فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال بیست و چهارم شماره 4 (پیاپی 96، زمستان 1398)

The theory of “meaning” was deployed by theologians (mutakallimūn) of the School of Kūfa, particularly Hishām ibn al-Ḥakam, as an ontological approach to analyzing and explaining divine acts and God’s attributes of action. Of God’s attributes of action, will is the most prominent, which is known by the great theologian in this period of the history of Imāmī Kalām as “motion.” Hishām ibn al-Ḥakam believed that will is what transpires out of power and volition, although it is different from other entities and creatures in the world. Thus, he posited an existence for will independently of God’s essence and act—what he referred to as “meaning.” The view was derived from some Imāmī hadiths according to which will was created separately from other creatures.

A challenging problem in theology is that of the ontology of divine attributes. In ontology of divine attributes, what is discussed is how the divine essence is related to divine attributes. Ash’arīs believe that divine attributes are distinct from his essence. One significant argument they present is the present-absent analogy (qīyās al-ghā’ib bi-l-shāhid). In this analogy, our judgments about the present—that is, humans—are generalized and ascribed to the absent—that is, God. Although this is a kind of jurisprudential qīyās or analogy, it is valid in that the ground of analogy is a full ground of the ascription of the relevant judgments to humans. Opponents of Ash’arīs leveled objections to the analogy, but most of these are implausible. In this paper, we seek to formulate the analogy and examine objections raised against it. We conclude that the analogy can just show the existence of principle for divine attributes, and thus, it fails to account for how the principle is related to the divine essence. Therefore, if the analogy is deployed to substantiate the theory of distinctness of divine attributes from his essence, it would go beyond the scope of the claim.

Abolqasem Fanaei believes in the reliability of rational conjectures (zunūn) in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), taking it to be irrational to discriminate between transmitted (naqlī) and rational conjectures. In this paper, I aim to criticize and assess four of his arguments for the above claim with an analytic method. Upon these considerations, it will turn out that (1) it is possible for God to put aside the practice of rational beings, (2) from an omniscient perspective, it is possible for speculative conjectures to be characteristically more erroneous than sensory conjectures, (3) unreliability of rational conjectures is specific to the realm of Shari’a and fatwas, not other domains of the life of a believer, (4) prohibition of acting upon rational conjectures does not imply circularity, nor is it self-defeating, and nor does it lead to the shutdown of the reason, and (5) predicaments faced by the traditional jurisprudence do not lead to the reliability of rational conjectures. Based on these points, I have shown that Fanaei’s arguments for irrationality are not plausible. Therefore, there is no justification for ignoring the relevant hadiths.

Even if we take Sophocles’s writing about civil disobedience to be philosophically irrelevant, we cannot close our eyes to Socrates and his philosophical view of such disobedience. When he was wrongly sentenced to death by the Athenian government, he refused to listen to his friends, disobey the issued ruling, and escape from the prison, because he considered civil disobedience as contrary to virtues and social conventions. The view was, however, adamantly opposed by people who believed that laws are sometimes so unjust that it is necessary to resist them with civil disobedience as the last possible way. Given the two views about civil disobedience, the fundamental question is which act is admirable towards unjust laws: should we keep obeying unjust laws in any possible ways, or can we object to them and force the government to acquiesce to reforms? In this paper, we seek to answer this question by criticizing and considering arguments from Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment period, and then uncover their internal contradictions.

A benevolent conception of insatiable pleasures as instances of happiness, on the one hand, and anti-hedonism as the only way of happiness, on the other, have always been two controversial sides of human interactions with pleasure. In pursuit of an answer to the question of the role played by pleasures in human virtue and happiness, this research deals with the nature and place of pleasure and its relation with virtue and happiness in the view of Seneca the Stoic and Imam Khomeini. Seneca believes value and goo in themselves can only be found in virtue, and happiness consists in the virtue of knowing the true nature of things, of the fact that events are outside of the scope of our wills, and then acting upon this insight and the satisfaction thus obtained. Imam Khomeini sees the good to consist in happiness resulting from rational and theological virtues. Both intellectuals considered psychological hedonism, but they went on different paths: Seneca adopts an anti-hedonistic position, taking pleasure-seeking to be fundamentally blameworthy, such that even the little good in it should be condoned but Imam Khomeini’s semi-hedonistic theory accounts for virtue in terms of the resulting rational pleasure. In this research, we find that neither of the two views can totally reject the role of pleasure, although they both consider virtue as a value. The instrumental value of pleasure has been extensively noticed, and Stoics have also admitted the necessity of desires affecting self-protection, and have paradoxically claimed that the result of achieving virtues is the peace of mind, which is very close to the notion of pleasure.

Utilitarianism is a normative ethical theory that mainly focuses on public good. In this research, we deploy the method of philosophical analysis with an emphasis on the views of Bentham and Mill to provide an account of the utilitarian approach to moral responsibility. With the rejection of entitlement in moral responsibility, utilitarianism takes the origin of responsibility to lie in pleasures and pains. In its evaluations, it focuses on consequences of actions and takes the scope of responsibility to be general. We believe that responsibility is unclear in utilitarian terms, for example as to the instrumental deployment of moral values, inattentiveness to the agent’s motivation, inattentiveness to prior commitments because of the Utilitarian Principle which is a posterior principle, relativism, the predicament of naturalism, and inattentiveness to permanent afterlife pleasures, which are ignored in non-religious theories.

Determinism (jabr) is one of the most important theological challenges, originated in Islam by Mu’awiya in the second half of the first century AH, and was then promoted by the subsequent Umayyad caliphs. On the contrary, Shiism was strongly opposed to determinism, fighting this false belief under the leadership of the Imams from the Household of the Prophet Muhammad. Notwithstanding this, there are hadiths from the Imams known as “Hadiths of Ṭīnat” (Hadiths of Nature), which might imply determinism. Much has been said by way of justifying and accounting for these hadiths and showing their compatibility with the belief in human free will in his actions and beliefs, but all these seem implausible. Thus, having tentatively accepted the reliability of such hadiths, we conclude that since the Imams were in circumstances that demanded dissimulation (taqīyya), they had to talk by way of dissimulation, using the word, “ṭīn” (clay), as a symbol. Therefore, hadiths of Ṭīnat denote something indeed which is contrary to their apparent meanings, and they need to be known by considering other hadiths.