Mulla Sadra, Art, Ethics, and Eschatology was Published                   11.3.2009

The Collection of the Selected Papers Presented at the Second World Congress of Mulla Sadra was published under the supervision of Professor Seyyed Mohammed Khamenei.

The first edition of the series of the selected papers of this Congress was published under the title of Mulla Sadra, Art, Ethics, and Eschatology in 2009 in 2000 copies by the Publication Center of Sadra Islamic Philosophy Institute.

The collection of the papers of this Congress has been published in five volumes. This book, which is the fifth volume of the series, consists of some papers in two categories about ethics, philosophy, art, politics, philosophical psychology, and eschatology. This volume includes 21 papers, seven of which have been translated from English into Persian.

We read in the Introduction of this book: “The Second World Congress of Mulla Sadra, held in Tehran in 2004, like the First Congress, held in May 1999, while introducing Islamic philosophy, particularly Mulla Sadra’s Transcendent Philosophy to the world, succeeded in familiarizing Iranian scholars with the thoughts and ideas of the foreign guests who were the representatives of other schools."

One of the main pillars of any field of science is comparing the ideas of the scientists and theoreticians of that field with each other. This issue is of greater importance in philosophy. Comparative studies in this field have certain advantages including learning about the defects and perfections of related theories and developing a better and deeper understanding of them. This is because if a philosopher only knows about his own school, he will not know clearly about its shortcomings; however, if he also looks at it from the outside, he can judge its various aspects better and find out about its strength and defects more thoroughly.

Some of the titles of the articles published in the present book consist of The Effect of the Views of the Philosophy of Ethics on Practical Decisions in the Field of Medical Ethics by Dr. Baqir Larijani, A Study of the Theoretical Bases of Islamic Art, Imagination, and Beauty in Mulla Sadra’s Thoughts by Hassan Bulkhari, The Issues of the Philosophy of Ethics and their Relationships with Religion in a Comparative Approach by Maryam Sani’pur, The Philosophical Foundations of Civilizational Dialogue by Hans Köchler, The Emergence of Justification in Ethics by Dagfinn Føllesdal, and The Imaginal World, Mulla Sadra and Islamic Aesthetics by John F. Quinn.

From among the other papers presented in the Second World Congress of Mulla Sadra we can refer to Narrative Methodology of the Islamic Society’s Analysis by Yuriy M. Pochta, Moral Claims as Formal Truths: Some Implications for the Relations between Theology and Ethics by Douglas P. Lackey, Creative Mind and Aesthetic Creation: New Sign for a New Theory for Contemporary Aesthetics by Mustafa Abdo Mohammed Khair, and Bare Individual Essences: An Aristotelian Approach to Immortality by Christian Kanzian.

The fifth volume of the Collection of the Selected Papers of the Second World Congress of Mulla Sadra has recently been published under the supervision of the president of the Sadra Islamic Philosophy Institute in 392 pages and is now available on the market. This book also involves a short biography of the writers of the papers.