Dharma is the road for both the individual and the social progress in the world. It is fundamental for the growth of the individual and thereby for the society. In this paper, I propose to discuss the above mentioned topic under the following heads: 1) Dharma – its connotation - literally meaning “that which upholds, supports or maintains the regulatory order of the universe. It also refers to the righteousness and duty of humans towards oneself, society and the universe at large. 2) Dharma – its classification - according to the Indian tradition and philosophy, Samanya and Visesha, i.e. general and specific duties, depending on the functionality, taking into consideration the unity as well as diversity among human beings. 3) Dharma - its application - the individual’s practice of values such as truth, righteousness, harmony, kindness, love, non-violence, etc., is made possible only as a member of the society. These values pursed by the individuals have social significance for they are practiced to help others and thereby help themselves. When an individual discards this fundamental principle, life becomes meaningless, and the society chaotic. The scriptural clarion call to Dharma is but to feed the roots of integrity in our lives.

Vaisesika is one of the very oldest of the six orthodox systems of Indian Philosophy. This system was found by the great sage Kanada also named Uluka. It is associated with the Nyaya system and has the same end in view, namely, the liberation of the individual self. It represents a pluralistic realism and is usually held to be an atomistic, metaphysical theory. It accepts only two independent sources of knowledge, perception and inference. It brings all objects of knowledge, i.e. the whole world under seven categories, namely, Dravya, Guna, Karma, Samanya, Visesa, Samavaya and Abava. And the atomic theory of the Vaisesika explains the order of creation and destruction of non-eternal objects. It is an early attempt at an atomic theory of the universe and consequently does not mention ‘God’, but later commentators felt that the atoms by themselves could not have created an orderly universe so they postulated a ‘God’ regulating the activities of the atoms. This paper will give a brief survey of the atomistic pluralism of Vaisesika Sutras.

The philosophers claim that everything in the world is maintained in a disciplined way. They claimed that there is cause-effect relation behind every event. But it is the view of Imam Gazzali that the connection between what is believed to be the cause and the effect is not necessary. For example, This is not That; nor That can be This. Or: the affirmation of one does not imply the affirmation of the other, nor the negation of one implies the negation of the other. The existence of one is not necessitated by the existence of the other, nor its non-existence by the non-existence of the other. There are other examples, as well, such as the quenching of thirst and drinking, satisfaction of hunger and eating, burning and contact with fire, light and the rise of the Sun, death and the severance of the head, healing and the use of medicine, the loosening of bowels and the use of a purgative, or any other set of events observed to be connected together in Medicine, or Astronomy, or Arts, or Crafts. They are connected because of the Decree of God, the Lord of the Universe, which preceded the existence. If one follows the other, it is because God has created them in that fashion, not because the connection in itself is necessary and indissoluble. He has the power to create the satisfaction of hunger without eating, or death without the severance of the head, or even the survival when the head has been cut off, or any other thing for that matter.

What has been noticed during the history of human thought and human life is that forms, figure, feelings of pleasure and aesthetic perception, are not the only subjects that belong to the sphere of art. In fact, art includes other aspects, such as themes and content. As a matter of fact, each art work could be considered as outstanding, not only because of its form, but because of its theme and content, as well. However, art works in the western classical art, were inspired by mythology and religion and their form has been a reflection of that content. In this paper art is going to be discussed through its religious themes and contents. Therefore, first, I will analyze some approaches to religious themes and content in art works through discussion of religion as its background. And, second, I will try to establish a method which will distinguish between religious and non-religious themes and contents in the works of art.

One of the most important and most original Islamic philosophers, Razi, has a radical view of philosophy. His approach to philosophy is radically rational or Aristotelian, and it seems that he does not give any place to godly or divine concepts in his cosmological design. Against some concepts that have been suggested in the basic sources of Islam, like Quran and hadits, Razi offers some different concepts which he uses in a slightly different manner. So, in this paper I will try to compare and explain those concepts within the borders of Islamic and Aristotelian understanding of philosophy.

Sufis have advocated, as well as appropriated, the perennial hermeneutical breakthrough that while a set of exactly true statements referring to the Ultimately Real is impossible of formulation, the scriptural revelations of historical religions symbolize what is ultimately Real in their specific cultural contexts. Such a hermeneutical standpoint of Sufis has profound sociopolitical implications in view of the fact that theological politics of truth has hyperpolarized the entire humankind into perennial warring camps. Sufis, across differences of cultural conditioning, philosophical interpretation, theological exegesis and jurisprudential reconstructions, have been unanimously oriented to moral struggle as well as spiritual transformation owing to their irresistible love of God and their quest for God-realization. Their non-consequentialist commitment to fundamental values of Islam and their unconditional love of God germinated a universalist, perennialist and transcendentalist spiritual quest whose contemporary appropriation by Muslims and assimilation by non-Muslims can pave the way for peace, love, catholicity, pluralism, as well as justice and sustainable development. This pluralistic ethos of Sufis needs to be revisited and re-appropriated. Their emphasis on tolerance, pluralism, liberalism, love and peace needs to be underscored in our times. Their aversion to any kind of ideological dogmatism and theological fanaticism needs to be re-appropriated.

