فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال بیست و چهارم شماره 1 (پیاپی 93، بهار 1398)

This is a research that seeks traces of the continuity of the theological current of Hishām b. al-Ḥakam in Basra. The research is pursued with the question of why and how Hishām b. al-Ḥakam’s thoughts continued in Basra. As it seems, after Hishām b. al-Ḥakam and his students were persecuted by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, some of his students, such as ‘Alī b. Ismā’īl al-Maythamī and al-Ḥakam b. Hishām b. al-Ḥakam, migrated to Basra to continue their theological activities, because the city was a thriving environment for theological dialogues and was distant from the center of the Abbasid Caliphate. In order to pursue their theological thoughts, they had scholarly interactions with the intellectual sect of Mu’tazila, and the opposition they faced from some Imāmīs in Basra is remarkable. Given oppositions to them by people outside and inside the Imāmīyya denomination, the current faded after a short-term presence and influential activities in Basra. Although there has so far not been a clear picture of their presence in Basra, in this research we have found that the theological strand following Hishām was active in Basra in late second and mid-third centuries AH.

This paper briefly reviews different views of the nature of revelation (waḥy), and then states that, in accordance to mystical views of the analysis of the stages of being and the manifestation of God in these stages, and thus, the Quran is not necessarily detached from prior stages of being and is present in each stage as appropriate to that stage. Thus, the Quran is present in the “Before-God” and “the Mother Book” stage down to the material stage, existing in condensed (ijmālī) or expanded (tafṣīlī) forms. Given the stages of being, the first expanded verbal presence of the Quran would be in the imaginal world (‘ālam al-mithāl), in which material accidents exist without the existence of the matter itself. Given the missionary revelation and the place of Gabriel (or Jabra’īl) therein, the paper argues that since forms of the imaginal world are present to the angel of revelation, and he is the one to whom the revelation is attributed, the attribution is genuine, indicating his active presence in the revelation, which is the formulation of Quranic words at the stage of detached and attached imagination and sending it down to the heart of the Prophet.

There is wide spectrum of views by Muslim intellectuals as concerning the concept of God, from a “personified” view by Ash’arites to a “pantheistic” view by philosophers and mystics. In two of his intellectual periods, al-Ghazālī has propounded two diametrically opposing views of the concept of God. In fact, his view is characterized by a dilemma between two views, that is, the individuation of existence and unity. On one hand, al-Ghazālī as an orthodox Ash’arite theologian provides an account of God and His attributes based on the Ash’arite theology, and on the other hand, after an intellectual development and revision of his views, from a purely theological and Ash’arite view, has tended towards the mystical pantheistic view. Providing a Platonic analysis, he offers a pantheistic account of God. Such a revision has not only influenced the views of subsequent mystics and philosophers, shows that the closer a theologian or philosopher is to the mystical taste, the more distant he is from a personified understanding of God and the closer he becomes to a pantheistic conception thereof, and the change will affect other views of the intellectual as well.

Kant is a distinguished philosopher as to his position on the relation between morality and religion. Because of his view that morality can identify our duties independently of the religionand that such an autonomous morality will necessarily lead to the religion, Kant came to be accused of self-contradiction—a contradiction between theology and ethics. In this paper, I overview, explain, and account for how morality and religion are related to one another in the framework of Transcendental Philosophy, trying to show that if Kant’s position here is analyzed and assessed in terms of his particular philosophical system as well as other considerations, his apparently contradicting approach to the relation between morality and religion will turn out to be a unified coherent position. In other words, by giving a new meaning to religion and attributing a single origin to morality and religion, Kant tries to reconcile his religious, moral, and epistemological concerns within a single philosophical system.

This paper provides an analysis of creative scientific imagination as the most important factor in the advancement of science in accordance to theoretical models and empirical findings of cognitive sciences. Most inductive inferences are intertwined with intuitive ontological relations; that is, they are not arrived at through reasoning. Intuitive ontology is a restricted categorical set, constituting theoretical frameworks. Scientific creativity is constructed by prior ontological expectations, and thus, the progress of science is owed to parting way from intuitive ontology. Analogies are powerful epistemic tools at the disposal of scientists to overcome such restrictions. Nevertheless, analogies are also affected by intuitive ontology, since they deploy analogies within the limits of their own minds. To deploy the repertoire within their creativity is to have constructed imagination. Thus, the progress of science is based on available body of knowledge, and the production of creative images is done in one way: to creatively bring about a discovery or an invention of certain familiar concepts. The relation between observation and theory in science is based on this construction via creative imagination, rather than a generalization of available models.

Understanding texts has been an important issue in humanities and a major concern of scholars. Jacques Derrida propounded the deconstruction approach and thus created a new strand in this regard. Drawing on an intellectual infrastructure derived from Martin Heidegger’s ontology, he challenged the hermeneutics governing the views of Western philosophers. Moreover, he cast doubts over linguistic classifications and laws, such as signifier, signified, sign, distinction, logocentrism, and phonocentrism, and concludes that every signifier can signify different things. He takes the main obstacle to understanding texts to be the construction of the texts. Thus, he opposed the phenomenological views of Husserl, structuralist views of Levi Strauss, and Saussure’s semiotics without providing any scholarly or rational reason, concluding that given infinite signification of signs for one another, there will be the possibility of an every-signifying signifier from an always-absent signified. Thus, he concluded that it is impossible to arrive at a certain and true understanding of a text. In this paper, we have tried to critically analyze this theory with a descriptive-analytic method in intellectual-logical terms, and thus discuss its truth or falsity.

In answer to the metaphysical question of the possibility of life after death, some people find the possibility of posthumous life more compatible with materialism than with immaterialism. Lynne Baker is one of the best-known contemporary philosophers of religion who has defended the idea, and has tried to formulate the view in terms of “constitution,” though her attempt has given rise to reactions. Some opponents believe that the main problem with her view is its internal inconsistency, which is central to the problem of life after death; that is, the idea of “unity without identity.” This paper presents a similar, and not an identical, criticism. The paper does not aim to show that it is inconsistent to emphasize on unity and reject identity at the same time; instead, we seek to show that the idea of “unity without identity” or non-reductive materialism does not actually find a clear-cut formulation in terms of her concept of constitution, whether or not its defensible. Thus, Baker’s main project is highly ambiguous. In the final section of the paper, we have sought to consider ways out of the ambiguity by drawing upon conceptual possibilities in the present literature of contemporary metaphysics, particularly the notion of realization.