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1 - Farabi and his Distinction between Existence and Quiddity
Ghasem Purhassan

One of the innovations of Farabi and Islamic philosophy is the theory of the distinction between existence and quiddity. This view was merely developed in the light of understanding the meaning of the reality of being. Islamic philosophers, particularly Farabi and Ibn S More

One of the innovations of Farabi and Islamic philosophy is the theory of the distinction between existence and quiddity. This view was merely developed in the light of understanding the meaning of the reality of being. Islamic philosophers, particularly Farabi and Ibn Sina, because of their epistemological rupture with Greek tradition, sought to understand being differently from Aristotle and, in a way, abstained from reducing the question of being to the question of the whatness of objects. In addition to a conceptual and logical distinction, Farabi managed to develop and present an ontological distinction in the field of philosophy. Ibn Sina expanded it so vastly that some might consider this theory as one of his own philosophical achievements. After the problem of the evidence and principliality of existence, the quality of the relationship between existence and quiddity turned out to be one of the most important discussions in Islamic philosophy. At the beginning, under the influence of dividing being into necessary and possible types, Muslim philosophers tried to explain the fundamental difference between them through explaining the relationship between quiddity and existence. As a result, they considered two propositions as the basis of two interpretations of existence and the explanation of its relationship with quiddity. The theory of the synthetic nature of quiddative existents in terms of their existence and quiddity, the existence’s being superadded or accidental to quiddity, and the distinction between existence and quiddity in existents are the views that emerged in Islamic philosophy with Farabi and gradually came to the fore as the most important discussions concerning existence. Furthermore, Farabi’s discussion concerning the individuation of quiddities and the criterion for individuation, which was later accepted by all Islamic philosophers and emphasized by them, was developed under the influence of the above theories. In this paper, the writer has initially tried to provide a correct understanding of the theory of distinction through clarifying its fundamental bases. Then he has clarified its ontological and philosophical consequences and highlighted the importance of this theory in Islamic philosophy. Such an explanation necessitates an extensive investigation of Farabi’s ideas about existence, the meaning of existence, and the existence-quiddity relation. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

2 - Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Islamic and Western Philosophies
Abdurrazzaq Hesamifar

Doubt and certainty are two soulish states which form problematic and certain knowledge in the process of human cognition. Problematic knowledge is mainly obtained in the realm of empirical sciences, while certain knowledge is mostly acquired in the domain of certain no More

Doubt and certainty are two soulish states which form problematic and certain knowledge in the process of human cognition. Problematic knowledge is mainly obtained in the realm of empirical sciences, while certain knowledge is mostly acquired in the domain of certain non-empirical sciences such as philosophy, logic, mathematics, and gnosis. In the history of philosophy, philosophers often sought certain knowledge and believed that it is possible to attain the truth. In contrast, skeptics undermined the acquisition of such knowledge and did not believe in the existence of any kind of truth. The confrontations of these two groups have always constituted a part of the history of philosophy. Such a confrontation has been revived in contemporary philosophy as a result of the discussions which are made in modern epistemology both in Islamic philosophy and Western philosophy. On the one hand, contemporary Muslim philosophers have tried to defend the strong epistemological principles of Islamic philosophy through negating the views of skeptics. They believe in realism in epistemology and reject any interpretation of knowledge which is based on subjective idealism. On the other hand, at least some contemporary Western philosophers have tried to provide some responses to the questions posed by skeptics by developing a number of new views. In this comparative study, the author has tried to evaluate the attempts of a group of philosophers of each side in this regard. It is eventually concluded that the responses of Islamic philosophers to the posed questions enjoy a stronger basis both in the past and at present. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

3 - Epistemological Place of Phronesis and its Importance in Aristotle’s Philosophy of Ethics
Ali Nazemi Ardakani Reza Davari Ardakani Malek Hosseini

