نشریه جاویدان خرد
سال نوزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 42، پاییز و زمستان 1401)

Following Aristotle, some philosophers mainly Peripatetic such as Avicenna hold that Ancient Greek philosophers are physicist. In his al-Shifa, Avicenna calls them tabi'iyyun (physicist), in contrast to other group whom he with respect refers to as ila'hiyyun namely metaphysicians. According to this approach, the project of separating physics from metaphysics was set up in Aristotle's philosophy; thus, the idea of pre-Socratic philosophers that a single element – such as water for Thales or fire for Heraclitus- as the prime matter or the origin of all things was misunderstood and made them belittled. In contrast to this group of philosophers, Muslim mystics and philosophers of Illumination adopted another view closer to that of Ancient Greek philosophers. Their attitude towards nature as manifested existence paraphrased in Ancient Greek as "aletheia" and towards natural things as different manifestations of that truth greatly corresponds to what Greek philosophers meant by "phusis". So is Suhrawardi's view who regards the language of Ancient Greek philosophers symbolic and thus Aristotle and Avicenna unable to understand that language.The concept of manifestation or appearance (Zuhūr)) is the keyword to understand Greek understanding of phusis (Being). As Parmenides specified, "Being exists, and none-being does not", thus Being is one and necessary and impossible not to exist; and all things (phenomena) are its manifestations.In Islamic mysticism, the ontological foundation is "appearance" or manifestation. In his al-Asfar, for example, Mulla Sadra says: Being is one single reality characterized by "being apparent (uncovered) in all forms of appearance and it makes other things apparent. Being is concomitant with appearance. "Were it not apparent for itself and by itself in different things but apparent through something else, it would not be there at all, rather it would still remain under the veil of nothingness and darkness of hiddenness". The same relation between Being (phusis) to truth (aletheia) to the ancient Greek philosophers is between Being and Truth in Islamic mysticism. Al-Qaisari begins his Comments on Fusus al-Hikam with "On Being and that It Is the Truth"; Being is concomitant with Truth(al-haqq), thus it is one and every constituent of multiplicity is a state of it. Every exiting thing is a manifestation of the Truth. The Arabic term mazhar stems from the root zahara which means to appear, thus mazhar means a place where the Truth appears or manifests Himself; this is the precise equivalent of "phenomenon" in Greek language. In fact, what Muslim Sufi mystics say about the Truth Almighty Who manifested Himself in the world of Beings is their understanding and interpretation of the doctrine of creation in the Qur'an. In their view, "God created means that God manifested Himself". Each existing thing is a place where God has appeared and it shows Him somehow. As Jami has said, "It is Being that appears in all things".Nonetheless, Muslim mystic argue, this so-called theory of similitude (tashbih) does not imply the negation of God's incomparability (absolute transcendence or tanzih), because He is far cry from all other than Himself. As per the sufi philosophy rule "The absolutely simple entity is everything, yet it is far cry from everything". Muslim mystics, like mutakalemin, hold that God Almighty is far cry from His creature (the theory of incomparability), but contrary to them and at the same time, they hold that He manifests Himself in all existing things (the doctrine of similitude). Divinity of natural beings, in Ancient Greek thought, somehow denotes the theory of similitude as understood in sufi mystical context. Thales, as reported by Aristotle, "held that the origin of all things was water" while he was used to say that "all things are filled with gods" is an evidence for such divinity theory. In Greek tales, as reported by Homer and Hesiod, natural beings are gods having divine affairs -for example, Gea is the natural earth and at the same time the name of one god i.e. god of earth, or Oceanus is both natural ocean and god of oceans. This issue symbolizes the doctrine of similitude in mysticism yet it is not to be taken by mistake as the "theory of pantheism". This is because Ancient Greek thinkers adopted an attitude of similitude which means the appearance of the Divine in the world, and at the same time they believed in His absolute incomparability, too. Gradually, their belief of similitude was overshadowed by rival theory and transformed or lost its meaning. The separation of logos from mutus and, from another side, physics from metaphysics are the other aspects of such an event.In fact, in the works of Ancient Greek philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus and more explicitly in all those of Plato in his theory of Forms, there can be seen a consideration of incomparability between God as the Good (agathon) and the beings. That is why Plato treats those myths with respects, but expects Homer as one of the first composer of those poems not to enter his utopia.  After the Greek period, in the Christian theology, Logos or the eternal Word adopts the very status and importance of Greek phusis. The theory of manifestation of phusis with the Greek was later substituted by the idea of incarnation of the Father in the Son. As a result, despite many treatises authored under "On The Nature of Things" in the Middle Ages which sometimes are interpreted symbolically considering the nature as God's creature, the world of nature lost its theophanic affair and thus its ontological value in favour of the metaphysical world.In the same way, if we consider the concept of phusis and its relation to Being and Truth in the horizon thought of Ancient Greek philosophers, the opinions of Greek sophists will take on another meaning and facet different from what Aristotle had openly rejected. Here, too, a deep look at and reference to the understanding of the Sufi mystics about the idea of appearance and its relation to the Truth and Being prove that their attitude towards Ancient Greek Sophists is different from the opinions of Aristotelian Peripatetic philosophers who rejected them.