The paper aims at analyzing the arguments put forward by al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on the question of the divine attributes in the sixth chapter of their respective works, the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) and the Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence). By comparing these two works, it appears that Ibn Rushd’s intention is to defend philosophy against the assumed misunderstandings of al-Ghazālī. The Arabic philosophical texts of the sixth chapter constitute a debate over the proper understanding of the divine attributes, their origination and evolution from its roots in Greek thought to its development by the Mu‘tazilites, Ash‘arites and the Muslim philosophers. Distinct from the doxological “names” of God, the matter of the attributes was a subtle point of doctrine that belonged largely to the realm of intellectuals. For them, however, it carried a great deal of weight: having to do with the relation of God’s essence to such qualities ascribed to Him in the Qur’an as knowledge, power and will. In the final analysis, the attributes discussion was effectively over the nature of the God. It furthermore came to bear on other such significant points as the oneness of God and His relationship to creation. God’s knowledge is discussed by al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd respectively. Becoming familiar with the implications behind our authors’ references to various religious groups helps us appreciate their interactions and understand where within the disciplines of kalām and falsafa they themselves stand. It appears that Ibn Rushd’s concerns lie primarily with upholding the Greek tradition and showing its compatibility with Islamic doctrine, a task that sometimes prompts him to break with his own Muslim predecessors in falsafa.

Presently, we are living in international and inter-cultural society or what is called global society. The question of global peace and prosperity has emerged as the foremost challenge of our times. The need for global peace can be authenticated from various ideological, theological, religious and spiritual perspectives. A purely intellectual and subsequently scientific and technological approach to social, political and economic problems can again culminate into great wars across the globe. We, the philosophers, have to strive to make room for faith, love, tolerance and devotion in inter-personal as well as inter-national affairs, if we earnestly want global peace and progress. In this paper, I shall try to shed some light on the abovementioned issue with reference to the basic sources of Islamic cultural and spiritual tradition. The entire focus of the Islamic teachings, including the Prophetic behavior and the practices of his faithful companions, Imams, Sufi-poets and philosophers, powerfully oriented Muslims to adopt Islamic ethical teachings for peace, universal goodwill and service to mankind with love and care. They transcended all kinds of prejudices or even considerations of caste, color, gender, race, culture and geographical divisions. They fostered horizontal and liberal values of love and tolerance. Their universal and perennial spiritual vision was anchored on One Supreme God —the Creator and Sustainer of them all; the Supreme personification of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Unfortunately, however, the modern puritans are displaying great misunderstanding of the spirit of the Qur’an and are shutting off the doors for a universal, tolerant and judicious interpretation of the Islamic Weltanschauung. Therefore, during current tumultuous and terror-shaken scenario, there is a great need to initiate, appropriate and appreciate the real Islamic spirit, its ethnico-cultural legacy and value-system on positive lines along with other great religions of the world. A truly global dialogue from Islamic perspective can help bringing about peace and prosperity for the entire human race. No doubt, Islam has such great ideals and moral standards to offer with a view to solving of the moral crises of the global human society.

After the publication of William Lane Craig, ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument’ in 2000, the discussion of classical Muslims scholars’ arguments on the existence of God has attracted many contemporary students. In his book Craig discusses Al-Kindi’s cosmological argument on the existence of God. He suggests that Kalam cosmological argument also survives the objections of Hume and Kant. In this paper, however, I would like to introduce another type of cosmological argument based on the concept of analogy (qiyas) by another Muslim rationalist scholar, Al-Qadi ‘Abd Al-Jabbar. In his arguments ‘Abd Al-Jabbar rejects the philosophers’ view that God is the cause of the universe, since that will imply the eternity of the world, one of the justifications used by al-Ghazali to discredit Muslim philosophers in his Tahafut Al-Falasifah (‘The Incoherence of Philosophers’). Hence, ‘Abd Al-Jabbar in his arguments mainly depends on the concept of action.

