existential psychotherapist seeking to reduce the problem of death anxiety through existential solutions based on atheism and unbelieving in religions. He believes that man has accidentally been thrown into this non-meaningful world and has no choice but to give it meaning. According to him, human beings face four existential concerns in this world: death, freedom, loneliness, and emptiness, death is the most important among them. As an existential psychotherapist, with a naturalistic and atheistic approach and a nihilistic view to death, he accepts the reality of death as a human existential concern and tries to reduce its anxiety by strategies such as thanatopsis, having an existential vision to death, thinking about Being, self-disclosure, increasing life satisfaction, desensitization of death, creativity, rippling.

The paper is devoted to examining Stanley and Williamson’s well-known and disputed argument in favor of intellectualism about knowledge-how. In the first section, I will give an overview of the linguistic argument. The gist of the argument is that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that because ascriptions of knowledge-how entail ascriptions of knowledge-that. Section 2 will focus on cross-linguistic data that Stanley and Williamson’s opponents employ to challenge their argument. In particular, I will take a look at ascriptions of practical knowledge in various languages such as French, Latin, Greek, German, Turkish, and Russian. As critics have shown, the ascriptions of practical knowledge in these languages are inconsistent with Stanley and Williamson’s syntactic and semantic analysis of ascriptions of knowledge-how in English. In section 3, I will examine Stanley and Williamson’s argument based on the ascriptions of practical knowledge in Persian. In light of this analysis, it will be clear that, despite appearances to the contrary, the data from Persian is fully consistent with Stanley and Williamson’s argument. Another conclusion which can be drawn from the analysis is the tentative suggestion that there is a methodological gap in the literature on cross-linguistic data in this debate. In particular, the debate has focused on the synchronic analysis and widely ignored the diachronic method of examination and explanation

The Value-Free Ideal of science (VFI) is the view that non-epistemic values can play no legitimate role in the epistemic evaluation of scientific theories. The VFI, which once was defended as a regulative norm guiding the course of scientific inquiry in dealing with non-epistemic values, has been the target of some forceful attacks lately. One of the main objections is an argument called the Inductive Risk Argument (IRA). The validity of IRA, though, has been questioned. Moreover, it can be shown that even if we assume its validity, IRA is not successful in routing out the VFI. The core idea behind the VFI is the illegitimacy of any role non-cognitive values may play in determining the evidence, so to undermine the VFI, this very claim should be denied. Accordingly, there have been attempts in the literature to point out cases of the proper evidential role of non-cognitive values. By examining these cases, we argue that non-epistemic values should not play any evidential role for scientific theories, and thus the VFI can be defended. In the end, a more accurate interpretation of the VFI will be provided.

Husserl reached a point of crisis on the position of his philosophy and subsequently arose an evolution in his thought in 1906. In addition to his presence in the neo-Kantian atmosphere of universities of Germany, he also read Kant’s work immediately, and this matter provided a ground for him to passage from the happened crisis. The transcendental turn of Husserl happened through acquaintance with Kant, and his phenomenology found another property in Ideas . Kant influenced him in matters such as “transcendental reduction,” “constitution of objects” and “intentional object”, but despite these influences and being some common problems and origins, his transcendental phenomenology ran a different way. Differences between Kant and Husserl stem from different views about the relation of knowledge and reality. In Kant, on one hand, is preserved our relation with reality, but on the other hand, knowledge bears limitations. In contrast, in Husserl’s phenomenology, we find knowledge more developed and being released itself from Kantian limitations and consequently losing its foundation in reality and goinog on the side of absolute idealism.

Broadly speaking, physicalism says the world consists of just the two types of entities: those posited by physics and those related, in some sense, to them. This relation is not symmetric in such a way that the former class has some sort of ontological priority to the latter. This article aims to show physicalism defined in terms of this relation, which I call the “fundamentality relation”, is not tenable if the picture of the world depicted by modern physics is taken seriously. Particularly, it will be argued that the dualities involved in quantum field theory imply the fundamentality relation to be a relative notion. Physicalism also becomes incoherent when the fundamentality relation is defined on symmetry structures of quantum theory. These among other arguments show that an alternative formulation of physicalism is needed to be articulated. Toward the end of the paper, I shall discuss some of these alternatives.

