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سال شانزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 62، تابستان 1390)

The necessary relation between moral knowledge and action is known as a Socratic theory. According to Socrates, knowledge of good and bad is not only necessary for moral action and the acquirement of virtues, but is known as its cause too; that is, knowledge is the necessary and sufficient cause of the moral act and virtue-acquirement, and nobody commits a bad act with knowledge and awareness of good and bad. Thus there holds a necessary relation between moral knowledge and act.Acknolwedging the Socrates’ theory, Plato has established it upon his own epistemological view of ideas. The theory with its Platonic foundations has certain implications and conclusions which distinguish it from other theories, despite their similarities. The most significant objection to this theory has been raised by Aristotle, though he concludes with a theory close to this with certain qualifications. However, the theory has its critics too.

Different views have been raised about the moral aspects of the abortion. Some people hold that abortion is morally wrong from the moment of conception, even if the mother’s life is in danger. On the other hand, some people believe that abortion is not wrong throughout the pregnancy and above that, killing the infant is not wrong either. A third party makes a distinction here: some of them see abortion as legitimate if the mother’s life is in danger, some have made the distinction in different phases of pregnancy and regard it as legitimate in some early phases; some others maintain that abortion is legitimate if the pregnancy was unwanted, and where the pregnancy is wanted, they only allow abortion in case the mother’s life is in danger, …. Judith Jarvis Thomson has proposed the last distinction. She distinguished between unwanted and wanted pregnancy for the first time in her 1971 paper and regarded it as legitimate when unwanted. In this paper, I will deal with the examination of part of the Thomson’s claim.

Prophecy or conveying the divine message is one of the affairs of the Prophet and Imams, but this is not their sole affair; they had other affairs as well, such as the interpretation, inference, legislation, education, governing …. In this paper, I shall try to explain different affairs of Masumin and their significant effects on our knowledge of the various religious doctrines. The most significant effects include: separation of religious doctrines from non-religious ones, resolution of the inconsistency between conflicting narrations (riwayat), kowing different sorts of religious doctrines such as the feqhi or moral ones, and knowing the more and the less important doctrines.

The atomistic approach to the understanding of religious texts in ijtihad will lead to a system of Feqh, the rules of which would be unperformabe; it will reduce the criteria of the rules to mere artifice and would not have a clear relation with the purposes of shari’ah; it will selectively refer to texts, and will leave out many religious texts. On the other hand, the contextualist approach to the texts will result in a system of Feqh which has performable rules, centered around criteria, aims at the realization of the purposes of shari’ah, considers all religious doctrines in ijtihad, resolves the current deadlockes in Feqh and is in continuity with the Usuli method as opposed to the Akhbari approach. In this paper, after the explanation of contextualism and its aspects, I will show that contextualism is the natural continuum of Usuli approach.

The use of conditional sentences in religious texts and necessity of the nature of the conditioned rule has attracted the attention of scholars of Usul to the disparity of the views of logicians and the scholars of Arabic Rhetoric about the definition of conditional sentences. This has led to a much wider literature concerning the meaning of conditional sentences in Usul. Though in this literature little attention has been focused on the dispute between the logicians and rhetoricians, it includes different and interesting arguments for each of the two views. In this paper, we I shall first explicate the theories of logicians and rhetoricians in brevity, and then examine two arguments proposed for the theory of the logicians. My contention is that the rhetorical theory is more consistent with intuitions about conditional sentences.

In order to gain knowledge of Quran as a consistent system, one needs to rely on an exegesis based on clear resources. One of the exegeses which has achieved the Quranic knowledge through original resources, and in particular, the source of readon, is AllamehTabatabaee’sAl-Mizan.This paper explicates the exegetical method of AllamehTabatabaee and examines the necessity of employing reason and logic in Quranic exegesis, and with a distinction between the two meanings of reason, as a resource for the understanding religion and as means of understanding Quran, I wil deal with the functions of each in Al-Mizan.The main characteristics of Al-Mizan in employing reason is the observation of critera such as the distinction between comparison and exegesis, commitment to Divine bounds, and distinction between exegetical and philosophical issues.

Simulism and corporealism have always been attributed to some Shiite and Sunni thinkers throughout the history of theological thoughts. One of these thinkers is HishamIbnHakam, the great Shiite theologian. Some Sunni thinkers, like Jahiz and Khayat, have attributed those positions to him. Shiite scholars have reacted differently to such an attribution. This paper deals with the arguments attributed to Hisham in favor of corporealism, and traces back the attributed view to Hisham. The paper will then sort out the reactions of Shiite scholars to such attributions and report them. In the end, I will conclude that the evidence for the attribution of corporealism to Hisham is not strong enough and the remarks of Sunni theologians in this regard are contradictory and are thus unreliable.