Phronesis or practical wisdom is one of the intellectual virtues which Aristotle has defined as a predisposition for continuously becoming involved in practice while thinking wisely about good and evil affairs. The outcome of this predisposition or phronetic act is the More

Phronesis or practical wisdom is one of the intellectual virtues which Aristotle has defined as a predisposition for continuously becoming involved in practice while thinking wisely about good and evil affairs. The outcome of this predisposition or phronetic act is the product of a kind of philosophical thinking which, in addition to viewing certain established principles, attends to madīna (polis) as a cradle for the development of acts; to finite, particular, and changing affairs as the subject of knowledge, and to Man as a free agent. The irregularity and, at the same time, legitimacy of phronesis provides individuals with a strategy not to surrender to fixed and strict scientific laws as the only legitimate tools of knowledge acquisition. Through making a methodological distinction between sophia or theoretical wisdom and phronesis, Aristotle has in fact founded the independence and irreducibility of practico-ethical knowledge about what is correct; practical deliberation cannot be reduced to logical arguments. In Aristotle’s ethical philosophy, accidental knowledge, as the knowledge of finite, particular, possible, and changing affairs, is a complement to essential knowledge, which pertains to pre-eternal and universal affairs and primal and fixed basic principles. Sophia and phronesis can lead to happiness only in case they function as the two sides of the same coin. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

4 - Hume’s and Kant’s Epistemological Critique of Metaphysics
حامد احتشامی SSeyyed Mohammad Hakak

Metaphysics is a term which was used by the compilers of Aristotle’s works for a part of them that appeared after the book of Physics. Later it was used as the title of the science which Aristotle dealt with in that section; a science that discusses the principles of ex More

Metaphysics is a term which was used by the compilers of Aristotle’s works for a part of them that appeared after the book of Physics. Later it was used as the title of the science which Aristotle dealt with in that section; a science that discusses the principles of existent qua existent. Since it delves into some of the fundamental problems of human beings such as God, self, and free will, this discipline has always been the main representative of philosophy. It is, in fact, only in the modern era that epistemology has gained more importance than metaphysics; moreover, some philosophers such as David Hume and Emanuel Kant have questioned its validity. In Hume’s view, metaphysics is an absurd field of science because its concepts are meaningless. In Kant’s view, metaphysical concepts and, thus, the related propositions are meaningful; however, it is impossible for theoretical wisdom to tackle them, and the solutions for metaphysical problems should be sought in the realm of practical wisdom or ethics. This paper reports and evaluates the viewpoints of these two philosophers in relation to metaphysics. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

5 - Middle Platonism: Introduction and Analysis of Religious and Philosophical Theorems
Mahbobeh Hadina

20.1001.1.20089589.1400.12.2.8.6

Middle Platonism is one of the most important philosophical-religious schools of the first century BC. While claiming to revive the original Platonic school, it is rooted in the fundamental epistemological and philosophical theorems of that time including the essence of More

Middle Platonism is one of the most important philosophical-religious schools of the first century BC. While claiming to revive the original Platonic school, it is rooted in the fundamental epistemological and philosophical theorems of that time including the essence of the One, God as Creator, descent of the soul, rational knowledge, and salvation. A study of middle Platonists’ works reveals that the philosophical principles of this school are mainly based on a reinterpretation of certain religious-philosophical theorems of Platonic, Stoic, Pythagorean, and gnostic schools. In fact, a clear trace of the concern for explaining the problem of the oneness and transcendence of the essence of Almighty, the quality of the creation of the world, and the presence of evil therein can be witnesses in the works of the philosophers that advocate the mentioned schools. The fundamental principles of middle Platonism are basically religious, and this school is mainly concerned with such topics as the duality of the essence of divinity in two concepts, God as the Maker or Creator of the world, the duality of the spiritual and material origin of Man and the descent of the soul, cosmology and the material structure and fate of the world, eschatology with an emphasis on the theorem of Man’s salvation through rational knowledge, and finally the discussion of ethics and the definition of its practical frameworks for attaining rational perfection, which is necessary for salvation. The present paper aims to explain and provide a comparative analysis of the principles and quality of the formation of the philosophical theorems of Middle Platonism as a philosophical-religious school. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