In Metaphysics Delta alone, there are five definitions of necessity, and understanding the relationship between these definitions plays an important role in our approach to necessity in Aristotle's philosophy. The way in which the various meanings of "necessity" are shared is reminiscent of the different meanings of Metaphysics Γ, in which Aristotle deals with the category of analogy of attribution or analogy of proportion by giving "medical" and "healthy" examples. In this article, we look at how the various uses of necessity express a single nature for it, and therefore necessity cannot be considered as a purely (irrelevant) equivocal in Aristotle's works. Among the five meanings of "necessary" in Metaphysics Delta, the fourth meaning must be taken as the original meaning of necessity, which is in fact definition of necessary on the basis of possibility. The relation of other meanings of the necessary to this basic meaning is of the kind of specific equivocality or in relation to (pros hen) a thing and origin. Pluralism of the necessary’s definitions indicates an analogy between them, not equivocality or being univocal in the definitions. The division of "necessary" in various senses is not the division of genus into its various species. While all of these are called necessary, one cannot speak of a single general concept of necessity. The analogical theory of necessity requires an understanding of the definition and nature of necessity in a particular way in each of the uses of the word. The relation that each of the meanings establishes with the original meaning determines the metaphysical degree and order of "necessity" in that meaning. For Aristotle, other meanings of the necessary are called necessary by virtue of this meaning and by the logical relation of analogy.

Morality is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. Moral intuitionism is a branch of ethics responsible for explaining whether ethical principles are objective or not. Georg Edward Moore believes in the objectivity of moral principles and rejects moral subjectivism. In his critique against subjectivists, he states that we should not equate objectivity with internality. Khajeh Nasir al-Din al-Tusi the philosopher and theologian of the Islamic world who has many works in the field of ethics is considered a virtuous philosopher. The present article examines and compares objectivism and subjectivism in ethics then after explaining objectivity in Khajeh’s point of view, compares his approach with Moor’s view. Although meta-ethics issues were not raised during Khajeh’s lifetime, by examining his works, it can be argued that he is also an objectivist in ethics and does not accept subjectivism.

Focusing on Lukacs’s and Adorno’s ideas, this paper aims to clarify how the philosophical attitude of critical theory relates to the essay genre as a method. It firstly elaborates on essay as an emergent genre of modern philosophy, indicating that philosophy is extremely interwoven with its form of presentation. Accordingly, form, language, and stylistic features are irreducible to chimerical or ornamental appearances; it includes various methodological and epistemological implications. The genre first appeared closely linked to the emergence of modern observing self, became critically self-conscious in the 20th century, increasingly engaged with the question of methodology. In doing so, interpreting Lukacs’s essay “On the Nature and Form of Essay”, indicates essay is a proper form of expression for lived experience and it is inherently an ironic form. For Lukacs, irony has the same relation to essay as doubting has to science. Afterward, by reading Adorno’s “Essay as Form”, this paper shows how he employs essay as a methodological tool to realize the negative dialectics thesis. Adorno formulates essay against the four rules that Descartes’s Discourse on Method sets up, contends that it proceeds methodically unmethodically. This method makes it a force field in which concepts come together in an open, dynamic network. So essay is a privileged form of philosophizing, allowing for the resistance to identifying, totalizing tendencies in a philosophical system. Therefore, both Lukacs’ and Adorno’s descriptions of essay are largely informed by their broader philosophical outlooks. Combining its epistemological and aesthetic aspects, they have also extended beyond the modern science-art dichotomy.

Cornell realism has been widely discussed in contemporary literature of philosophy. Jackson and Pettit (1990) propose an influential defensive argument called “program explanation” pro-Cornell realism. This explanation bestows moral higher-order properties a place in the best explanation of the natural world. We begin by specification of the proposal and its explanatory role in moral endeavors. In part two, Leiter’s criticisms against program explanation will be assessed. In part three, we consider Miller’s criticisms against both Leiter’s argument as well as program explanation. We end by proposing a new defence of program explanation based on Nelson’s argument.

Great art is the focus of Heidegger's analysis of art in the book "The origin of the work of art," which has a non-aesthetic value and is the scene of the being of truth. However, modern art represents an aesthetic dominance of art that ultimately leads to the death of great art. Heidegger's view changed after getting acquainted with the works of some modern artists, especially Cézanne and Klee's paintings and the poetry of poets like Rilke, and consequently, he started to analyze modern art from a new perspective. Altogether, modern art also could Provide human habitation in the vicinity of being and solve the homelessness of contemporary man. Therefore, some of these works can be considered great art. The present article aims to examine Heidegger's encounter with some modern artists' works and reveals the consequences of this encounter in changing his view of art in modern times.