فصلنامه تحقیقات فرهنگی ایران
سال شانزدهم شماره 4 (پیاپی 64، زمستان 1402)

Farabi, an Iranian philosopher of the 3rd century AH/9th century AD, lived in the middle of conflicting intellectual, social, political and economic currents, each of which decorated the claim of power with a raising sword. These currents were not afraid to be openly violent and show a scary and decisive face and remove their opponent from the arena through the sword or with the verdict of apostasy and heresy and make fear a permanent occupation of people, although, Baghdad during the Farabi era, as an exception, hosted numerous scientific, philosophical and theological currents and practiced tolerance.
The Farabi art, at this time and in the city of seventy-two nations, was a witness to these currents and understand the competitive arena on the one hand and offered philosophical suggestions to overcome crises and improve conditions on the other hand. He held discourse tolerantly with different ethnic groups and schools of thought, and did not hesitate to sit in the assembly of a Christian, or to have students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, or look at religion from the scientific and philosophical perspectives, in order to extract what is appropriate for a society from those readings and conversations. In fact, he was a philosopher of dialogue and tolerance. Farabi looked at religious disputes from a philosophical perspective and tried to understand the position of each one in understanding the purposes of revelation and religion. He also gave a special place to reason in politics and defined the governing rules sensible and desirable for cities. In ethics and aesthetics too, Farabi paid attention to cultural diversity, behavioral rules, and judgments based on wisdom, consensus, and taste, and through these, he opened the way to pluralism, diversity, tolerance, and dialogue.
In general, the method of Farabi in "contemplating" the cultural building blocks together can be a suitable model of cultural thought and policy making in our time. Although in the contemporary era, Farabi's philosophy, due to the great weight of his political thought, has been wrongly reduced to the axis of politics but in reality, Farabi in his own thought process, has had place for each of the intellectual and cultural subjects, including ethics, theology, politics, aesthetics, linguistics, sciences, social relations, family, cultural products, and the like in a certain organic way; the connections that encourage the reader and those inclined to his thoughts to examine each of these and other components and then understand and read them all in relation to each other.
Today, due to massive investments of economy and politics in the cultural arena and as a result of services of academies as well as cultural and non-cultural scientific and research institutions being used in this direction, the cultural realm requires double freedom and liberation; a freedom that is more than the usual and known one in cultural productions and their consumption. More freedom that is necessitated in the field of culture is the freedom from desires and demands of economy, politics and even narrow religion. Although culture has always been and continues to operate in relation to these domains, the logic of cultural activity is to free this realm from adjacent areas and act according to its own particular logic. Cultural production and consumption in the current world is very much caught in the constraints of ideology, politics, economy and closed and minimal readings of religion.
Farabi's approach in presenting a general concept of human relations with himself and with the world as well as the surrounding environment and with theological and metaphysical thoughts and then showing certain abode and destinations in the future can help us in the current chaotic world where those who claim power use technological, political, religious and ideological swords to use the culture field as a tool and change people according to their desires and interests where they think of liberation, freedom, happiness and prosperity; the ones that require dialogue, participation, tolerance and respect for human rights, free from any discrimination and exploitation.

Farabi's philosophy, in the most accurate meaning, is a problem-oriented and worldly philosophy. This statement is against the claim that Farabi's philosophy is completely abstract and unrelated to the concrete issues of his life, or even if he believes in such a connection, the proposed philosophical model is considered to be fundamentally unrealizable in this world and that philosophy in many aspects i.e. anthropology, politics, ethics, etc., is considered to be the highest part of a person's soul. In contrast to this claim, which has many supporters, this article claims that not only Farabi's philosophy is basically born from the concrete political, religious, cultural and social contexts of his lifetime, but his solution to the problems of the time, unlike other one-sided solutions, is based on the distinct but related ideal-real duality. According to the latter aspect, Farabi tried to bring together the ancient tradition and the contemporary requirements and to help the intellectuals of the world solve the problems of the Islamic society of his time. In this article, while analyzing these fields including Farabi's response to the issues and crises of the time, it tries to propose this way as a model for philosophical thinking and cultural policy-making, which recognizes the two real and ideal situations at the same time.

