https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/ Shenakht en daily 1 Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0330 Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0330 https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107153.html https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107141.html Theurgy is a form of magic that employs symbols to subjugate the will of the gods and manipulate divine powers. Theurgists believe that certain objects, due to their symbolic resemblances, possess a connection with the divine, and through their utilization, one can capture the will and powers of these deities. According to Proclus, theurgy is a form of knowledge, and despite certain differences, philosophy and theurgy share common foundations. While philosophy is a knowledge based on names and ideas, theurgy is a knowledge based on symbols. Proclus synthesizes these two forms of knowledge by providing a distinct interpretation of the concepts of causality and resemblance. He argues that all knowledge is founded upon a causal relationship, and that causality itself is based on the resemblance between cause and effect. Every cause produces effects that resemble it, and every effect returns to its cause by virtue of this resemblance; this return of the effect to its cause constitutes knowledge. The notions of causality and resemblance described by Proclus are foundational principles of magic, lacking parallels in traditional science or philosophy. By offering this distinct explanation of causality and resemblance, Proclus brings philosophy and magic into closer alignment. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107142.html The relationship between the existential condition of the knowing subject and the possibility of discovering truth has been largely marginalized within dominant modern epistemology, where knowledge is reduced to a purely mental and method-centered process under the model of the “neutral subject.” This article challenges this assumption and defends the thesis that the truth of knowledge is not determined solely by the sufficiency of evidence or the validity of reasoning, but fundamentally depends on the existential orientation of the human agent toward reality. Through a philosophical reconstruction of the theory of the noetic effects of sin and its interpretation at an ontological level, it is argued that epistemic distortion cannot be reduced to methodological failures or deficiencies of data, but should instead be understood as the result of a structural rupture between the human subject and truth—one that systematically constrains the horizon of understanding. In contrast, obedience is conceptualized as existential alignment with reality: a condition that is not an irrational alternative to rational inquiry, but rather the condition of possibility for deeper truth-disclosure and the actualization of genuine rationality. The methodology is analytic–conceptual and grounded in a critical dialogue between contemporary epistemology and religious-philosophical sources. The outcome is an ontological model of human knowledge in which the discovery of truth is conceived as an event dependent upon the existential relation between the knowing subject and reality, while sin and obedience function as opposing existential states that structurally close or open the horizon of knowledge. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107143.html It has been criticized that Foucault did not explain resistance and that his subject is imprisoned within itself and subjugated by language. The present research understands Foucault's subject, in most of his works, not as a subject but as a subjugated-subject; however, it claims that he also spoke of a subject that has existential aspects—this subject is no longer subjugated, and without this subject, Foucault's intellectual framework remains incomplete. The idea of resistance is always present throughout the expanse of his works, and this concept has an ontological correspondence with the concept of the subject. In reality, Foucault speaks of two subjects: first, a subjugated subject that emerges within discourse and the practices of power and self-techniques. This subject bears a clear resemblance to the subjects of Lacan and Althusser. Second, a subject capable of re-creation and self-creation, which can disrupt the knowledge-power game and create, not discover, a new identity. This subject is close to Nietzsche's envisioned Übermensch. The present study will first provide a brief overview of Foucault's archaeological-genealogical thought and its emancipatory aspects, then address the issue of the subject. The main emphasis is on Foucault's second subject, which, despite its considerable importance, has received less attention due to the dense discourses surrounding the first subject. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107144.html This paper offers an educational reading of Wittgenstein by drawing on key concepts of his later philosophy — such as 'training' versus 'explanation', 'language-games' as part of a 'form of life', 'rule-following' as a social phenomenon, the rejection of 'private language', and philosophy as 'therapy'. Its central argument is that socialization cannot be understood merely as a conscious, rule-based, and linguistically explicable process; rather, the internalization of norms and social skills occurs through 'training' and practical repetition within social actions and reactions, not through the theoretical transmission of rules. Accordingly, the implications for educational systems include: prioritizing 'training' over 'explanation'; aiming at 'initiation into a form of life' rather than merely teaching correct beliefs; grasping the indissoluble interconnection between 'agreement' and 'rule'; recognizing the pivotal role of 'shared examples' in shaping judgment; acknowledging the posteriority of 'doubt' to underlying beliefs; affirming the necessity of 'the other' in meaning-making and education; redefining moral virtues such as shame and confession as achievements of linguistic socialization; and finally, conceiving philosophy (and thereby educational thought) as 'therapy' and transformation in 'way of living'. — The educational upshot is a transition from abstract rule-teaching toward designing situations rich in collective practice, gradual initiation into a 'form of life', prioritizing practical certainties before doubt, and assessing understanding and rule-following through observing social interactions and the other's feedback. