فصلنامه حکمت و فلسفه
سال چهارم شماره 4 (پیاپی 16، زمستان 1387)

For a long time, Plato's thought has been affected by the interpretations of Aristotelianism or Neo-Platonism. However, some remarks which have been recently made regard the core of Plato's own thought in his dialogues. This becomes critical when we find something totally different from our traditional knowledge about Plato comparingit with, for example, what we see in Theaetetus where Plato, unlike Aristotle and Plotinus, maintains no role for perception in knowledge acquisition, and this is the issue which will be discussed in the present paper. Therefore, such an approach makes a main difference between the old (classic) and new (modern) interpretations of Plato's works and develops a central element in his epistemology, as will be indicated. In this article we emphasize on the negative aspect of Plato's epistemology, however, with doing so, the positive aspect will be demonstrated too.

There are various and sometimes contradictory ideas about Rousseau's thoughts. Some classify him in the group of enlightenment thinkers and some acknowledge him as an anti-enlightenment philosopher. There is no doubt that Rousseau's thought was affected by some elements of enlightenment, however, he criticized most of its characteristics as well,and challenged rationalism in the age of mastery of reason. The significance of humanity and the freedom of human beings is one of the central concepts in Rousseau's thought, but he considered reason and rationality as a tool for decreasing the very freedom. In Rousseau's view the culture of modernity not only has been constituted due to absence of morality, but also the development of science and art has not improved human's life at all. He believed that only the natural state of human's essence can release him. This paper will explain the enlightenment principles in Rousseau's thought, and compare the affinities and dissimilarities of his beliefs with the other thinkers of the age of enlightenment.

Teaching philosophy to children is an important and new discipline in the contemporary world. This article along with a comparative study explains the aims of teaching philosophy to children in different countries such as USA, Argentina, England, Australia, France, andDenmark. The results of this survey make clear the aims of those countries and show the difference and similarity between their intentions and purposes. All of them have common grounds in developing thought and argumentation, improving education, and spreading critical thought; however the advancement of children's democratic tendencies onlybelongs to the countries like as USA.

It is one of the basic questions of the Logic that why Aristotle has not dealt with conditional logic. How has the very originator of logic not paid any attention to such an important topic? Has this carelessness been some kind of ignorance or has it been deliberated and Aristotle has had good reasons for that? In this article, after having examined the conditional logic (conditional syllogism and proposition) from the stoics’ point of view and explaining its significance for modern logicians, theoretical andphilosophical bases of the two systems of predicative and conditional logic have been discussed. With studying Aristotle’s philosophy and having in mind his specific viewsregarding categories and the insertion of the things in The Ten Categories we can conclude that Aristotle has had an essence-based way of thinking and this is completely different from empirical thinking of the stoics, because stoics deal with external laws of the things in their philosophical thinking, rather than with essence and nature of the things. Therefore, the stoics have deviated from the predicative logic and have focused on conditional logic, because this kind of viewing the beings does not have thenecessities of an insertion and predicative system. In the same way that, we cannot speak conditionally and dubiously with a class-based look at the world's beings. In other words, regarding Aristotle's philosophical and ontological bases, we cannot accept conditional logic. For this reason, Aristotle has not entered discussing conditional syllogism and proposition in his works, whereas Megara school have dealt with these discussions before Aristotle, and after him this discussion has been seriously followed by thestoics, because it has been more compatible with their ontology.

The philosophical critiques, in twentieth century, on binary paradigm caused the negation of the law of excluded middle as the same as it caused the establishment of many-valued logics and fuzzy logic, while the laws of excluded middle, identity and contradiction are all fundamental principles of thought and truth or falsity of each is derived from the truth or falsity of the others. This view point gives rise to some questions as follows: Canwe deny these principles and are they fundamental? Otherwise how can we accept the claim of many-valued and fuzzy logicians indicate the negation of the law of excluded middle? Regarding these questions I first show, in this paper, various formulations of those three above laws and then I argue that the inability of binary logic and the necessity of establishment of many-valued logics and fuzzy logic are not in contrary tothose three above laws. Besides, it is the connection of the present paper that Aristotle as the first philosopher who has elucidates the laws of contradiction and excluded middle was quite aware of the possibility of ambiguous in some propositions if they contain words which are equivocal. He also appealed to the truth values of both "partially true" and"partially false" to describe those propositions which at some level are vague.

Before emerging of the modern logic, the then current logical system seemed to be without any alternative. But now classical logic encounters several systems which claim to be logical systems and rival of classical logic. Therefore a philosophical question arises: Is pluralism in logical system and/or logical rules possible?Contemporary philosophers give various answers to this question. Many don’t accept this possibility but their reasons are different. Past philosophers and logicians didn’t answer explicitly to this question, but by using their work we can gather that if they had been asked about this question they would have given decisive negative answer to it. In thispaper I try to show that they were realist about logic and consider logical truths and rules as "secondary intelligible" (in a broader sense of this term).

One of the issues that is considered as a fundamental component of Hekmat (or philosophy), is the understanding of metaphysics. The problem is how and by which way we can understand the metaphysics? The answer of Aristotle and peripatetic philosophers is "reason" and "discursive method". But Suhrawardi (who is considered as the founder of Illuminationist philosophy) added to it, The Mokashefah (spiritualdiscovery) and Taaloh (divinization), and in the same place separated his method from the early philosopher's ones. These two factors, according to Suhrawardi, are the ways for observation of incorporative world. In Suhrawardi's view metaphysics contains sensory, fantasy and rational concepts that the first is concluded from the two factors andthen became discursive and used in philosophical propositions. This metaphysics requires a certain methodology that the article says about it: in the methodology of Suhrawardi, divinization and spiritual discovery are new ways to understanding metaphysics and specially the part that must to be call "meta nature". Also the methodology benefits from the symbolic and figurative language that reduplicates the capacity of philosophical meanings. On the base of that methodology, the formal language is unable to indicate the nature of things, and to understanding of metaphysics.