Farabi did not deal with art and beauty in a special and separate way, and he has no other writings in this field, except for a work entitled "Great Music", which has a scientific and mathematical perspectives. Therefore, his principal fame is due to his extraordinary opinions in the field of politics and political philosophy. He considers the goal of individual and collective human life to be reaching happiness. But he considers life in a perfect and virtuous society to be necessary for a person to achieve happiness. Man should be raised and educated in such a society to reach happiness, which is a political goal and of course otherworldly. The teacher and guide must be able to use his imagination to reach the useful mind. It is from this channel that artists play a key role in Farabi's utopia and are ranked next to the head of Medina. The two concepts of imagination and simulation, on the one hand, in the education of citizens, and on the other hand, in the creation of works of art, highlight the dignity and social-political position of artists. Farabi's definition of beauty is based on the concept of perfection. In fact, perfection is beauty, even though perfection is happiness. With such an attitude, it can be concluded that the whole of Farabi's political philosophy has an aesthetic aspect, and in this way, the elements of his political aesthetics can be compiled. In this article, by using the collection of library information and the descriptive-analytical method, elements such as happiness, imagination and similes have been examined and addressed the definition of beauty that Farabi has based on perfection.

"Governance" is a new model and method in the field of politics and management, which has attracted the attention of many thinkers in the last few years. This model has many types, one of which is ethical governance. This governance, which insists on "management and administration" based on values, is a group action planned by the rulers and managers in order to implement a decent ethical system to integrate all business under a set and organization. Farabi is the first Iranian Muslim philosopher who, in addition to founding Islamic philosophy; has been the designer of many political and ethical discourse. In his political philosophy and civil science, he saw ethics and politics together, and the way to achieve the utopia of good fortune is only by converting to moral principles, which according to him, is possible through the cooperation and convergence of people and officials, and in the context of society. The subject of this article is the moral governance from the perspective of this peripatetic philosopher. The authors first defines governance and then ethical governance, then by adopting the method of content analysis and exploring Farabi's thoughts, they identify and introduce the foundations and signs of this governance/management model. Its purpose is to clarify the content of a percentage of Islamic philosophy in order to provide the content of one of the most important types of governance, for managers and officials of governmental and sub-governmental institutions, as well as citizens.

This article examines the thoughts of Abu Nasr Farabi in terms of attention to multicultural society and raises the question whether minorities and different ethnic and religious groups are recognized in Farabi's thought. If the answer is yes, how does this happen? In this study, in the two parts of ontological foundations and political-social foundations, topics such as the precedence of philosophy over religion, communal city, the great society, the use of allegory and imagination, the evolutionary formation of language and society, and the increasing complexity of language along with the evolution of society and the impact of Farabi's ontological debates on the acceptance of pluralism in society, have been discussed. In discussing the formation of society, Farabi talked about how different cultures were created and then how they faced each other. A communal city gives the same status to minorities and different groups as advanced democracies do today. The great society in his thought is made up of all nations and is more complete than a single country. Philosophy, which is based on universal rational reasoning and methodology, determines the practical and theoretical opinions of religion and provides a common language for all the residents of a city, and thus, hadithism and religious appearances do not replace rational truths. All of these make Farabi's thought rich and efficient source for analyzing and investigating a multicultural society and show the acceptance and desirability of a multicultural society in his thought.

If until now Farabi has been considered the founder of Islamic philosophy, then he can also be called the founder of a special subjectivity in philosophical thought of the Islamic world. Some philosophers of the world, as well as contemporary Iranian philosophical thought, in general, have acknowledged the possibility of dialogue between classical and modern philosophical thinking. But this dialogue has double importance for Iranian classical philosophers, because such a discourse is one of the conditions for the possibility of being present in the new philosophical horizon and conversing (and not necessarily agreeing) with it. So far, this type of discourse has been more or less based on philosophical arguments such as existence, nature, causality, motion, goal, knowledge, etc. The suggestion of this article is that it is possible and even necessary to continue this dialogue by raising another basic issue and opening another path. The basic problem proposed is the question of the subjectivity of Farabi's philosophy. Farabi's philosophy involves a certain epistemology which, more or less, includes a theory or a description about the subject. Now the question is: what is the implied subjectivity in Farabi's discussion of knowledge? This question is worthy of consideration because the foundation of modernity is subjectivity. This article tries to follow the same approach based on Farabi's texts, inspired by Cartesian methodology in extracting philosophical subjectivity. As a result, Farabi can be introduced as the founder of Islamic subjectivity.

Seeking happiness, fortune, and perfectionism are in the essence of human existence, and without a doubt, all humans are in search of success, salvation, and happiness throughout their lives. Therefore, the issue of happiness and good fortune has always been the concern of thinkers and sages throughout the history in the field of psychology and anthropology. Al-Farabi, the second teacher, defined the happiness of man as "the good that requires pleasure, which is beyond him and the last thing that can be done by human beings" and Ibn Sina used "the best thing a living person has ever sought to achieve" and other similar expressions. Of course, other thinkers have also identified the happiness and good fortune of the human being, from a selected point of view. In this article, we first explain and analyze the views and rational and narrative approaches, then analyze Farabi's opinion on the issue of happiness and his inclination to other opinions, and finally we focus on the best speech in explaining human success and happiness.