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107145.html This article seeks to explain and analyze the concept of "emotions/affects" at the very heart or central core of the philosophy of education of Liz Jackson, a contemporary philosopher of education, drawing on her books—especially Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Action (2024)—and her articles. According to Jackson, in recent decades, emotional well-being has become a hot topic in society and education. Yet in Western philosophy of education, emotions are often neglected, while rationalist values and norms are emphasized. In contrast, in the East, the role of emotions in individuals' social relationships is given greater weight. Thus, Jackson, defending the ethics of care, criticizes philosophers such as Nel Noddings against Kantian deontological ethics and Benthamite utilitarianism. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that "emotion/affect" is a central element in Liz Jackson's philosophy of education. She endeavors to show that education is not merely a cognitive process or a transmission of information, but is deeply interwoven with feelings, values, and lived human experience at the heart of social relationships. In her works, especially within what she calls the "affective turn" in education, she emphasizes that affect is not merely a marginal part of learning but is one of the constitutive forces shaping thought, moral judgment, and personal identity. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107146.html This article has sought to explore the views of Adam Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, on the aforementioned issue, known as "tragic pleasure" or the "paradox of tragedy." In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith locates the solution to this problem neither in egoistic theories such as Thomas Hobbes's view (which attributes pleasure to the awareness of one's own safety) nor merely in David Hume's formalist theory based on eloquent and refined expression, but rather in the concept of "sympathy." For him, sympathy is not an automatic reaction but a process grounded in the faculty of imagination and moral judgment. Through the imagination, the spectator places themselves in the situation of the character, and the primary pleasure arises not from the suffering itself, but from the "harmony of sentiments" and the "approval" of the character's appropriate emotions in that situation. Consequently, this theory, by emphasizing the inseparable connection between aesthetics and ethics, appears to transform sympathy into a means for cultivating virtue and benevolence, thus presenting a more comprehensive and ethical solution to the paradox of tragedy compared to other proposed solutions. Since his solution differs, on the one hand, from that of David Hume and resembles, on the other, that of Edmund Burke, comparing it with the ideas of these two thinkers and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his viewpoint in contrast to theirs has constituted the conclusion of the present study. The method of this research has been descriptive-analytical, based on library data. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107147.html Recent advances in machine learning, particularly in data-driven and predictive modeling, have led to remarkable successes across a wide range of scientific and practical domains. At the same time, these successes have raised fundamental questions in the philosophy of science concerning the role of explanation and causality in a scientific practice increasingly centered on statistical prediction. In response to the limitations of purely correlation-based models a growing body of work under the heading of Causal Artificial Intelligence has sought to reintroduce causal structure into machine learning.This paper offers a philosophical analysis of the notion of causality employed in contemporary machine learning, with particular attention to causal discovery and intervention-based frameworks. It argues that the causal relations represented or inferred by machine learning models should be understood neither as direct representations of the world’s fundamental causal mechanisms nor as merely instrumental devices for improving predictive performance. Instead, the paper proposes an alternative interpretation according to which causality in machine learning constitutes an intervention-dependent, mid-level explanatory structure.On this account, the epistemic legitimacy of causal models derives not from strong metaphysical commitments, but from their ability to remain invariant under interventions, support counterfactual reasoning, and enable out-of-distribution generalization. By situating causal modeling between predictive success and metaphysical realism, the paper shows how causal concepts can play an indispensable explanatory and decision-theoretic role in data-driven science without exceeding the epistemic limits of machine learning. This interpretation provides a coherent philosophical framework for understanding the renewed significance of causality in contemporary artificial intelligence. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107148.html This study begins by addressing a foundational problem: How do digital objects in video games constitute the game-world through their own mode of being—prior to any human perception or action? This problem becomes significant in light of the fact that classical theories of gaming have largely emphasized human experience and activity, while paying insufficient attention to the technical structures, algorithmic logics, and nonhuman agencies that preconfigure digital worlds. From this theoretical gap emerges the central research question: How can a synthesis of phenomenology and speculative realism provide an ontology of video games in which digital objects are understood as autonomous and agentive entities? The aim of the article is to demonstrate that the game-world is the outcome of technical logic and ontotechnical operations, rather than a construct dependent on human consciousness. The methodology is based on philosophical analysis employing a non-experiential, non-subject-centered phenomenological approach combined with principles of speculative realism to examine the modes of existence of digital objects. The findings show that graphical processing, code architecture, lighting systems, and algorithmic operations form a network of nonhuman agency that independently configures the game-world. This analysis reveals that the human occupies a secondary position, since the digital world is already constituted by technical structures prior to any engagement. The study ultimately provides a framework for a non-anthropocentric, technicologically grounded ontology of video games. