How can soul existence theory be got justified?

We  believe in existence of something by using our sensory organs and system. for example we see, touch, taste,.. something and it gives us enough ground to believe the existence of the case. but the question is how does belief in existence of soul  become justified even tough soul is not tangible by any sense?
human has lots of features like creativity, emotion, reasoning, free will, consciousness, goal to win,... believers of soul say that some kind of human features like what are already mentioned above can not be explained only with  materialism so we need to appeal to dualism theory. Dualism theory asserts that human has a soul beyond and independent  of his body. by appealing to  this view we can explain these features so soul must exist.
A question for thinking and elaboration:
Aren't those features actually explainable with matrialists' view?

for more information go to Professor Shelly Kagan's online course.

Desire nothing - Some points from eastern philosophy

Nobody can stop desiring completely.  Persian Sufism talks about the levels of desires. a Sufi starts from Plant/animal being desires (eating, sleeping,..) and then he/she purifies himself/herself and he/she got upper level of desire for example desiring of knowledge and at the end he/she reaches ultimate level of desire that he/she desires to desire nothing (is it still desire?)

Jalal ud-Din Rumi has indicated this purification in  beautiful verses:

"I died as a mineral and became a plant,

I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return"*

and Bayazid Bastami as great Sufi has a famous qoute:
" I desire to desire nothing"

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*: Wikiquote

Introduction to Idealism

The first known idealist is Plato. He  introduced the ideas and asserted that human’s mind can understand the ideas, the question is what is ideas? I am giving you a example, when I am saying that I am looking at black horse I am using two concepts black and horse and with putting together these two concepts I am pointing an existing case, a black horse but what pure horse is besides its several attributes for example blackness, tallness, shortness or whatever attributes. This horse without color without length without breed and all other characteristics doesn’t exist. Can you imagine? Yes it doesn’t exist. So what is horse-ness? Where does it come from? This is the main motivation of Idea theory of Plato. He says there is forms/ideas world that all ideas live there and all real horses for example our black horse is a imperfect copy of the idea of horse.

Foundations of knowledge-2

There are some theories which are describing how the epistemic foundation can be formed for a particular belief  to being justified . One of them says that some beliefs are fundamental beliefs and other beliefs are grounded in them and it is so-called foundationalism. another one claims that the beliefs form a web of the beliefs and the legitimacy of a particular true belief to being a case of knowledge comes from a big circle of belief that this circle is started and finished on our assumed belief. it is supported by coherentists. Infinitism is  third one and it describes that the structure of justified beliefs is based on a never ended chain of the beliefs. There is a tough discussion in favor or against of any of these opinions of knowledge structure. for more inforamtion please refer to Stanford Encylopedia of philosophy. 

How much do we know?

In this post, I want to give some points in order to approach to the some responses given to the Brain In Vat (BIV) paradox.

Basically BIV is a form of sceptical scenarios and the base aim of introducing of such scenarios is that human is not able to posses some or any genuine instance of knowledge. BIV is a extreme sceptical scenario that asserts we are not able to obtain knowledge at all. There is a principle that BIV use it. the principle is the epistemic closure principle. Simply it says that if we know (believe) the proposition A and A entails another proposition, say B, then we know (believe) proposition B. closure principle has been used in BIV scenarios as below:
1- we are unable to recognize that we are not victim of BIV scenario

2- if we are unable to recognize that we are not victim of BIV scenario then we don’t know anything

3- we don’t know anything

This reasoning is vey obvious and simple so BIV is correct. How can we deal with this scenario? Closure principle seems very correct and justifiable but it is the base of one the most radical forms of sceptism. good news is there is a softer version of closure principle. I’ll introduce it in my future posts.

Justification and rationality

According to the Epistemologist’s consensus, truth of the case and the case’s owner’s belief are necessary conditions for something to being as a instance of knowledge. Truth of the case comes form the case’s reality and it exist independently from anything else such as the owner’s mind’s state. In the other hand when the owner of the case believes in its truth she gets the needed information from the external world and after that she processes the information and as a result of the process, her mind’s state gets changed in order to accept its truth so the belief is completely internal thing and it should be achieved by rational analysis of the human.


we have lots of true beliefs that all of them can not be counted as instance of knowledge because we gain them in a way which is not epistemicly rational and we luckily obtained them. I got the meaning of epistemicly rational as a process of gaining knowledge with the correct and relevant input information which is taking place by cognitive power of a normal and mentally healthy human.

Does using Induction in scientific experiments make knowledge for us?

Our presumption for induction reasoning is the Principle of Causality. this Principle asserts that there is a connection between the cause and phenomenon. if we know the cause we can predict the raised phenomenon but in real situation especially in scientific experiments it is very hard to trace the causes and we just rely on the happened phenomenon and in most of cases the cause(s) will be remained unknown to us. if we know the cause (by other means rather than experiments) our instance of knowledge (the result of induction ) will be justified so because of lack of knowing cause in induction reasoning our true belief can not be get justified.

The Matrix movie and its philosohpical aspects

Image from Google knol

The Matrix shows one of the radical scepticism argument. This is called brain in the vat. It led to a radical scepticism situation as in this scenarios brains with wires are connected to a super computer and a mad and genius scientist by using computer facilities is feeding our brain with fake information and all sensory data come from this super computer. We have no way to perceive anything rather than the ones which have been received to our brain with the wires.

There are some response to resolve to this situation. I will come back to this interesting matter soon.

Is Cogito reasoning of Descartes correct?

The Cogito reasoning is


"I think therefore I am"

he proves his existence based on his thinking but
how does he know that he (not somebody else or something else) is thinking before his existence has been proved(because his existences proof is based on his thinking)?
Cogito reasoning has some irresolvable internal loop.

Platonic world of Ideas and religions

Nowadays I am thinking on the relation between form or idea world theory of Plato and soul existence in the religious texts. As Nietzsche declared Plato has invented the Soul concept as something which is separated from the body and can understand the Ideas come from the form world. I am wondering whether Plato has learned form religions or Prophets learned form him.

Foundations of knowledge

We can not definitely have knowledge on false P or at least S (not everybody) has to be aware of truth of P. besides the truth of P we need that something should be happened for S in a relation with P. when S knows that P, it implicitly implies that S knows all aspects of P including truth of P and it means that S believes that P is true so belief is another condition for knowledge. The belief condition is applied to the possessor of knowledge. Sometimes a true belief has been attained because of matter of luck for example S predicts something in future (P) by her plain feeling and it happens to be true. For excluding these instances of true beliefs from being knowledge we need another condition, this condition should bring a correlation between truth of P and belief not only for S but also for the external observer and the belief must be grounded in some foundations that it would indicate our true belief has not been achieved by luck but the question is what can be considered as foundation for our beliefs?
Please think and put your valuable comments here.

What is Epistemology?

We as human being know lots of things and also we need knowledge sometime because it is useful for handling our life and achieving our goals and sometimes because of complex structure of our mind and brain we get satisfied by having knowledge without any direct and obvious usefulness in our life.
We can have ability knowledge which means we know how to do something for example driving a car but there is another type of knowledge which our main difference with other types of species and animals comes from that that is propositional knowledge. Propositional knowledge is a type of knowledge relating to statements generally this knowledge can be represented with this sentence that “Somebody(S) knows that P (a Proposition)”. For example I know that earth is rounded.
Due to importance of this kind of knowledge, a branch in philosophy has been created with the name of epistemology. As far as we are concerned with epistemological matters we should find the exact specification of propositional knowledge or at least we should try to find out some common specification for them.
I will continue this subject in my future posts