محمود نمازی اصفهانی

Moral education, in the sense of the process of institutionalizing moral values in human existence, is considered one of the most important missions of divine religions. The general structure of these values is the same in different religions, but the moral teachings that are the practical manifestation of these values are different in some details. What is the place of "sacrifice" as an important moral doctrine in moral education? This article examines the place of this doctrine in moral education based on the teachings of Islamic and Jewish sharia by referring to library sources and using the descriptive-analytical method. Both Shari'ahs propose selflessness and sacrifice towards others as one of their most important educational teachings, but they differ in determining its criteria - as a moral act. Paying attention to the race of people in determining examples of self-sacrifice is the most important criterion that exists in Judaism - in its present form; In the sense that self-sacrifice against a non-Jew can have a negative value. On the other hand, the only criterion for self-sacrifice towards others in Islam is that it should be based on God's service. Paying attention to this axis in practice means that only the enemies of God and people who suffer from moral diseases such as wonder and arrogance are not included in the scope of self-sacrifice.

Virtue ethics is known as one of the three branches of normative ethics, but some moral philosophers are not in favor of an independent position for it in normative ethics. The question of the present article is, what is position of virtue ethics in normative ethics researches? Are the arguments of those who assert the independence of virtue ethics in front of other competitors, i.e. duty-oriented and utilitarianism, without problems? What is the proposed solution? The collection of data in this article is a library, and it explains the questions and answers them with a descriptive and analytical method. Those who believe in virtue ethics have different interpretations for virtue ethics, the virtue of the moral subject is common in all of them. The reasons for turning to the ethics of virtue are numerous and mostly refer to the weak points of competing theories. Investigations show that there are problems with the interpretations of virtue ethics, and the arguments for approaching it can be undermined. The result is that although virtue ethics does not have an independent position in normative ethics, the logical concerns of those who adhere to virtue ethics can be solved by the theory of divine proximity

The most important pillar of existentialist philosophy is human and his free will. In Islamic philosophy, Allamah Tabatabaei proposes some valuable points, according to Islamic doctrines and under the influence of Mulla Sadra's philosophy, about human being. Since recognizing human being and perceiving his characteristics plays a considerable role in generation of intellectual schools, investigating the anthropological foundations is one of the pillars of philosophical thinking. In existentialist philosophy, even in its theist faction, the man is an abandoned being around him everything is formed and his nature is constantly formed in complete freedom, while in Allamah's view, the man is the subject of recognition, everything is formed around God, and the man can achieve the highest degree of transcendence at his own discretion. The present article attempts to do a comparative study of the anthropological foundations of the theist existentialism and Allamah Tabatabaei's anthropological foundations through a descriptive-analytical method.

One of the important books written by philosophers of mind and translated in Iran is Keith Maslin's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Somewhere in the book, four reasons have been presented for negating the possibility of arguments for incorporeity of the soul. The Islamic philosophers have considered the incorporeity of the soul as a resolved issue and tried to prove it. These arguments go back one step and attempt to deny the possibility of the soul's incorporeity, considering it as having a corrupt unacceptable sequence and regarding the acceptance of the soul's incorporeity irrational. This article states four reasons for Keith Maslin's book and tries to criticize them to prove the possibility of the soul's incorporeity in a rational way. It proves the mind is not all or nothing; by accepting the soul's incorporeity, the brain still functions, there would be no problem of the idiot fallacy, and it would be possible to enumerate the souls.

Existentialism, formed in the mid-twentieth century as an objection to all holistic inclinations, restricted its axis of attitude to human’s existence and maintained that the only device of construction of existence is freedom. For the existentialist philosophers, since the man’s genesis with special essence and nature has been denied, the man is then obliged to make his own identity with his own volition. Since there is no objective value from the existentialist philosophy’s viewpoint, and the values are formed just in the light of volition and choice, and it is not important to what end they would lead, the man comes to existence just when he does his works out of his volition and freedom. However, the question is whether any deed is valuable just because of being volitional, or the value of volition is related to things other than volition. Clearly, the answer lies in the axiological foundations of existentialism. They believe that any person must choose his own values individually. Thus, when there is no value beyond one’s ‘choice’, the very volition and choice are valuable; and since ‘choice’ is inevitable and evading it is not rational and it does not follow the causality principle, there is no objective and far-reaching standard for it. In Islamic view, however, volition – in spite of the fact that it creates superiority for the human over other creatures – has no value in itself and, put technically, it is not an independent favorite thing. Rather, the favorability and source of value of human’s volitional actions lie in human’s perfection.

In this paper the epistemic sources of existential philosophies are inspected. To this end, first, we explain briefly the antecedent views regarding the value of human knowledge from ancient Greece to contemporary philosophy and philosophy of the 20th century. During the explanation of this historical survey, the idea of phenomenology/internality as one of the epistemic sources of existential philosophies is observed. In this section, the way in that this reflection transfers from Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728 – 1777) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) in modern history, to Jean-Paul Charles Aymar Sartre (1905 – 1980) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) and others in contemporary century and existential philosophy is examined. Then the role of mediocrity of this line of thought, i.e., Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) as an intermediary student of Kant and direct teacher of Nietzsche is highlighted. Then the position of phenomenology among its homogeneous fields, such as, epistemology, ethics and logic is descripted and distinguished. In this section it will be observed that phenomenology could not be a tendency opposing its homogeneous fields, for phenomenology means to know phenomena, and therefore in this case it is part of knowledge, not opposite to it. Then lexical and terminological concepts, definition, courses and the subject of phenomenology are investigated. In this part we will deduce that it is impossible to give a firm, fixed and definite definition for phenomenology. At the end the theory of phenomenology as a basis of epistemology of existentialism is examined.