Freedom of action and free will of the moral agent are the most challenging requirements of moral responsibility. Incompatibilist philosophers implicitly argue, in an indirect way and with the help of elements such as the constancy of the past or non-changeability of laws of nature, that previous causal determinations make any alternative actions unavailable to the moral agent, and sometimes drawing on the modal principle of the transition of lack of responsibility, they directly assert that causal necessity results in the negation of human moral responsibility. In addition to these standard arguments, however, there are other semi-direct arguments that do not rely on this principle. A major semi-direct argument considered by incompatibilists is the manipulation argument, which draws upon our intuitive conceptions of the reverse relation between the responsibility of moral agents and their non-ordinary manipulations. A well-known version of the semi-direct manipulation argument is the four-case argument by Pereboom, which begins with a particularly unordinary case and then adds conditions to it, finally reaching an ordinary agent in the determinate world. In this way, he shows that such an agent lacks moral responsibility. Against this argument, McKenna adds other cases to those introduced by Pereboom, concluding that even in a determinate world as envisioned by Pereboom, we cannot decisively say that agents are not free and morally responsible. In another argument, Pereboom rejects McKenna’s agnostic approach, asserting that this approach leaves it unclear whether an ordinarily determined agent is morally responsible or not responsible. In this article, I appraise these two views, showing that for the manipulation argument by incompatibilists, including Pereboom’s four-case argument, to work, it needs to establish its first two premises, but it fails to do.

According to traditional theories of the nature of propositions, propositions are primary vehicles of representations. An act-type theory of the nature of propositions holds that traditional theories cannot satisfactorily account for the representational character of propositions. We should therefore set aside the traditional theories. According to an act-type theory, when an agent predicates a property of an object, she represents the object as something that possesses that property. That is, the agent is the primary vehicle of the property of representation in virtue of the act of predication that she does. On this theory, propositions are types of tokens of the act of predication, inheriting the property of representation from those tokens. In this article, I introduce two main versions of the act-type theory: Soames’s and Hanks’s. I will then overview the main weaknesses and strengths of these two versions. Considering the flaws of both versions, I conclude that neither can qualify as a successful act-type theory. Moreover, given the strengths and weaknesses of the two versions, I show the conditions that an act-type theory must fulfil in order to qualify as successful.

The present article explores the issue of metaphysics and its position in Wittgenstein’s thought using a descriptive-analytical method. To accomplish this, several points are highlighted. Firstly, there is a kind of continuity between Wittgenstein’s ideas. Secondly, metaphysics serves as one of the elements that can be used to assert a connection between Wittgenstein's views. Thirdly, based on these two points, metaphysics is not rejected in Wittgenstein's philosophy but rather deemed necessary. Since Wittgenstein’s primary interest was to discover meaning through the relationship between language and reality, he argued that language could only represent a part of reality due to its limitations. However, a component of reality - the essential part - cannot be expressed by language but may just be showed. Wittgenstein demonstrated that reality extends beyond what language conveys by drawing definitive boundaries around language and knowledge in both his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. While in Tractatus he adopts a moral approach to distinguish what can be said and what can be shown, characterizing essential concepts such as God, morality, and religion as what can just be shown, in his Philosophical Investigations he adopts an aesthetic approach to demarcate what can be known and what can be shown. Furthermore, given the position assigned to them by Wittgenstein, metaphysical concepts are descriptive norms that serve as foundations of empirical and scientific knowledge. Finally, we show that metaphysical concepts are not only undeniable in both Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations but also necessary components of Wittgenstein’s thought in arriving at his notion of reality.

Using the library-based and descriptive-analytical method of research, the present study is a fundamental and applied kind of research, which critically seeks to clarify the errors in the book Lexicon of Islamic philosophy in the section on a priori semantic relationships. In some cases, the errors arise from a misconception of the relevant philosophical concepts or confusion of Illuminationist, Peripatetic, and Transcendent schools of philosophy, and in other cases from improper deployment of the rules of lexicography. There are mistakes in this lexicographical work as for the systematic structure of philosophy, compliance with the formal rules of lexicography, and the conceptual relations among philosophical terms, which need to be corrected, since it has been translated into Arabic and English and is accepted by some academic centers as a base for storing, searching, and retrieving information. Moreover, it has been welcomed by other countries. This research elucidates some of the main problems with this work only in the section on a priori conceptual relations, offering solutions to provide a more enhanced account of semantic relations. I hope these are considered in the next edition of the work and this article marks the beginning of serious criticisms and reviews of lexicons

One of the most influential versions of the evidential argument from evil was put forth by contemporary American philosopher William Rowe. He believes that frequency of evils and certain particular instances of evil in the world provide a rational context of evidence against theism. In contrast, critics try to uncover flaws in his argument. Rowe dismisses many of these critiques as apologetic and ineffective, believing that theodicies such as John Hick’s “cultivation of the soul” fail to justify why arbitrary evils occur. In this study, we seek an answer for the following question: are William Rowe’s critiques of John Hick’s theodicy rational enough? To see this, we provide a rough account of the evidential argument from evil and John Hick’s theodicy, and finally show that while Hick’s theodicy fails to establish some of its grounds such as the belief in resurrection and is founded upon principles such as reincarnation, Rowe’s critiques do not undermine the ability of this theodicy to justify arbitrary evils.

The present study aims to consider thinking about death in the views of ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī and Irvin Yalom, using the descriptive-analytical method of research. Some of the results indicate that while Yalom, just like some other existentialists, believes that death marks the end of the human life, he holds that thinking about death bestows meaning and value upon life. For Yalom, a major factor that alerts human beings about (their own) death is to be involved in or have a close encounter with death, time, careful consideration of dreams and individual fantasies, artificial aiding tools, and the like. Among the practical treatments of the death anxiety are creation of a work of art and being around those who are about to die. For ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī, what perishes with death is the physical dimension of human beings, and what survives and moves form one realm to another is the psychological dimension. In his view, the universe comes from God and is under his direction and power.