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107261.html The main issue of this research is to investigate the possibility of whether the allegory of the cave, in the horizon of Jaspers is reinterpreted as an image of the existential captivity of mass human beings in the modern world. The central question is whether there is a meaningful structure between the Platonic cave dweller and the human being described by Jaspers at the level of Dasein and at the heart of impersonal structures? Referring to the concept of mass man and the role of apparatus, Jaspers believes that the crisis of modern man is not the lack of knowledge, but the blocking of the possibility of existential self-awareness and escaping existential responsibility. In the allegory of the cave, by focusing on philosophical education (paideia), turning of the soul and dialectical ascent, at the same time, different ways of human's being are introduced. In fact, the Platonic cave dweller and Jaspers' mass man are both in a state of inauthenticity, habituation and living in the horizon of untested improvisations, and their captivity is existential in nature, not merely epistemological. Liberation and ultimately freedom in both intellectual systems require a fundamental transformation of the way of human's being: for Plato through philosophy and the realization of the form of the good, and for Jaspers through confrontation with situations-limits, existential leap and existential communication. From this point of view, we can consider Jaspers' mass man as the modern and historical form of Platonic cave dweller. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107262.html This paper examines whether Pyrrhonian skeptics can appeal to disagreement as a ground for suspending judgment without thereby committing themselves to the very dogmatism they seek to avoid. Throughout his works, Sextus Empiricus repeatedly invokes disagreement as a basis for epochē, both at the beginning of inquiry and at its provisional conclusion. Pyrrhonian skeptics insist that their investigative project must remain free from all forms of dogmatism, whether positive or negative. However, Sextus’ discussion in Outlines of Pyrrhonism I. 31–34 seems to rely on a form of disagreement that may be characterized as merely possible disagreement. Such an appeal threatens to foreclose the search for truth from the outset and thus appears to presuppose a negatively dogmatic stance. Moreover, the move from disagreement to suspension of judgment may itself depend on substantive theoretical assumptions, thereby compromising the methodological neutrality that Pyrrhonian skepticism claims to preserve.The paper argues that, despite their explicit rejection of dogmatism, Pyrrhonian skeptics risk embracing dogmatic commitments in the conclusions generated by their appeal to disagreement . In particular, the appeal to merely possible disagreement appears to yield a negatively dogmatic result that sits uneasily with the Pyrrhonian ideal of suspension of judgment. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107301.html Gadamer, in “Truth and Method”, considers practical wisdom as a model for the application of understanding, which leads to the transformation of the hermeneutic subject. From the 1970s onward, in articles such as “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy” and the book In “Praise of Theory”, he regards hermeneutics as a form of practical philosophy whose domain is ethics, viewing praxis as the mode of action. Our central inquiry is as follows: Does praxis induce a transformation in the subject's view, perspective, and horizon merely in a theoretical sense? Or does it transform the situation and the objects of the subject's understanding in a practical sense? Or perhaps both? The crux of the debate lies in determining what, precisely, action transforms.. Vattimo sees the future of hermeneutics in its transformation into practical philosophy, whereas Davey limits it to the transformation of the subject. After and in light of the aforementioned interpretive dispute, we will turn to Gadamer in a manner that this issue itself has not been explicitly addressed by him. This article now enters the dispute by providing a detailed and hermeneutically reflective examination of the topic in Gadamer’s thought. The article seeks a fresh path in Gadamer’s philosophy, taking this interpretive dispute into account. This article, emphasizing situatedness, phronesis, and praxis, elucidates the dialectical movement between subject and situation through action. The conclusion is that action not only unifies subject and situation but also links the future of hermeneutics to practical philosophy and the future of practical philosophy to hermeneutics. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107393.html Avicenna’s theory of essential self-awareness (al-shuʿūr bi-al-dhāt) and contemporary rationalist theories of self-knowledge both seek to explain human awareness of oneself, yet they offer fundamentally different accounts of its source and foundation. Avicenna maintains that self-awareness is an immediate, existential mode of awareness that precedes conceptualization, inference, and rational activity. By contrast, rationalist theories—particularly those advanced by Shoemaker, Moran, Stoljar, and Smithies—treat self-knowledge as grounded in rationality, epistemic agency, and the normative structure of the mind. The present study examines the theoretical relationship between these two approaches and evaluates their respective explanatory scope with regard to fundamental self-awareness. Employing a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, the study first reconstructs Avicenna’s theory of essential self-awareness on the basis of six ontological and epistemological criteria. It then analyzes the principal rationalist accounts and compares their explanatory power through the thought experiment of the Flying Man. The findings indicate that both approaches reject the observational model of self-awareness and affirm its non-inferential character; however, they diverge significantly in explaining the origin of such awareness. The principal contribution of this article is the reconstruction of the theoretical relationship between these traditions through a three-layer model consisting of Presence, Reason, and Interpretation. In this framework, Presence constitutes the foundation of fundamental self-awareness, Reason represents the level of rational self-knowledge, and Interpretation denotes the reflective level of self-understanding. This model demonstrates that the two philosophical traditions can be reconstructed within a unified and complementary explanatory framework. