نشریه فلسفه
سال چهل و چهارم شماره 1 (بهار و تابستان 1395)

The concept of punishment is one of the most important concepts of Plato´s philosophy, which is achievable through dialectic, using the ordinary concept of punishment. By denying the basis of revenge view of punishment in his own time, Plato establishes his philosophy of punishment on basis of rehabilitation of the criminal. The criminal, Plato says, is primarily a man who is ignorant of the good and the evil and a sick man who suffers from instability of his rational faculty, i.e. his reason cannot take his anger and his lust under its control. Thus the punishment must make the criminal aware of the true good and the true evil, and like a painful treatment endues him the ability to control his anger and lust. So, logically, there are two possibilities: we must either fortify the superior power, i.e. the reason, or we must debilitate the inferior power i.e. anger and lust. Consequently, the Platonic punishment would be executed in two ways: on is to fortify the reason by means of education; the other is to lower the power of the inferior desires. The first is containing the wide realm of education, while the second includes the wide range of weakness; Therefore, Platonic punishment includes a range, from education to weakness, containing practical exercises, restriction, coercion and even murder. Finally, with categorizing and character recognition of the criminal, Plato determines the rehabilitative method and goal of the punishment.

Avicenna in the sixth chapter of the fifth Namat of his Isharat and Tanbihat deals with the problem of contingency in temporally created things. According to him, every temporally created thing is contingent and prior to it there must be some matter. Normally the commentators thought that here Avicenna merely is going to prove the philosophical principle that before every temporally created thing there must be some matter. This reading is not exact and cannot justify why in this Namat Avicenna speaks of contingency. Furthermore this reading does is not consistent with the whole project of the fifth Namat. According to the new reading presented here in this article, the discussion of contingency is part of a bigger argument in which Avicenna is going to prove that the theory of temporally creation is self-contradictory and the immediate creation of the Necessary Existent cannot be temporal. In this way, if the first creation is temporally created, then there must be some matter before it and then in the exact meaning it cannot be temporally created and a first creation. In this respect, nine commentaries on Isharat were surveyed and no commentator among them has pointed to the reading presented in this article.

Carl Schmitt was one of the founders of new development in theory of the state and the concept of sovereignty in the modern era, with its landmark book, political theology. With introducing the concept of sovereignty, He argued that, decision is the main characteristics of the sovereignty and sovereign and the exception is constitutive element of sovereign. Schmitt’s political theology is a defense of the absolutist state and denial of the theory of liberal democracy. According to Schmitt, liberalism begins to sideline the concept of sovereignty as the wholly and exclusively political entity. He insists that liberalism, with transmiting the power to decide on the establishment and the exception status to dialogue institutions (such as parliament) actually impoverishes the state. Focusing on the concept of sovereignty from the viewpoints of philosophers such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Benjamin and Chantal Mouffeto this article inquires the genealogy and analysis-interpretation of this concept in Schmitt’s political theology and tries to show within the concept of sovereignty, connection of this concept to other conceps such as decision and exception.

For Hegel unknowability of thing in itself in Kant's philosophy is equivalent to skepticism and he quests the reason of this failure in the critical method; For Hegel the failure of critical method lies in the pre-evaluation of possibility of knowledge, so this method of critique presuppose the subjectivism and so the impossibility of absolute. This article will argue that how Hegel with phenomenology recognizes the legitimacy of critical method and how he proposes an alternative for it which does not have the defect of subjectivism. In interpretation of phenomenology as an argument against skepticism three rival interpretation has been proposed. Two of them interpret phenomenology without any ontological commitment and the third interpret phenomenology as an argument for an ontological entity called absolute idea. By critical examination of three alternative interpretations of phenomenology, this article demonstrates that the final result of phenomenally is an ontological principle i.e. absolute idea, because the truth cannot be based on the immediate certainty of consciousness. So this new method of critique will be transitional (like platonic ascent) i.e. will be an ascent from immediate certainty of consciousness to truth of absolute Idea as an identity of indelibility and being.

Before Descartes, middle age philosophers like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Duns Scotus (1266-1308), and Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) used to discuss the distinction between essence and existence in three ways (of course, Ibn-Sina was the first who made this distinction to rehabilitate Aristotelian philosophy in the Islamic heritage). Descartes was aware of that, but discussed it according to the relation between mind and body. Yet, he told us many times that he was used to separate essence from existence in metaphysical issues. The objective of this paper is first to rephrase his untold opinion about the relation between essence and existence on the basis of his conception of the problem of distinction according to mind and body, and second, to disclose that Descartes's conception of existence is twofold. At the end, it is claimed that his twofold notion of existence and his inability to overcome it, is the principal factor in his failure to explicate everything according to first principles, and so in his failure to defeat skepticism.

What we call "tragic culture" in this article is the result of Nietzsche and Artaud's approaches that found the aesthetic patterns of it in ancient Greek tragedies and “theater of cruelty’’. So from the perspective of Nietzsche and Artaud, Theater acts as a model for aesthetic justification of the existence. The ultimate goal of this paper is a definition of a kind of culture that is on the basis of such a perspective. The aesthetic culture takes place against the kind of culture that tries to reduce life to an ideological and subjective element. So in the end, in addition to a comparative study, we will see that the unity that exists in the modern culture is a false unity that is imposed by an external element, but the true meaning of culture is formed from an internal unity like the aesthetic unity in the work of art and this culture is linked to the aesthetic justification of existence. Finally we try to explain the quality of this culture in the pattern of a concept of "Action", "Pluralism" and "Yes Saying" to life and to the "New". This research is based on library resources and particularly focusing on the books “The Birth of Tragedy” and “the theatre and its double’’.

Mullasadra discussed about the origin of art and aesthetic creation more than any other mulism Philosphers. For him human as the caliph of god, presenting the art to humans in the worlds before the material creation, instinctive tendencies especially desire to present and expose the creations and innovations, desire to accomplishment and completion of works, desire to decoration and beautification are among the origins of art. With reliance on straggly remarks of Mullasadra, this article tries to reconstruct his theory about the origin of art and for this aim the concept of imagination has a pivotal role, because it is the close origin of all art works. So according to Sadraean anthropology, two faculties of passive imagination and active imagination has a pivotal role in aesthetic creation. Faculties that are in a close connection with the special conception of discontinuous imaginative forms and make the distinctive idea of him from Avicenna.