This paper aims at presenting a comparative study of a summary of Proclus’ first argument on the eternity of the world in two of al-Shahrastānī’s works. Proclus’ first argument does not survive in Greek, but we have two surviving Arabic versions, one in the translation of Isḥāq b. Hunayn (d. AD 910) and an earlier one by an anonymous translator. In this paper, I shall comment on some philological and philosophical points of al-Shahrastānī’s summary of Proclus’ first argument on the eternity of the world. Also, I shall briefly look into al-Shahrastānī’s sources and his argumentation against Proclus in the context of Muslim dialectical (kalām) discussions for the doctrine of the creation of the world.

The paper discusses Ibn Tufayl’s Hay ibn Yaqzan, a philosophical novel written in Andalusia in the 12th century. The novel’s eponymous character is a solitary individual growing up in a deserted island, who only meets another human being and gets initiated into language at an advanced age. As Ibn Tufayl presents it, in solitude Hay has developed elaborate ways of thinking, discovered God as the ultimate cause of the world and worships him in a direct, personal way. Given the context of Ibn Tufay’s story, the paper focuses on the relation between language and thinking. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations it criticizes the idea that language and community are inessential to human identity and ways of thinking. It argues that Ibn Tufayl should not be interpreted as putting forward a dualist picture of the self like Descartes’, but rather, as influenced by the Sufi ideals of genuine faith and personal experience of God.

Ali ibn Abu Bakr ibn Abdulzhalil al-Ferghani ar-Rishtani al-Marginani (1123-1197) is one of scientists who made a huge contribution to the development of theology. He received the initial knowledge in Margelan, later he moved to Samarkand and remained there till the end of his life. He made pilgrimage to Mecca in 1444. In the book Kitab ul mashoyy (The book about Sheikhs) he provided names more than forty scientists from whom he got his education. The biggest, world renowned Burhanuddin al-Marginani’s work is the Al-Khidoya. Thanks to this work he became very known scientist in all Islamic world. In the previous works on a science about laws of Sharia, only insignificant questions in the jurisprudence sphere were considered, while there were the problems connected with national life of the population, and the society and state. From this point of view, detailed studying of unstable conditions, during his time, to distinguish priority questions from minor tasks, decision making process, and comprehensive study and deep supervision of these matters were demanded by the author. According to the scientists, the carrying-out research on Marginani’s work could help solving these problems.

In this proposal I would like to present figures and works such as Leon Hebreo´s Dialoghi d´Amore and Abraham Cohen de Herrera´s Porta Coelorum as examples of the interrelation between Jewish and Christian scholars. This is a story that begins in 1492, when the Expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon took place. Alongside with the spread of Jewish people around the Maghreb, the Balkans, Palestine, the Netherlands, England and Italy this community started to have intellectual exchanges with the Christian population around them and this situation of course modified the cultural universe of both, Jewish and Christians. The fashion of Hebraism among Christian scholars during the sixteen and seventeen centuries had been place in part thanks to this kind of syncretism that could teach them the keystones of the Jewish intellectual framework but in an understandable way for their sensibility. The Jewish writings were because of that, one of the keystones in the foundation of modern science and philosophy, a source of inspiration for the systems and theories of space and matter of figures such as Conway, More or Newton.

There is no notion of postmortem Heaven and Hell in both ancient Israeli and Confucian traditions, and the two traditions also share quite a number of similarities about the idea of immortal life after death. Therefore, a comparison of the commonness in this field, e.g. the Jewish Levirate Marriage custom and the Confucian custom of adopting one’s son as heir; the idea of name surviving death in Biblical Judaism and that of glorifying one’s parents by making one’s name famous in future ages in Confucianism, can help us reveal the common pursuit in the two traditions: the postmortem fulfillment of an individual is realized in the form of the continuation of one’s family/ tribe/ nation of which they were, and forever remain, a generational link. In addition, this can help clarify a long faulted Confucian dogma of “Having no male heir being the gravest of the three cardinal offences against filial piety”.

We think that the formation and development of the logic of language in China can be divided into three periods: (1) Initial Period (the fifties - the eighties of the 20th century). Zhou Liquan is the initiator and founder of the logic of language research in China; under his advocation and influence, some scholars begin to introduce the logical thought of foreign languages systematically, discussing the objects of research and contents of the logic of language. The representative work of this period is Wang Weixian, Li Xiankun and Chen Zongming’s “The Introduction to the Logic of Language”. (2) Formative Period (1990s - the end of the 20th century). The representative achievements in this period are as follows, Zhou Liquan’s “Logic-A Theory of Accurate Thought and Effective Communication”, Zou Chongli’s “A Part of Lexical System that Utilizes Montague Grammar and General Quantifiers Theory to Analyse the Quantified Phrases of Chinese”, Cai Shushan’s “Speech Acts and the Logic of Language”. These three achievements indicate The Logic of Language has already formed in China. (3) Developing Period (the beginning of 21st century). It starts with Zou Chongli’s “Logic, Language and Communication” that was published in 2002. From the view of research approach, the studies of logic of language by Zhou Liquan, Li Xiankun and Chen Zongming belong to the Descriptive Logic of Language, and those by Cai Shushan and Zou Chongli belong to the Formal Logic of Language.