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107396.html The relationship between soul and body in Mullā Sadrā's philosophy is a controversial topic due to its great importance, as well as the specific path and original ideas that Mullā Sadrā presented in explaining it. Mullā Sadrā, on the one hand, by proposing the idea of corporeal origination (hudūth jismānī), and on the other hand, by proposing the principal body and the sensible body, has explained the major part of his views regarding the relationship between soul and body. The idea of the principal body and the sensible body is one of Mullā Sadrā's important innovations concerning the soul. However, juxtaposing Mullā Sadrā's statements in various passages concerning the principal body, the sensible body, and corporeal origination, certain contradictions become apparent. The aim of this research is to employ a descriptive-analytical and argumentative method to identify these contradictions and, in the next step, to examine their validity or invalidity. The findings indicate that these contradictions are generally related to the starting point of the soul's origination, whether or not the soul encompasses the levels of elemental, mineral, and vegetable forms, the union of soul and body, the embodiment of the soul, the identity of the soul with the sensible body and its organs at their levels, and the substantial correspondence and union between soul and body. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107409.html Philosophical dualisms have continuously confronted a fundamental dilemma: how to preserve the immateriality and immortality of the soul while simultaneously accounting for the concrete unity of the human being and the causal interaction between soul and body. This dilemma, which persists in contemporary philosophy of mind through the "hard problem of consciousness" and the explanatory limitations of physicalism, stems from the traditional opposition between materialism and immaterialism. Utilizing a descriptive-analytical and comparative methodology, this study formulates this dilemma into three central problems—personal unity, causal interaction, and universal immortality—and establishes precise evaluative criteria to conduct a comparative analysis of key philosophical paradigms: contemporary physicalism, Cartesian dualism, and Transcendent Wisdom. The innovation of this research lies in offering an integrated comparative framework that not only evaluates competing systems against these criteria but also subjects the Sadrian solution to critical internal and external challenges. Findings reveal that Transcendent Wisdom—grounded in the modulation of existence, substantial motion, and the principle of the soul's "corporeal origination and spiritual subsistence"—provides a coherent framework capable of resolving all three problems concurrently. By establishing the imaginal body (in contrast to descending transmigration) and articulating longitudinal-gradational causation in moral agency, this system demonstrates superior explanatory efficacy over both physicalism and substance dualism. Ultimately, this research opens new horizons for transcending the impasses of physicalism without lapsing into incompatibilist dualisms. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107417.html This article aims to fundamentally refute the reductionist model of religion (such as Feuerbach's projection hypothesis and Freud's psychological illusion) by conducting an epistemological analysis of Bernard Lonergan's 'Unrestricted Desire to Know'. The core hypothesis is that reductionists have diminished religion to mere defect, need, or projection of attributes by disregarding the essential and necessary structure of human consciousness. The methodology is analytical critical, focusing on Lonergan’s four levels of consciousness. The paper demonstrates that the Unrestricted Desire to Know is not a mere psychological or compensatory drive but an unconditioned and essential orientation that necessarily compels reason toward accepting an "Unconditioned Being". From Lonergan’s epistemological perspective, this desire is not a deficiency requiring consolation, but the actual perfection of the cognitive process. Consequently, reductionist models—by denying the ultimate object of this desire effectively challenge the validity of the entire system of human rationality and knowledge, rendering them epistemologically invalid. https://kj.sbu.ac.ir/article_107429.html The paper intends to investigate the nature of the family mind from a phenomenological point of view. To this end, in Section 2, drawing inspiration from Husserl, we present a phenomenological description of the salient components of collective family mindedness. According to Husserl, the normal family is a community of love, and the relationship between mother and child is the most fundamental origin of intersubjectivity. What is crucial for our line of reasoning is that the family mind is to some extent non-reflective and, in Husserl’s terms, instinctive. In Section 3, we examine four leading accounts of collective mindedness, particularly Gilbert’s account of collective belief, Schmid’s account of collective intentionality, and interpretationism and functionalism about collective mind. We argue that none of these accounts is successful in providing an adequate explanation of the non-reflective aspect of collective family mind. Finally, in Section 4, borrowing the idea of non-reflective mind from a recent reading of Dreyfus’s account of skill, we seek to develop an alternative account of collective mind that appreciates the non-reflective aspect of family mindedness. Employing the idea of non-reflective mind at a collective level, we suggest that a pre-reflective joint sense of smoothness between members of a family constitutes the nature of their non-reflective family mind. Everything, such as the distance between members of the family, that violates this sense of smoothness is experienced as a tension, creating a spontaneous pull among the members of the family to reduce the tension and to restore the smoothness.