نشریه متافیزیک
سال چهارم شماره 2 (پیاپی 14، پاییز و زمستان 1391)

Plato did not allow many artists and poets into his Utopia Republic because of their bad and misleading influence on the young. But it seems that he learned storytelling and narrating from them and concealed what he learned beneath his philosophy. Thus, Plato's dialogues became more effective and gained aesthetic and artistic qualities. Theaetetus, one of the best known dialogues of Plato, is a conversation and discussion about episteme. Due to using classical dramatic structure, this dialogue is the most important dialogue with regard to dramatization of philosophical thoughts. The goal of this article is to study the dramatic structure of Plato's dialogues and show its potentials for interaction with narrative theories. It could be said that Plato's dialogues have many resemblances to the Greek drama and, today, we can call Plato a playwright. Thus, it is important and necessary to reread and reevaluate Plato's works via narratological view.

Although the concepts of necessity and possibility (modal concepts) are inseparable concepts of metaphysics, the empiricist philosophers have traditionally challenged them. In the twentieth century, these criticisms were proposed by Quine in a new form. However, the emergence of the concept of possible worlds in semantics of modal logic made the belief that the challenge of empiricism may be defeated. In explaining the nature of possible worlds, there are two different approaches. Some philosophers believe that the concepts of possible worlds, necessity, possibility, essential, and accidental are members of a network. On the other hand, some philosophers use the reductive nominalism approach in describing the modal notions and reduce the other modal notions to the concept of possible worlds. In this article, after proposing Plantinga's criticism, as an outstanding representative of the first approach to the reductive nominalism, his standpoint to the nature of possible world will be discussed. The key concept in his thought is the state of affairs. He considers the possible world as a maximal state of affairs. Then, it will be shown that Plantinga's conception of the possible worlds can be adapted to the concept of Nafs-al-Amr in Islamic philosopher's view, in spite of obvious differences between them.

Subjectivism is viewed as one of the most fundamental underpinnings of modern philosophy. In modern philosophy, subject takes up a new position in human knowledge. The formation of the concept of subject is a decisive turn with which the modern philosophy starts. Considering the centrality of subjectivism in modern philosophy, this article attempts to explain subject in Tractatus according to David Pears. A review of Wittgenstein’s earlier teachings reveals that he considers a fundamental limitation for language. The subject serves as a point of view from which the language can be understood. The subject is the presupposition of understanding. Another way of putting this would be to say that any experience is understood from a point of view which is not represented in that experience. Regarding this, it seems that earlier Wittgenstein is somehow subjectivist. This specific form of subjectivism is different from Kantian subjectivism.

Intuitionistic logic, as a non-classical logic, encompasses the principles of logical reasoning which were used by L. E. J. Brouwer in developing his intuitionistic mathematics. Brouwer rejected the principle of the excluded middle on the basis of his philosophy. In his philosophical view, logic is the application of mathematics to the language of mathematics. In other words, logic studies the patterns that characterize valid inference. The resulting linguistic system of logic may be studied mathematically, even independently of the mathematical activities that it was originally abstracted from. In this paper, the philosophical basis of Brouwer’s view about Logic and Mathematics is explained.

The question of “what is happiness?” is among the most important questions of Greek philosophy. In those early works of Plato that very likely represent the views of Socrates, Socrates mainly focuses on moral issues and tries to get close to an explanation of the nature of virtue (or virtues), the happy life and the relation between virtue (or virtues) and the realization of happiness (Eudemonia). Given the Principle of Eudemonism, in this paper it is tried to examine Socrates’ views on the relation between virtue and happiness and defend what is known as the “Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue”.

Scientific representation is an interesting topic for philosophers of science, many of whom have recently explored it from different points of view. There are currently two competing approaches to the issue: cognitive and non-cognitive, and each of them claims its own merits over the other. This article tries to provide a hybrid theory of scientific representation, called Two-Dimensional Theory of Scientific Representation, which has the merits of the two accounts and is free of their shortcomings. To do this, we will argue that although scientific representation needs to use the notion of intentionality, such a notion is defined and realized in a simply structural form; contrary to what cognitive approach says about intentionality. After a short introduction, the second part of the paper is devoted to introducing theories of scientific representation briefly. In the third part, the structural accounts of representation will be criticized. The next step is to introduce the two-dimensional theory which involves two key components: fixing and structural fitness. It will be argued that fitness is an objective and non-intentional relation, while fixing is intentional.