
Seyed MousavianUniversity of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Philosophy
Seyed Mousavian
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Publications (13)
I will focus on the following question: “Is Avicenna an empiricist?”. I will introduce Avicenna’s language of “signification”, “understood content”, “mental impression” and “conception”. Then, following Kenneth P. Winkler, I will distinguish between origin-empiricism (OE) and content-empiricism (CE) and reinterpret the distinction in Avicenna’s lan...
Recently, in a series of papers, Joshua Spencer has introduced, defended, and developed a modified version of Neo-Russellianism (NR), namely Plenitudinous Russellianism (PR), according to which there are structurally identical but numerically distinct singular Russellian propositions (SRPs). PR claims to provide novel semantic solutions to all the...
The aim of this volume is to contribute to the discussion of the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition. Since the Aristotelian tradition covers more than 2000 years of interpretation, commentary, criticism and innovation, and since it spans many languages, including Arabic, Greek and Latin, it would be impossible to offer an inclusive and c...
This volume is a collection of essays on a special theme in Aristotelian philosophy of mind: the internal senses. The first part of the volume is devoted to the central question of whether or not any internal senses exist in Aristotle’s philosophy of mind and, if so, how many and how they are individuated. The provocative claim of chapter one is th...
Avicenna introduces the primary propositions (or the primaries, for short) as the most fundamental principles of knowledge. (In this paper, we are not primarily concerned with the primary/first intelligibles as concepts/conceptions.) However, as far as we are aware, Avicenna’s primaries have not yet been independently studied. Nor do Avicenna schol...
Concept originalism, recently introduced and defended by Sainsbury and Tye (S&T) (Proc Aristotelian Soc Suppl Vol 85:101–124, 2011, Seven puzzles of thought and how to solve them: an originalist theory of concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012), Tye (in Brogaard, Does perception have content? Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), and Sai...
According to Millianism, the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Many names, however, lack semantic referent; hence, so-called ‘empty’ names. Empty names raise various problems for Millianism. T.C. Ryckman, Fred Adams, Garry Fuller, Robert Stecker, Kenneth Taylor, and Nicole Wyatt, among others, have defended Millianism agai...
In a past issue of Philosophy East and West (Aminrazavi 2003), Mehdi Aminrazavi, developing his ideas expressed earlier in Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination (Aminrazavi 1997), attempted to argue “that Ibn Sīnā’s peripatetic orientation and Suhrawardī’s ishrāqī perspective have both maintained and adhered to the same epistemological framewor...
Here I shall focus on Suhrawardi’s use and conception of ‘fiṭrī’, translated as ‘innate’ by Hossein Ziai (1990), Hossein Ziai and John Walbridge (Suhrawardi 1999), and Mehdi Aminrazavi (1997, 2003), and will try to make some points in passing regarding Cartesian innate ideas in relation to Suhrawardi’s fiṭrīāt. I will try to explain my understandin...
Millianism is the view that the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Empty names, names with no semantic referents, raise various problems for Millianism. To solve these problems, many have appealed to pragmatics, thus ‘Pragmatic Millianism’. Pragmatic Millianism employs the relation of association between names and descripti...
After introducing Millianism and touching on two problems raised by genuinely empty names for Millianism (section I), I provide a brief exposition of the Gappy Proposition View (GPV) and of how different versions of this view can reply to the problems in question (section II). In the following sections I develop my reasons against the GPV. First, I...
Neo-Russellianism, which incorporates both Millianism (with regard to proper names) and the thesis of singular Russellian propositions, has widely been defended after the publication of Kripke's Naming and Necessity. The view, however, encounters various problems regarding empty names, names that do not have semantic referents. Nathan Salmon and Sc...