نشریه جاویدان خرد
سال نهم شماره 1 (پیاپی 21، بهار و تابستان 1391)

Dr. Mahdi Haeri is one of Muslim philosophers that considers ontological argument as a valid one. He accepts Anselm’s argument but rejects Descartes and Severely criticises it. One of his arguments is against Descartes belief that God's essence is different from His existence, the other is against taking God's necessity of existence on a par with the necessity of mathematical truths, while the necessity of God’s existence does prove the existence of God. Also, Aquinas considers Anselm’s argument invalid, for Anselm believes the existence of God is self evident, but since we don’t know the essence of God, His existence is evident in itself, but is not evident for us. Dr. Haeri thinks that this argument is invalid and argues that it isn’t true and replies to that. He argues that first evident propositions are of one kind, not two kinds and secondly for validity of Anselm’s argument, we dont need to know the essence of God, but understanding the verbal definition is sufficient. Dr. Haeri agrees to some of the Kant’s critisims of Deascartes, but not of Anselm. This article deals with Dr. Haeri’s views on Anselm’s and Descartes’ argument, and Aquinas’ and Kant’s critisims of the ontological argument.

The main issue of this article is an overview of Scheler’s phenomenological attitude toward Ethics. From the very beginning of phenomenology he decided to apply this attitude to the realms of Ethics and Religion. to achieve this goal, thus, by some innovations in phenomenology and by establishing a system which depends on non-formal values he tried to apply phenomenological attitude to the realm of Ethics and rejected formal attitudes such as Kant’s. For Scheler dependence on these formal systems in domain of Ethics results in negligence of values as basic phenomena in moral experience of man. Since values in his approach appeared through feelings, Kant’s denial of values as well as advocating formal systems of Ethics lead to denial of feelings. For clarifying the role of feelings, Scheler makes a distinction between feelings of something (intentional feelings) and feeling states and introduces the feelings of something as the main guide to the apprehension of values.

Generally speaking, Peripatetic philosophers have advocated a theory of pure incorporeals (intellects) world which can be called “intellects theory”. In order to justify the way of emanation of intellects, they have used the famous rule of “alvahed”, according to which any single cause can lead to only one single effect; therefore, one cause cannot be led to many effects. On the other hand, being affected by the ancient cosmology, the Peripatetic philosophy believes in numerical correspondence between the number of intellects and nine spheres, and therefore limits the number of intellects to only nine. Fakhr-e Razi was against this idea and also the idea of the mentioned correspondence. Striving after defining a new replacement, he introduced “the theory of spirits” with theological flavour. Although it seems that this theory is different from philosophers’ from a conceptual and fundamental point of view, further analysis shows that these two have many key components in common.

Mulla Muhammad Taqi Majlesi(d.1070),the father of the famous Allamah Majlesi, was one of the great Shiite ulamas (jurisprudents) in the Safavid period.In addition to his works in Shiite jurisprudence, he wrote some books on Sufism.One of his important Sufi writings is a treatise called Tashviq al-Salikin. Among the most important topics of this treatise is a description of the ways of thejourney on the path to God and proves that the chain of initiation of the Sufi sheikhs goes back to the Imams.The author introduces Sufi rules and manners and shows how they are based on the Imam's way of life.Majlesi believes that Sufism is the reality of Shiism and they are essentially the same.In this paper I introduce the three existing manuscripts of this treatise and my critical edition of it.

On the conversion of modal propositions, Afzal Al-Din Al-Khunaji has many innovations accepted by all logicians coming after. Pursuing the issue in Aristotle, Avicenna, Al-Razi, and Al-Khunaji, we show that the gradual changes from Aristotle to Al-Khunaji make a spectrum with seemingly no similarity between its two ends. In fact all Aristotle's views on the modal conversion have been rejected by Al-Kunaji. Al-Kunaji's successors, although accepted his views on the conversions of the actuality propositions, denied or disregarded his views on the verity propositions. Consequently the conversion of verity propositions vanished from their logic books. In this paper, we confine ourselves only to the conversions of the actuality propositions. With the aid of modern logical formalizations, we shall show that in all disagreements between Al-Razi and Al-Khunaji, the latter’s views were the right ones, hence the total acceptance of his ideas by his successors.

In Ayn-al-Qużāt Hamadānī's ontological system, two conceptions of plurality and unity of existence have been separated. The first has been presented when he tried to argue for the existence of necessary being and in doing that he divided existence into two categories: eternal vs. originated. A precondition of such a division is to accept the idea of plurality of existence. The second conception has been presented where Ayn-al-Qużāt confined existence to the existence of God and considered Him as the only true and real example of existence. According to this conception, pluralities are essentially nonexistent and are nothing but epiphanies of God. Therefore, the relationship between them and God is like the relationship between manifested appearances and manifestation itself, not between two independent objects. Accordingly, there is no otherness or plurality in the realm of existence. However, by taking into account the differentiation that Ayn-al-Qużāt suggests between Stage of Reason and Domain of beyond Reason, it can be claimed that plurality of existence is connected with the former and its unity is connected with the latter. This means that the difference between plurality and unity of existence is epistemological, not ontological, according to Ayn-al-Qużāt.

Suhrawardi’s logic of the Hikmat al-Ishraq is basically modal. So to understand his modal logic one first has to know the non-modal part upon which his modal logic is built. In my previous paper ‘Suhrawardi on Syllogisms’(3) I discussed the former in detail. The present paper is an exposition of his treatment of modal syllogisms. On the basis of some reasonable existential presuppositions and a number of controversial metaphysical theses, and also by confining his theory to alethic modality, Suhrawardi makes his modal syllogism simple in a way that is without precedent.