Some scientists, including David Hume, have tried to consider the news of miracles as unreliable. According to Hume's belief, there is no miracle that sufficient and qualified people have confirmed, human nature has an extremely strong desire for strange things, supernatural and miraculous news mainly and abundantly among nations. They are seen as ignorant and savage, due to the conflict of different religions, the miracles that are claimed to prove the truth of each of them weaken and invalidate each other; In this article, relying on the descriptive-library method, it will be clear that Hume's opinion is not acceptable. Memories and archives of the past, testimony of eyewitnesses and historical reports and quotations, physical works left behind, and some scientific laws, and most importantly, the frequency of supernatural news and the citation and acceptance of these news are among the most important reasons for rejecting Hume's theory

The long-term Naturalism-Supernaturalism debate among philosophers has been developed with respect to the question of the existence of supernatural entities. According to philosophical Naturalism, all there is are natural; while supernaturalists postulate supernatural entities like God, soul, etc. in their ontological framework. Recently the most heated debates on this issue are informed by scientific theories and the philosophers of both camps invoke the contemporary scientific achievements in their philosophical arguments. This paper is concerned with the question: is it possible for philosophical Naturalism to be challenged by scientific theories? The importance of this question is due to the dilemma it puts in the foreground of philosophical naturalists. If the philosophical naturalist answers the question negatively, she cannot legitimately appeal to scientific theories as empirical evidence in favor of her position. Because then science by default and regardless of its empirical content would confirm Naturalism. On the other hand, the acceptance of the possibility of challenge would be available just at the expense of discarding methodological Naturalism. Methodological Naturalism as a principle that excludes any supernatural entity or supernaturalistic premise from scientific explanations, guarantees the compatibility of scientific worldview with Naturalism, and eliminates the possibility of challenge. Therefore, if the Naturalist wants to benefit from science in her arguments against supernaturalists in a non-dogmatic manner, she has to give up methodological Naturalism as a necessary principle of scientific inquiry.

The following treats humanism and its problematical relation to humanity, religiosity and its ideological meanings, against this ideological illusion that humanism is the replacement of God by human being, that which is considered as the anthropocentrical foundation of humanities. It specifies humanism firstly as the historical phenomena in Italian at the beginning of modern time. Secondly, its literary signification as "human" and "humanity", will be debated, that which is used in countless usages. It includes the third ideological meaning as in Enlightenment, that centralizes the mankind place in the world in opposite to God.Humanities, nevertheless, emerge from Humanism as historical phenomena, i.e. from studia humanitatis and its different synonyms as unofficial pedagogic program that was widespread in Europe. It would be factually forgotten with making the termini "Humanism" and "Renaissance" in 19th century, in so-called "the age of Ideology". Thus, it would be opened up with countless ideological meanings of humanism in future, including its secular or religious meaning.Heidegger's Letter on Humanism as a Reference Text will be first discussed as certification for European common historical understanding of Humanism until middle of 20th century, thereupon as the philosophically most important critique on humanism.Also, humanism is in no way the anthropocentrical foundation of humanities, but they are only historically intertwined. Moreover, Humanities hasn't developed in contrary to natural sciences since the middle of 19th century unlike to common belief.

