فصلنامه پژوهش های فلسفی - کلامی
سال بیست و پنجم شماره 3 (پیاپی 97، Autumn 2023)

Many people in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheistic traditions testify to their experience of being commanded by God to do something or to be a certain way. Is this kind of testimony from experience credible in some cases, and, if so, on what ground? The main thesis of this article is that it is credible in some cases and a suitable ground is available in the morally purifying experience of the human conscience. The article looks to the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an for relevant testimony to the importance of righteous divine commanding experienced by humans. The relevant commands are not abstract or merely theoretical but grounded in human moral experience and potentially motivating for righteous action. The article doubts that God would be God if there were no divine commanding given directly to receptive people in their moral experience. It contends that God would not be a morally righteous guide of the divine kind needed for the worthiness of worship by humans in the absence of God’s commanding people directly in their experience.

We point out how some Christian-Muslim comparative philosophies of religion may be enhanced with certain translations or interpretations of Christianity: a modalist view of the trinity and a high Christology. While perhaps of only limited significance, we argue in more detail that a comparison of two leading philosophers, one Islamic, the other Christian, can bring to light a shared philosophy of innate ideas or nativism, grounding moral and theological views of goodness and the divine

This article provides a brief background of how Comparative Theology is understood today, to point out features of how it is practiced that are responsive to issues peculiar to contemporary Catholicism, and to suggest how a version of CT might be developed that is more consistent with Islamic traditions of thought on related issues. In order to accomplish this last goal, a brief introduction to the traditional “Islamic sciences” is provided. It will be suggested that an Islamic Comparative Theology (ICT) can be understood as a multidisciplinary field that draws on several Islamic sciences, as well as research in religious studies. I argue in favor of a blurring of the distinction between Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology, and point out that relevant discussions are to be found across a variety of traditional Islamic sciences, but that it would be advantageous to collect these discussions together and to augment them with information gleaned from both secular and Islamic approaches to the teachings of Muslim thinkers about theological issues, broadly understood, in comparison with what is found in non-Islamic traditions in such a manner to enrich our own understandings of the issues and those with whom we engage in dialogue.

A longstanding problem confronting Christian theology and its doctrine of incarnation is the apparent contradiction that it faces. For example, to be divine, in the relevant sense, is to have the limitlessness of God. To be human, in the relevant sense, is to have the limitations of humans. The incarnation (in the person of Jesus per Christian doctrine) is to be both divine and human. Many theologians and sympathetic philosophers have attempted to ‘consistentize’ (i.e., make consistent) incarnation. Timothy Pawl has been one of the latest to do so. In this paper, I concisely note a dilemma for Pawl’s approach.

If we want to talk about the philosophy of religion with an Islamic approach, we must clarify what are its differences and similarities with the conventional philosophy of religion in the West. For this purpose, in this paper, the meaning of comparative philosophy and its obstacles, possibilities, necessities, and benefits will first be investigated. After that, it will be shown what considerations should be taken into account in order to have a comparative philosophy. Then, we will show how to have a philosophy of religion with an Islamic approach and what differences and similarities this type of philosophy of religion has with the Western philosophy of religion. Following that, some hermeneutic considerations for this philosophical comparison will be mentioned, and afterward, it will be shown how the Christian background of Western philosophy of religion has affected it. Finally, we will review some of the main subjects of the philosophy of religion if it is to be rationally evaluated with the foundations of Islamic thought to show what differences it has with the conventional Western philosophy of religion.

Contemporary philosophers of religion have predominantly focused on understanding the nature of faith, yet there has been a lack of attention towards a particular type of faith that we can call inquiry-based faith. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring some challenges associated with inquiry-based faith. I argue, in particular, that while this is a widespread kind of faith, we face a dilemma in showing how it is possible and plausible. On the one hand, faith that P requires acceptance of P, and on the other, if someone is inquiring into whether P is the case, she must not already accept that P is the case. Borrowing a conceptual framework from recent literature on inquiry, I propose a solution to this dilemma by appealing to parts of the story of Abraham in the Quran. I suggest, specifically, that one can have faith that a partial answer to a question is the case, and at the same time, seek further inquiry into the question for a more complete answer. As such, I support the idea that inquiry-based faith is a possible and plausible option for both faithful people and inquirers.

In recent work, I defend an indeterministic weightings model of libertarian free will. (Lemos, 2018, Ch. 5; 2021; 2023, Ch. 6). On this view, basic free-willed actions are understood as the result of causally indeterminate deliberative processes in which the agent assigns evaluative weight to the reasons for the different choice options under consideration. In basic free-willed actions, the assignment of weights is causally undetermined, and the choices are typically the causal consequence of these assignments of weights in which the choice option that is more highly valued is the choice option selected. In a recent article, Ishtiyaque Haji (2022) criticizes my view, arguing that it: (a) does not resolve worries about luck and (b) does not make coherent sense of the freedom of the weightings involved in free choices. I argue that his criticisms are based on misunderstandings of my position.

John Lemos defends an indeterministic weightings model of libertarian free will that is a variant of event-causal libertarian views. Many argue that these views are susceptible to the luck problem: an agent’s directly free choices are too luck infected for the agent to be morally responsible for them. The weightings model supposedly escapes this problem largely because in this model an agent’s reasons for choices do not come with pre-established values. Rather, an agent performs intentional acts of weighting that contribute to the value she assigns to her reasons. Decisions that are consequences of weightings are, thus, under the agent’s control and not subject to luck. In a recent paper, I argued that despite its weighting component, Lemos’s model succumbs to the luck problem. Lemos rejoins that my criticisms are based on misunderstandings and confusions. I deflect the charge of misperception and explain why the weightings model remains susceptible to the luck problem.

In this article, we inquire into the concept of meaning in pedagogy through Heidegger’s philosophy. Since metaphysical systems reduce the Being of humans, due to the dominance of subjectivist and worldlessness views, they tend to suffer from the crisis of nihilism, which has made its way into various ontological sciences, especially pedagogy. In this article, we tackle the elements that culminated in such meaninglessness in pedagogy in terms of dualism, worldlessness, absence of existentials, and finally the posteriority of Eros and Pathos to Logos. Now, since the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger extensively deal with the issue of meaning, and in particular, Heidegger in Being and Time grapples with the concept of the meaning of Being by analyzing existentials, here we decided to discuss meaning by drawing on the existentials of understanding and attunement, and from this perspective, we look for a way out of the crisis of nihilism in pedagogy. Discussion of the meaning of being-in-the-world and the prior precedence of Eros over cognition and Logos is also helpful for overcoming the crisisof nihilism in pedagogy. That is, if pathos, eros, and the existentials of understanding and attunement are taken seriously in pedagogy, then pedagogical meaninglessness might be resisted by appealing to worldlessness and subjectivism. In fact, the revolution that sparked in Heidegger’s philosophy, in which pathos was deemed prior to logos and the question of meaning was rendered possible by turning to existentials, opened the way for a pedagogy based on existentials.