Quasi-set theory by S. French and D. Krause (2006) has been so far the most promising attempt of a formal theory of non-individuals. However, due to its sharp bivalent truth valuations, maximally fine-grained binary relations are readily found, in which members of equivalence classes are substitutable for each other in formulas salva veritate. Hence its mentioning and non-mentioning of individuals differs from existing set theory with defined identity merely by the range of nominal definitions. On a semantic level, quasi-set theory does not provide an interpretation with explanatory power of its language terms as non-individuals, and it is not easy to see how such an interpretation can be set up.

Routley-Meyer ternary relational semantics (RM-semantics, for short) was introduced in the early seventies of the past century. RM-semantics was intended to model classical relevant logics such as the logic of the relevant conditional R and the logic of Entailment E. But, ever since Routley and Meyer’s first papers on the topic, this essentially malleable semantics has been used for characterizing more general relevant logics or even non-relevant logics. The aim of this paper is to provide an RM-semantics with respect to which Łukasiewicz 3-valued logic Ł3 is sound and complete. Ł3 is understood as (any axiomatization of) the set of all valid formulas in Łukasiewicz 3-valued matrices MŁ3. In this sense, leaning on previous work by us, Ł3 is axiomatized as an extension of Routley and Meyer’s basic positive logic B+, labelled Ł3(B+). And the RM-semantics for Ł3 is actually defined for this particular axiomatization of Ł3(B+). The result presented in the paper is interesting from the Universal Logic perspective, in the sense that it connects Łukasiewicz many-valued logics and similar systems to relevant logics from the point of view of the latter, the 3-termed relational point of view, in particular.

The paper develops an axiomatic theory of truth and falsehood operators, including the non-classical case. Their domain is a set of sentences, which then is extended to the set of symbol expressions of the language. In general, sentences do not necessarily have to be two-valued. In case of statements about the truth or falsity of sentences, classical logic is applied. We restrict ourselves to the set of sentences for which the truth and falsehood operators are well-defined. This proposed theory differs from Kripke’s theory of truth. Iterations of truth and falsehood operators are allowed. Thus, the pro-posed theory differs from Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. Note that the use of truth and falsehood operators instead of the corresponding predicates allows avoiding the liar paradox. Non-truthfulness in general does not necessarily mean falsehood. Therefore, truth and falsehood operators will be regarded as logically independent. On the basis of the above considerations, the truth and falsehood operator theory is constructed and formulated and it is further ex-tended to the universe of symbolic expressions.

In 1934 Jaśkowski and Gentzen independently published their groundbreaking works on Natural Deduction. The aim of this paper is to provide some criteria for division of the diversity of existing systems on some natural subcategories and to show that despite the differences all these systems are descendants of original systems of Jaśkowski and Gentzen. Three criteria are discussed:The kind of items which are building-blocks of the proof.The format of proof.The kind of rules.The first leads to the division of ND into two main classes: F-systems working on (occurences of) formulas and S-systems working on sequents (but not to be confused with sequent calculi). The second distinguishes between T-systems with tree-proofs and L-systems with linear proofs. Finally, the third leads to several minor divisions in the main categories.

As it is well known, in the forties of the past century, Curry proved that in any logic S closed under Modus Ponens, uniform substitution of propositional variables and the Contraction Law (W), the naïve Comprehension axiom (CA) trivializes S in the sense that all propositions are derivable in S plus CA. Not less known is the fact that, ever since Curry published his proof, theses and rules weaker than W have been shown to cause the same effect as W causes. Among these, the Contraction rule (RW) or the Modus Ponens axiom (MPa), for example, are to be noted. But, moreover, as Brady has proved, even the Generalized Modus Ponens axiom (gMPa) or the Generalized Contraction rule (gRW) give rise to “Curry’s Paradox” under the same circumstances as W does. In some previous work by us, “weak relevant model structures” (wr-ms, for short) are defined on “weak relevant matrices” by generalizing Brady’s model structure MCL built upon Meyer’s Crystal matrix CL. We have proved that wr-ms only verify logics with the “depth relevance condition” (drc). The aim of this paper is to show how to falsify gMPa and gRW (and so, W, RW and MPa) in certain wr-ms. In particular, it will be shown that gMPa is falisfied in any wr-ms and gRW in any wr-ms verifying Routley and Meyer’s basic positive logic B+.