The acceptance of new astronomy in Iran was more due to their technical and military superiority than through the careful examination of calculations and observations of Europeans. Therefore, the Shaykhist leaders opposed the new astronomy based on religious and natural reasons. Muḥmmad-Karīm Khān Kirmānī (1810-1873), one of the Shaykhists leaders, in his Riṣala fī Tazyīf Kitāb Afranjī fī Ḥarakāt al-Aflāk (Treatise on a European Book’s Fraud about the Celestial Motions -April 10, 1853), brings an Arabic summary of a European book have been translated into Persian. This summary includes Copernican and Tycho Brahe’s theories as well as Cartesian vortex theory and Newtonian theory to dynamic explanation of heliocentrism. The latter is a simplified version of proposition I.1 of Newton’s Principia explaining planetary motions around the sun according to the theory of gravity and inertia law. This text should be considered as the oldest document of this proposition in Iran

Inspired by linguistic and pragmatic turn, Richard Rorty suggests a contextualist interpretation of relation between truth and justification, and refuses any substantive function of such concepts as reality, truth, and justification beyond totally context-bounded justificatory practices . In contrast, in spite of coming to terms with Rorty’s neo-pragmatism , Hilary Putnam believes his naturalistic approach is uncapable to explain the transcendent character of such important concepts as truth and justification. He also questions Rorty’s exclusively sociological attitude toward justification which makes a nonsense of any reform or progress in the transformation of justificatory practices. In this essay, I would try to show that how Putnam’s criticisms, founded on irreducibility of the normative to the natural, leads Rorty to leave his overtly fervent naturalism found in his early work, and persuades him to insist on a vocabulary pluralism.

The present essay is an explanation of fallacy from Farabi's opinion and the role of imagination in it. The subject of fallacies، public affairs، the foundations of fallacies، suspect fame، illusory certainty، and the purpose of this industry are false imagination in the form of truth. Taking "Mahaki" and "Mushabhah" are for the reasons of its interference with the art of poetry، and taking it as the basis of science. Taking "Mahaki" and "Mushabhah" is for the reasons of its interference with the art of poetry. Among the roles of imagination in knowledge and fallacy: responsible for the powers of similarity and contrast and weakness in them. The use of imaginary ideas of the properties of things instead of the first meaning of special knowledge، because of their distance from the truth of things، there is a possibility of confusion and fallacy، Being placed in an imaginary epistemological existence.

Thick moral concepts are moral concepts that are claimed to bear both evaluative and descriptive content, as opposed to thin ones which bear only the former. This paper firstly argues that the descriptive aspect of these concepts cannot be disentangled from their evaluative aspect. So their evaluative aspect cannot be reduced to thin moral concepts. Secondly, thickness is a gradable concept; any thick concept can be made thicker through adding new descriptive content. Along with changes in the descriptive content of the concept, its evaluative content changes as well; a qualitative change that cannot be reduced to thin evaluative concepts, even if they vary in degree. On this basis and through some other considerations it is concluded that moral deliberations in specific cases are not possible through simply applying general principles which are commonly expressed through thin concepts. Rather, each individual is entrusted with the task of deliberation in each particular case on their own.

Metaphysical naturalism has been the dominant strand since the mid-20th century (e.g., Quine, 1981), though the exact formulation of it has been heatedly disputed (Papineau, 2007/2020). Often it is discussed with its kin physicalism and materialism, though these terms have different connotations and theoretical baggage (Stoljar, 2010). In recent years, a relative consensus amongst the Anglo-Saxon tradition seems to be this: metaphysical naturalism should take the form of certain version of physicalism, and details aside, some form of physicalism has to be right (Kim, 2011). One prominent exception is John McDowell’s variant: accumulated in his seminal work Mind and World (1996a), he has been arguing for a relaxed version of naturalism, which denies physicalism (1996b; for discussions, see e.g., Fink, 2006; Toner, 2008). This variant has not been taken seriously in the naturalism literature, partly because McDowell’s writing style is idiosyncratic, and his works involve elements in continental philosophy, notably German Idealism and hermeneutics (e.g., 1996a, 2003). To remedy this, there are two aims of this paper. The first is to explain why Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between environment and world (1960/2004) is crucial for understanding McDowell’s relaxed naturalism; the second is to explain how contemporary analytic metaphysics can help cash out a crucial missing piece in McDowell’s writings, i.e., strong emergence (O’Conner, 2020; Wilson, 2021).

