hamide aflatouni; Majid Mollayousefi
Volume 7, Issue 4 , January 2017, , Pages 1-24
Abstract
Abstract
Practical reason/wisdom or phronesis, from Aristotle until Hume, meant virtuous action, in accordance with intellectual goods. Emphasizing on the role that our desires, motives and our passions, play in our ethical decisions, Hume endorsed the role of psychological factors in practical reason. ...
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Abstract
Practical reason/wisdom or phronesis, from Aristotle until Hume, meant virtuous action, in accordance with intellectual goods. Emphasizing on the role that our desires, motives and our passions, play in our ethical decisions, Hume endorsed the role of psychological factors in practical reason. Ascribing other features to practical reason, such as self-autonomy, and emphasizing on the will with more intensity, Kant presented a new definition of practical reason that posed serious challenges to Hume's views on this issue; he was struggling to eliminate the role of psychological desires and motives from the realm of moral decision. However Kant’s and his followers’ attempts to build Moral conscience, based merely on reason and will, were not so successful, and also there are some serious criticisms against Kant's purely rational interpretation of practical reason. Today, some ethical philosophers, including Philippa Foot and other new-Aristotelian, while criticizing the Kantian interpretation of practical reason by presenting a new definition of practical rationality, attempt to create a compromise between reason and other motivational elements, including intentions and motives. In this paper we discuss and examine some philosophers’ criticisms on Kant’s practical reason.
Majid Mollayousefi; Ahmad Allahyari; Maryam Eskandari
Volume 3, Issue 1 , September 2012, , Pages 119-140
Abstract
The term of ethics of belief is appeared for the first time in Clifford's well-known essay by the same title in 1876.According to Clifford's saying that became known afterwards as Clifford's Credo or Principle "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". ...
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The term of ethics of belief is appeared for the first time in Clifford's well-known essay by the same title in 1876.According to Clifford's saying that became known afterwards as Clifford's Credo or Principle "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence". This debate from the time of its presentation by Clifford has been the subject of different controversies. The main problem behind these controversies was that whether human beliefs are principally under the will of human beings to be evaluated morally or they are, like many of mental states, involuntary and passive and so excused of any moral evaluation. Some say that our beliefs are involuntary and are not under our control. In contrast, some believe in the impact of the will on our beliefs or the doxastic voluntarism. Depending on the amount of influence of the will on our beliefs, doxastic voluntarism is divided into two general kinds: direct voluntarism and indirect voluntarism. The doxastic voluntarism (direct/indirect), on the other hand, can divide into descriptive voluntarism and normative voluntarism. In normative voluntarism, we can say about a kind of epistemic deontologism in our beliefs and it is this epistemic deontologism that entails the ethics of belief. In effect, only when we can say about the ethics of belief that we believe in the epistemic deontologism in our beliefs. Martyr Motahhari believes that the reasoning (ta‘aqqul) and the thinking (tafakkur) as mental actions are in direct control of our will. For him, there is a difference between opinion (‘aqida) and thinking (tafakkur).In his view, thinking is the opinion based on a rational process which can bring about the knowledge. Taking in consideration the process of forming knowledge from him, shows that he believes in a kind of epistemic deontologism. Thus he gives some advices about the ways of acquiring the knowledge that we can place them under the title ethics of belief such as avoidance of intellectual stagnation, distinguishing between belief and the owner of belief and like that.
