فصلنامه تاریخ فلسفه
پیاپی 1 (تابستان 1389)

The writer of this paper has tried to cast a fairer and more modern look at sufists, the notorious teachers of history. We should pay attention to at least a few points concerning these people: first, we know them through the works and views of their powerful and capable enemeies, i.e., Socrates, Plato, etc. Second, since sufists had no deserving heirs to disseminate their ideas and purposes, they joined the dead in the course of history. Third, in spite of all the notoriety that gained as a result of the vast propaganda of their opponents, it appears that at least some of their ideas and thoughts, which brought them some social success and led to the spread of training and education among people and giving them an equal chance of attaining good social positions are more consistent with today’s democratic society. Fourth, the masterpiece of sufists was the dissemination of anthropological discussions instead of almost useless cosmological discussions, which deserves to be greatly appreciated.

The present paper intitially explains “cogito” or “I think” motto of Descartes as the intiator of the philosophy of the modern era in the history of the West and discusses how, in his view, thought and the soul are prior to everything else. Based on his grammatical skepticism and internal journey, he wishes to reveal that man’s intellectual faculties are capable of going beyond the sensible world and experience and reaching the world of truth. In this way, man will be able to know his own soul in an intuitive rather than inferential manner. In fact, through his motto of “I think”, Descartes emphasizes the principiality of man’s thought and its consolidating role in the whole world. This is because, in this way, the human being attains a new status in the world of being. He knows himself as an existent whose existence is more certain than anything else. In fact, in his scrutinizes, Descartes feels the necessity of a starting point based on the principiality of the agent of knowledge. In other words, he believed that philosophy must begin from the deliberation of a self-conscious “I”. The writer later deals with St. Augustine in order to seek the historical roots of Descartes’ philosophy. This is because St. Augustine is apparently the first person who considers the human thought to be the proof of his existence. Accordingly, he can be viewed as a pioneer to Descartes. Finally, the writer poses the issue of Ibn Sina’s argument of “suspending man” and deals with the question of how the human being can be separate from everything but his soul. He also asks if it can be claimed that Ibn Sina’s “relation” has been reflected in the philosophies of the modern period or not. In other words, he wonders if in the modern era Ibn Sina’s allegory of the “suspending man” has been used in the philosophy of “I think; therefore, I am” or not. Descartes’ “cogito” can verily be considered to be a kind of Sinan “suspending man” who is realized directly and by itself. It seems as if in his “cogito” Ibn Sina’s “suspending man” finds its relying point of thought and being in their very conjunction point. This is because being is directly present in relation to itself through thought, and thought comes into being through becoming aware of itself.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways Plato was influenced by Eastern philosophy, particularly by Zoroaster. No human being is ever capable of establishing a philosophical system without seeking help from others’ ideas, and Plato is no exception to this rule. If this point is proved, it will not decrease his value; rather, it will add to the value, richness, and inclusiveness of his works. Here, the writer aims to explore the effects of Zoroaster’s Eastern-Iranian philosophy far from any kind of blind favoritism for ancient Iran or biased appreciation for ancient Greece.

This paper argues that there are certain relationships between the Iranian worldview and the philosophy of Akragasian Empedolces. The writer believes that there is a great similarity between the opposition of love and hatred in Empedocles’s philosophy and the opposition of bad and good in the Iranian worldview. In his worldview, Empedocles maintains that there are four stages in the world of being which, in fact, represent the stages of the battle of love and hatred. In Iranian traditions, too, the belief in the four-stage process of the world of creation, which is the realm of the opposition between good and bad, has existed since antiquity. In this paper, the writer presents some pieces of evidence revealing the effects of the Iranian worldview on the philosophy of Empedocles.

Aristotle’s thoughts have greatly attracted the attention of thinkers and philosophers in the course of history. Some of them have accepted them and some have criticized them. One of the greatest thinkers of the world of Islam is Mulla Sadra who, through knowing about Peripatetic, Illuminationist, gnostic, and theological thoughts, has created a new school of philosophy. He has explored the thoughts of several masters of philosophy in his Transcendent Philosophy. One of these prominent figures is Aristotle. In this paper, the writer has tried to locate, present, and review all the ideas that Mulla Sadra has quoted from Aristotle or attributed to him in his Magnum Opus, al-Asfar.

Learning about the process of the historical development of logic requires a series of extensive and systematic studies so that a well-documented and well-grounded description of the expansion of logical thoughts is attained. Due to the difficulties involved, such a direction is rarely witnessed in contemporary studies.The theoretical philosophy of each period and, ultimately, the philosophy of our period is considered a historical product which appears in greatly different forms at different times. Therefore, the science of philosophy, like any other science, is a historical one including the historical growth of human thought. What opens the way of thought towards pure truth cannot be merely considered to be the quantitative density of knowledge; rather, this effort and movement also includes the multiplicity and development of logical tools used to know the world. Since the time of Aristotle, formal logic has been the domain of serious debates, and we can say that modern logic is a historical phenomenon born out of several centuries of development. Accordingly, the science of logic moves ahead in line with the collection of scientific knowledge.

The dominant theory among most of the thinkers and researchers working in the field of science and philosophy is that philosophy, art, culture, and science began in Greece and ended in the new Western civilization and modernism. Here, they do not attach any value and importance to the East. However, some Eastern thinkers believe that the origin of thought and philosophy in the East. One of these thinkers is the distinguished Iranian philosopher, Shaykh Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, who believes that the history of philosophy began with Hermes, the Eastern philosopher, rather than Thales, the Greek philosopher. In this paper, the writer has tried to analyze this claim of Suhrawardi and examine the related proofs.