فصلنامه معرفت فلسفی
سال نهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 35، بهار 1391)

According to many Islamic teachings, human substantial motion continues after death too. Mulla Sadra also speaks in some occasions in a way that seems to have accepted human soul’s motion in immaterial worlds. However, very often he considers the separation of the soul and body as a point of freedom from change, and takes death as being the final point of human evolution.The author argues in this article that, apart from Mulla Sadra’s personal idea, one may employ many propositions and principles of transcendent philosophy to suggest a rational theory of perpetual movement of human soul even after one’s death.

The authors of this article suggest their own definition of knowledge by presence as the kind of knowledge that only reveals itself to the knower, vis-à-vis knowledge by representation that reveals something else too. They believe that this definition is more suitable to the reality of knowledge by presence as an existential entity, because revealing is the most ontologically essential trait of any knowledge, and knowledge by presence is nothing other than being, and presence, of the known for the knower. Knowledge in nothing other than the disclosure of the known for the knower, and disclosure becomes possible by presence and presence by unity or identification. Therefore, whenever there is unity or identification, there will be knowledge by presence too. Different types of unity bring about different kinds of knowledge by presence such as knowledge of the self, of the attributes, of the accidents and affections, of the faculties and existential stages, of the body, etc.

The scope and limits of human knowledge are important issues with which contemporary theory of knowledge deals. They raise such questions as: what is the realm of human knowledge? Is the human being capable of attaining the truth? And are there facts outside the reach of human knowledge?The authors try to analyze such issues on the basis of epistemological foundations provided by two groups of influential philosophers in the West and in the Islamic World, namely, Sadraian philosophers on the one hand, and Cartesians on the other. These views are compared and their commonalities as well as differences are reviewed. Admitting some limits for each source of knowledge is one of their commonalities, while their different views about the object of knowledge can be considered as major points of divergence.

Perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis) is somehow the heart of tradition, to the extent that traditionalists consider it to be the most central component of traditionalism. This article wants to review its content and critic it in the light of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy. To do so, the authors study its history, and its metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical dimensions, as well as its criteria and the method for attaining such philosophy in the works of some prominent traditionalists.For the purpose of critique, they assess the methodology and foundations of traditionalism, and juxtapose them with Suhravardi’s “True Wisdom”, and try to show their essential differences.

Shaykh Shahab-al-din Suhravardi is the first Muslim philosopher to look into the Qur’an and hadith for evidences for his philosophical theories. In this way, he tries to find the most reliable knowledge of the ultimate truth.In this article, the authors analyze Suhravardi’s viewpoint on hermeneutics (ta’wil) of religious texts. They argue that based on his theory of imagination in the domains of epistemology and ontology, Suhravardi finds it necessary to go through a process of ta’vil in order to attain and observe esoteric truths. He considers such a process to be multi-leveled and hierarchical, and by such understanding he solves the problem of the contradiction between the oneness of truth and the plurality of ta’vils which rely on one’s pre-understandings.

In his Critique of Judgment, Kant defines ideal beauty as “expressing a rational idea in one entity”. He confines ideal beauty to the human being, and in such expression, pays attention to the ideas and ends of practical reason (morality), and more than that, he focuses on the product of the culture of discipline which is the result of human use of “objective purposiveness” in nature. The question is whether such a consideration contradicts Kant’s claims about judgment of taste and its subtleties. The author in this article, after describing the concepts of ideal of beauty and culture of discipline in Kant, tries to show that although the ideal of beauty is not produces on the basis of subjective teleology, and therefore, should not be called beautiful, or at least is not a pure beauty, it has a relation to the common idea of beauty, and hence can be considered beautiful and an object for aesthetic studies.

This article, as the first of its type to be written on this subject, tries to scrutinize Walzer’s idea about the political philosophy of Islam. Walzer’s preoccupation is to find out the relation between the political philosophy of Islam and that of the Greek philosophers. According to him, all of the ideas in the former (which he calls “Arab political philosophy”) come from the Greeks. He even supposes lost Greek sources for ideas in the Islamic political philosophy which are not found in the works of the Greek philosophers. The author argues that such an approach to Islamic political philosophy stems from the inaccurate hypothesis that Islamic philosophy is not but a copy of Greek philosophy, and does not believe in the ability of Muslim scholars to produce any philosophy at all. This article takes such issues of Walzer as “Greek Source-seeking”, “not distinguishing between Islamic and Arabic philosophy”, “Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Neo-Platonism”, and “being influenced by Jewish and Christian teachings” to reflect on and criticize.