6 - Historical Trends of Epistemological Issues in Pre-Sadrian Philosophical Tradition
Ali Asghar Jafari Valani Donya Asadi Fakhrnejad

20.1001.1.20089589.1401.13.2.4.9

A study of epistemological developments in Islamic philosophy indicates that, although the issues in this philosophical trend have not been independently dealt with and have been generally discussed under epistemological issues, there are other problems in Islamic philo More

A study of epistemological developments in Islamic philosophy indicates that, although the issues in this philosophical trend have not been independently dealt with and have been generally discussed under epistemological issues, there are other problems in Islamic philosophy that, if organized and classified, can open the door to philosophical approaches to ontological discussions. Perhaps, some of the fundamental ambiguities in epistemology can be clarified based on the outcomes of such discussions. For example, reference can be made to the effects of ontological views of Ibn Sīnā and Suhrawardī over their epistemology. The main question of this study is how an epistemological approach can be extracted from an investigation and analysis of a collection of problems and demonstrate it with reference to the standpoints and views of Islamic philosophers. In order to achieve this purpose, it must be said that an epistemology based on the sense, reason, and intuition can lead to the development of Islamic philosophers’ epistemology. The Peripatetic philosophy is mainly based on the intellect and reasoning, and the Illuminationist philosophy, although relying on reasoning, basically draws on unveiling and intuition in epistemological analyses. However, logic, as a gateway to epistemology, usually opens the discussion because almost all Islamic philosophers consider the theory of definition as a tool for unveiling the unknown (unveiling the general nature of affairs) relying on acquired knowledge and the five predicables (universals). Nevertheless, Suhrawardī and his followers, while relying on presential knowledge, believe that a genus-differentia definition is not justified and, by criticizing the theory of definition, try to discover the particular unknown through observation and illumination. Accordingly, the problem of vision and imagination in the common epistemological system is usually viewed as one of the sides of acquired knowledge. In contrast, it is explained under presential knowledge in Illuminationist philosophy. Manuscript profile

Open Access Article

7 - An Analytic Evaluation of the Concept of Moral Certainty in Western Philosophy: A Historical Approach
Mohammad Saeid Abdollahi Mohsen Javadi Muhammad Legenhausen

20.1001.1.20089589.1403.14.4.5.5

<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roma More

<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-hansi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-bidi; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-theme-font: major-bidi;">Moral certainty is one of the functional concepts that has recently attracted the attention of some philosophers of ethics and epistemologists. During the last decades, philosophers have approached this concept from different angles; however, they have sometimes provided an incorrect and inaccurate concept of this term because of ignoring its origin and historical development and losing sight of the historical, religious, or legal context in which it might be used. Jean Gerson, the French scholar and educator, created the term “moral certainty” for an appropriate level of certainty. Later, Descartes defined it as a kind of certainty that is sufficient for organizing behavior and assisting people in solving life-related problems. On the other hand, John Locke included absolute certainty and moral certainty in the concept of his own “real certainty”. The concept of moral certainty has also undergone an interesting process of development in Christianity. In church law, the concept of moral certainty is used to describe the mental status of the judge when they should decide with certainty whether the accused is truly guilty or not. In this paper, after referring to the first applications of this concept in the history of Western philosophy in the course of a historical-philosophical research and a study of the development of the concept of moral philosophy in different periods, the authors demonstrate that the concept of certainty has been prone to many changes since the 14th century and its first use in Gerson’s works. They will also clarify the place of this philosophical term in today’s epistemology of ethics after its historical journey and presence in various disciplines, and how the Wittgensteinian approach to this concept has gained widespread acceptance during the recent decades after its introduction many centuries ago. Manuscript profile

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