scholarly journals The necessity of knowledge of self for proper comprehension of divine knowledge in Mulla Sadra's view

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (126) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Rezvaneh Najafi Savad Roodbari

One of the ways to know God is to acquire self-knowledge. This kind of knowledge is intuitive and in complete harmony with the soul of the mystic because it arises from the depth of our being. This kind of knowledge of God is as old as the history of mankind. There are different versions of the give and take between these two kinds of knowledge, the introduction to most of which is a comprehensive study of self and being. This paper, in an analytical way, seeks to explain the threefold narrations contained in Mulla Sadra's books. 1. Intuiting God through the intuition of the soul and the intuition of the truths of the creatures that are embodied in the active intellect. 2. Intuiting God through the connection and association of the soul with its powers and actions, and paving the process from the creative self to God as the ultimate creator, 3. Intuiting God through man's position as a caliphate and that the caliphate is a sign of the believer. This kind of self-reflection has two consequences: intuitive knowledge of the presence of God and the limited knowledge of the existence and qualities of God, not his essence. Summarizing Mulla Sadra's narrations in relation to knowing God through self-knowledge and associating Sadra's analysis and interpretations with the knowledge of the presence of God are the main findings of the present study.

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 453-468
Author(s):  
Jesse D. Bourke ◽  
Camille Plant ◽  
Sophia Wooldridge

The following case outlines the use of interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) with integrated expressive art practices over 10 sessions in treatment of AF, a 62-year-old Caucasian female presenting with depression as a psycho-oncology outpatient. AF’s presentation was in the context of a history of diagnosis and treatment of melanoma, several family losses to cancer, long-standing dysthymia and recurrent major depressive episodes, and relocation from interstate following marriage separation. IPT was delivered to address AF’s identified core problem area of interpersonal sensitivities, while expressive art exercises played a role of creative self-reflection and exploration. At the conclusion of therapy, AF demonstrated not only elimination of clinical symptoms of depression and anxiety but also growth as a newly resilient and enlivened individual. Theoretical, research, and intervention implications for treatment of depression in broad and specific to psycho-oncology contexts are discussed.


Author(s):  
Jaromir Jeszke

The Researcher and Their Interpretative Perspectives in the Studies on the History of Science A historian (also of medicine) should accept the values and canons of the studied culture, including medical ones, as their own. As Florian Znaniecki pointed out in his works, they should be the researcher’s highest authority. This means that the researcher should deviate from evaluating the ideas and practices of the studied culture from their own perspective. The category of minimal cultural imputation developed by Wojciech Wrzosek shows that it is not an easy process. However, the application of the subjective-rational perspective to the interpretation has already become an obvious approach. An open and much less obvious problem is the role of the historian of science when they venture to make comparisons between past and present scientific cultures. By doing so, do they still remain a historian, or – by undertaking such comparisons and evaluations – do they abandon the role, assuming the position of, for example, methodologist? The author of the article outlines the possibilities of separating these roles, presenting the attitude of a ‘methodologist’ who searches in the past for the roots and theoretical justifications for contemporary paradigms of their discipline, using the latter to evaluate the past. However, the possibility of a non-evaluative dialogue between the cognizing culture and the cognized culture is also shown, where the former also includes the specialist knowledge of a contemporary researcher interested in the past of their discipline. The historiography of a given science appears here as a record of the self-knowledge of a given generation of researchers – as their self-reflection. As Jan Pomorski calls it, a researcher assuming such a role appears as homo metahistoricus in their field of study.


2021 ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Wojciech Lasota

The article is based on an analysis of Róża Sternkac’s notebooks, which are a previously unused archival source from the history of the Orphans’ Home. On that basis, chosen examples of Korczak’s pedagogy being used in reference to various aspects of the functioning of Orphans’ Home have been identified. The examples, however, do not concern Korczak himself, but the notebooks’ author, mentored by Stefania Wilczyńska. The previously mentioned analysis allows us to trace the path of the young educator’s development. Starting with the struggle of the first pedagogical challenges, the path eventually leads to the formation of an attitude of effective action based on self-knowledge, understanding children, and work conditions. Another important factor is in-depth self-reflection, concerning not only one’s actions and emotional states, but also the sphere of values and institutional conditions. The article concludes with a proposal to broaden the understanding of the term “Korczak’s pedagogy” to the area of shaping young educators’ and pedagogues’ abilities to create their own, original pedagogy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.


Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinlein

This contribution reflects on the role of tradition-building in international law, the implications of the recent ‘turn to history’ and the ‘presentisms’ discernible in the history of international legal thought. It first analyses how international legal thought created its own tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These projects of establishing a tradition implied a considerable amount of what historians would reject as ‘presentism’. Remarkably, critical scholars of our day and age who unsettled celebratory histories of international law and unveiled ‘colonial origins’ of international law were also criticized for committing the ‘sin of anachronism’. This contribution therefore examines the basis of this critique and defends ‘presentism’ in international legal thought. However, the ‘paradox of instrumentalism’ remains: The ‘better’ historical analysis becomes, the more it loses its critical potential for current international law. At best, the turn to history activates a potential of disciplinary self-reflection.


Author(s):  
Jean-Yves Lacoste ◽  
Oliver O’Donovan

Considering the distinction between discursive, acquired knowledge and intuitive knowledge raises the question of how theology as a learned discipline relates to the spiritual life. The two kinds of knowledge cannot exist apart in history, but may be in unhappy tension. Eschatology can have no place for discursive knowledge, while history may be conceived as veiling of intuitive knowledge behind discursive knowledge. The goal of theology, then, is to introduce the believer into intuitive knowledge of God. “Indirect” communication allows it to speak of God without reductively “objectifying” him. The experience of worship combines the two kinds of knowledge. It involves words, and the words aim at truth. But its function is to allow the truth not merely to be understood but to be felt in its splendour.


Author(s):  
Hubert Treiber

More than a simple guide through a complicated text, this book serves both as an introduction and as a distillation of more than thirty years of reading and reflection on Max Weber's scholarship. It is a solid and comprehensive study of Weber and his main concepts. It also provides commentary in a manner informed both historically and sociologically. Drawing on recent research in the history of law, the book also presents and critiques the process by which the law was rationalized and which Weber divided into four ideal-typical stages of development. It contextualizes Weber's work in the light of current research, setting out to amend misinterpretations and misunderstandings that have prevailed from Weber's original texts. Ultimately, this volume is an important work in its own right and critical for any student of the sociology of law.


Author(s):  
Ian Proops

The book aims to provide a comprehensive study of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of Kant’s first Critique. It argues that Kant conceives of ‘critique’ as a kind of winnowing exercise, aimed to separate the wheat of good metaphysics from the chaff of bad. However, he uses a less familiar metaphor to make this point, namely, that of ‘the fiery test of critique’. This turns out to be, not a medieval ordeal (a trial by fire), but rather a metallurgical assay: so-called ‘cupellation’—a procedure in which ore samples are tested for their precious-metal content. The upshot is that critique has a positive, investigatory side: it seeks not merely to eliminate the dross of bad ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics but also to uncover any hidden nuggets of value that might be contained in traditional speculative metaphysics. There are both gold and silver to be found. The gold is the indirect proof of Transcendental Idealism afforded by the resolution of the Antinomies, the silver Kant’s defence of theoretically grounded ‘doctrinal beliefs’ in a wise and great originator and in an afterlife. In the course of making these points, the book engages with Kant’s views on a number of central problems in philosophy and meta-philosophy, including: the explanation of the enduring human impulse towards metaphysics, correct philosophical method, the limits of self-knowledge, the possibility of human freedom, the resolution of metaphysical paradox (‘Antinomy’), the justification of faith, the nature of scepticism, and the role of ‘as if’ reasoning in natural science.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110441
Author(s):  
Eran Fisher

This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.


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