فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال پانزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 58، تابستان 1389)

Heidegger –as one of the deepest contemporary thinkers- has made a new plan in philosophical anthropology. He maintains the closeness between the human and the world, and traces all the humans problems since the Platonic period to the present time back to the human-world detachment. If the human-world relation takes the desired form, the humans will actualize all his essential capacities, the thought furnishes, and the language will take the direction of expressing the truth. On this view, the human is not taken to be the master of the universe; rather he is the shepherd of the world. Thus the human does not consider the earth to be a manipulation source, but as a house of transcendence and development. Heidegger takes thought and language as two significant factors of the human approach to the world. In his view, the folk superficial understanding, radical instrumentalism, and the common metaphysics in the philosophical thought are the main obstacles to this approach. He maintains that the nature of the human is confined in subjectivity and the rational animal. Limited to his own self and is detached from the world, the human being is immersed in thoughtlessness and ignorance, and this is the source of all calamities, since the human detached from the world is like a rootless tree which is not expected to bear a fruit. Thus human beings try to dominate one another and the nature to their own satisfaction, and never think of the consequences of their own actions.

In the first section of this paper, the property of qualitative consciousness is briefly discussed. In the second section, the thesis of ontological emergentism concerning properties is considered and its conceptual characteristics are studied. Systemacity, novelty, having novel causal powers, functional irreducibility, and dependency upon the basal level are distinguished as characteristics of emergent properties. In the third section, the causal version of emergentism is introduced and some of its criticisms are briefly discussed. Since it seems that the causal version can account for the dependency of emergent properties upon the basal level as well as their causal efficacy in a proper way, and since the property of qualitative consciousness possesses the conceptual characteristics of emergent properties, this property is regarded as emergent in the conclusion.

The problem of mental causation was one of the most important problems in philosophy of mind at least from the time of Descartes. Since Cartesian philosophers found the causal interaction of the soul and the body problematic, they explained away the direct relation between the soul and the body in different ways. However, the problem was not resolved in contemporary philosophy of mind when the idea of a Cartesian immaterial soul was abandoned. If we count the mind-body problem as the most basic problem in the contemporary philosophy of mind, the problem of mental causation would be one of its main forms. With Cartesian dualism, the problem would be that of the causal interaction between the two different substances of the body and the soul, and with physicalism, the problem would be how the mind can exert its causal forces in a wholly physical world. Philosophers proposed different solutions to the problem on the basis of their views of causation and the nature of mind, some of which will be dealt with in this paper.

According to content externalism, the contents of at least some of the intentional states do not supervene upon the internal properties; that is, it is possible to have two duplicate subjects with regard to their internal properties, the contents of whose intentional states are different. So far various arguments have been raised in favor of externalism which have given rise to different versions of this view, including the natural-kind externalism, individual externalism, and social externalism. One of the most important problems regarding externalism is the question of its consistency with the idea of the subject's privileged access to the contents of his own intentional states. The gradual replacement is one of the arguments for the inconsistency between the two ideas. In this paper, I will introduce and examine some of the most significant responses to this argument, and finally I shall propose my own response.

Personal identity, its nature and the persistence conditions of our personality are among old questions both in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. There are two main questions here. Firstly, what does constitute my personal identity and make me different from others? Secondly, under which conditions I am allowed to call my-present-day-I the same person as myyesterday- I? Any answer that we give to such questions has important and significant consequences for other fields of philosophy like the philosophy of law and the philosophy of religion. Issues like punishment in the philosophy of law and resurrection in the philosophy of religion are directly related to the topic of personal identity. In this paper, we will consider some common and standard answers which have been given to the question of personal identity. First, we will discuss the relationship between personal identity and body. Secondly, we will critically discuss those accounts of personal identity which define it in terms of brain-continuity (or continuity of any other part of our body). After that, we will consider psychological properties and characteristics, especially memory, and their bearing with personal identity. It will be shown that reducing personal identity to psychological features will face us with difficulties not easier than the original problem of personal identity.

Moral phenomenology is the only discipline that can study the experiential or qualitative aspects of the realm of values and is not, like moral psychology, limited to the functional aspects of the values. Phenomenology or phenomenal experience has different meanings and what we have in mind here is the undergoing of a mental state from the first-person perspective, but there is controversy among philosophers as to what mental states can be phenomenally experienced; some require the phenomenal character and some do not; some of those who require the phenomenal character restrict it to the perceptual experiences and some generalize it to the non-perceptual too. In this paper, I will deal with the possibility of moral phenomenology on the basis of these views, and then deal with the problem of commonality and distinction. Finally two objections to the possibility of moral phenomenology will be examined.