فصلنامه حکمت و فلسفه
سال ششم شماره 4 (پیاپی 24، زمستان 1389)

This paper is intended to be an account of existential spatiality based on an analogy with Heidegger’s way of treating the issues of ecstatic temporality. The paper first situates the nexus of “existential spatiality and formal space”. It then proceeds to the role of the various types of spatiality in existential analytic. There are certain parallels with Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology of bodily experience. Finally, the scope of existential spatiality is delineated.

Mulla Sadra is considered unanimously as the most influential philosopher in the Islamic Philosophy tradition in the last four hundred years. Mulla Sadra’s philosophy is founded on existence as the unique constituent of reality and its primacy, the intensity of existence, and finally transubstantiality or substantial motion of being. Mulla Sadra made the primacy of existence as the main basis of his philosophy. He distinguishes between the concept of being and the reality of being. The first, is the most obvious of all concepts and the most universal, while the second, is the most ambiguous, since it requires presence knowledge and pure intellect, which would be able to discern existence as reality. Farabi and Ibn Sina perceived that in the existence-quiddity relationship, existence is an accident. Al-Suhrawardi holds the theory more radical that existence is merely a mental concept with no corresponding reality and it is quiddity, which constitutes reality. Ibn Rushd had criticized this approach. Mulla Sadra despite all Islamic philosophy tradition and his teacher, Mir Damad adopts an opposite and new outlook. His fundamental doctrine is principality of existence, and then quddities are the mental constructs. Reality is then the base of existence, which is graded and existentiating the reality of all things. Mulla Sadra at first followed his teacher and only after visionary and Gnostic existence, came to realize that it is existence, which bestows reality and has primacy on quiddity.

In the last three decades, Historical Sociology has appeared as a disciplne concentrating on "social change" as its subject matter. The notion of "social change" has, however, been in the center of Ibn Khaldun's “new science”. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on Ibn Khaldun's theory of social change (umran) and its implications for contemporary social thought.

After briefly discussing the various versions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter PSR), I argue that Clarke’s classic version of the Cosmological Arguments for the existence of God is rooted in the PSR, while Sadra’s so-called Siddigin argument is not based on any weak or strong version of PSR. My paper is thus divided into three parts: (1) the PSR and its significance concerning the Cosmological Arguments for the existence of God, (2) Clarke’s version of Cosmological Argument and its dependence on the PSR, (3) Sadra’s Siddigin argument for the existence of a necessary being - as a proper correspondent to what constitutes the nature of Cosmological Arguments - and its independence from PSR.

Muhammad Al-Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas have respectively played a considerable role in Islam and Christianity. Religious attitude can be seen in their works; and the body-soul distinction is thus one of the issues that suggest the two scholars’ religious attitudes. Ethical issues are among many others seriously proposed for examination in the works of Al-Ghazali and Aquinas. This paper aims to examine how their philosophy of ethics is influenced by their belief in the body-soul distinction and to what extent the former issue is developed by the latter, highlighting the fact that Al-Ghazali has a more significant role than Aquinas.

Even though Mulla Sadra and Jacob Boehme come from two different traditions and despite the absence of philosophical formation of the latter, a similar visionary experience led them to lay the basis of a conception of man which has many shared aspects. The issue of the relation between his body and soul enables us to seize some of these similarities, especially concerning the aim of man's terrestrial life in light of eschatology. In both cases, terrestrial life enables man to grow progressively his own "body of resurrection" which will remain in the outer world after the death of his material body.However, on the basis of his conception of the principiality and unity of existence as well as its modulated nature, Mulla Sadra presents a conception of the relation of body and soul characterized by a deep unity, and introduces the central notion of creative imagination, whereas Boehme conceives their relation through a frame of his ontology marked by a perpetual opposition of contraries. Nevertheless, both thoughts grant a great importance to body since, although it is the place of perpetual temptation and may induce man’s fall, it is also, and above all, a "temple" in which a celestial body is progressively constituted. This "body of resurrection" will remain after the death of the corporal body, taking the shape of the person's thought and acts during his terrestrial life. Therefore, this vision led both philosophers to account for the personal dimension of resurrection, and the centrality of the individual.

It seems necessary to introduce the basic concepts used in this article i.e. formalism, anti-formalism and moderate formalism. Formalists believe that the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork generally involves an attentive awareness of its sensory or perceptual qualities and does not require knowledge about its non-perceptual properties. Anti-formalists on the other hand hold that none of the aesthetic properties in a work of art are formal. A number of philosophers have recently advocated a more moderate formalism. According to this view, although not all aesthetic qualities are formal, many are, and some artworks possess only formal aesthetic qualities. The quarrel among these three rival views concerns what sort of knowledge, if any, is required for appropriate aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. In what follows, we will give a brief exposition of these three viewpoints. Subsequently, we will give our preferred position with regard to these views.