Naturalism has typically been entangled with a physicalist view. Physicalism, on the other hand, falls short of accounting for qualitative states of mental phenomena. The hard problem of consciousness seems to be a natural epistemic boundary in such a way that we do not even have any conceptualization as to how we can possibly account for mental states in physicalist terms in the future, which leads us to some version of causal/ontological plurality in the sense that it does not seem possible to explain everything with the same parameters even though the world fundamentally consists in a single substance. If plurality in multiple levels of scientific explanation is necessary, I argue that strong emergentism is, as a metaphysical framework, the best candidate to account for this fact. I will tackle two major physicalist views by Kim and Sider. Kim shows us that non-reductive physicalism is a bankrupt project whereas Sider’s physicalism that postulates a pure and complete fundamental level renders higher-level phenomena (including mental reality) metaphysically spurious. In relation to Kim and Sider’s accounts, I will try to elaborate on my view that physicalism, when pursued to the end, is inherently reductive and ultimately falls short of accounting for the mental reality. I emphasize that the causal identification of brain and mind rests on an arbitrary carving of world, namely a description of the world which cannot be intrinsic to nature. These are the main reasons why I conclude that our revised naturalism should be disentangled from physicalism and embrace the causal/ontological plurality of strong emergentism without falling for substance dualism.

Metaphysical naturalism has been the dominant strand since the mid-20th century (e.g., Quine, 1981), though the exact formulation of it has been heatedly disputed (Papineau, 2007/2020). Often it is discussed with its kin physicalism and materialism, though these terms have different connotations and theoretical baggage (Stoljar, 2010). In recent years, a relative consensus amongst the Anglo-Saxon tradition seems to be this: metaphysical naturalism should take the form of certain version of physicalism, and details aside, some form of physicalism has to be right (Kim, 2011). One prominent exception is John McDowell’s variant: accumulated in his seminal work Mind and World (1996a), he has been arguing for a relaxed version of naturalism, which denies physicalism (1996b; for discussions, see e.g., Fink, 2006; Toner, 2008). This variant has not been taken seriously in the naturalism literature, partly because McDowell’s writing style is idiosyncratic, and his works involve elements in continental philosophy, notably German Idealism and hermeneutics (e.g., 1996a, 2003). To remedy this, there are two aims of this paper. The first is to explain why Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between environment and world (1960/2004) is crucial for understanding McDowell’s relaxed naturalism; the second is to explain how contemporary analytic metaphysics can help cash out a crucial missing piece in McDowell’s writings, i.e., strong emergence (O’Conner, 2020; Wilson, 2021).

This article aims to defend a conditional proposition, or to be more precise a biconditional, one: if we reject that science is value-free, then we must also reject that values are independent of reality, and vice versa. Therefore, arguments proposed against neutrality or value-freedom of science may also be applied in defending moral realism. Two arguments for this claim will be provided. The first argument is based on conformational holism, and uses the fact that by assuming a holistic structure for the relation of theory and evidence one agrees that every criterion which is potentially useful as evidence for theories be subject to confirmation and disconfirmation by further empirical evidence. The second argument is based on anti-dogmatic nature of science I will then argue that among different forms of moral realism, ethical naturalism is the one that is better vindicated.

Both scientific and nonscientistic varieties of naturalism reject that values, reasons and meanings understood as normative standards appear as part of the content of causal explanations and are objects of scientific research. This view follows from the hermeneutic assumption that substantive normative categories comprising the human life can only do some sort of interpretive work and thus cannot be part of scientific explanations. However, with the advent of model-based social science, this assumption has been losing its force. In this paper, I argue that if science is the only activity that can give a complete understanding of the human world, the proper version of naturalism must accommodate the explanatory significance of normative standards. To this end, I will draw on three agent-based model (ABM) studies in addiction science to illustrate how norms that derive from interpretation of the values, action reasons, and life meanings of substance users at the individual level are indispensable to the explanatory social mechanisms that dynamically generate the explanandum phenomenon. Then I expand on this argument to show that the dominant versions of naturalism either contain a contradiction or are trivial. Given this surprising conclusion, we would surely need a more adequate conception of naturalism that can seriously consider the normativity of the human world.