Muhammad Asghari

Today, we encounter a question that has rarely been treated as a serious or provocative issue: women and sexuality as a philosophical problem. This theme now acts as a critical marker—an axis that divides entire fields of thought into a before and after. The beginning of this epistemic shift can be traced back to a Freudian question: What does a woman really want? In this article, we follow this question through the lens of Lacanian theory, in which he introduces the concept of sexuation and illuminates the foggy, ambiguous terrain of femininity through the formulation of the hysterical discourse. Moving beyond a purely hysterical approach to womanhood, the French psychoanalyst carved a path for the re-inscription of her historically ambivalent and fragmented image. For Lacan, woman is a symptom—an embodiment of the fundamental contradiction and rupture within the symbolic order. The Woman does not exist; rather, la femme is a rebel who struggles to exist.

The term “island disease” refers to the isolation and fragmentation of academic disciplines, a phenomenon prevalent in Iranian universities and research institutions. Specialization, while enhancing precision and depth within individual fields, often results in limited interdisciplinary interaction, leaving each discipline functioning as an isolated “island.” This fragmentation manifests in curricula that separate related subjects, minimal collaboration among faculty, and disciplinary languages that hinder cross-field understanding. Philosophical perspectives from Rumi, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset highlight the importance of holistic knowledge and the university’s role in integrating education, research, and culture. Globally, universities increasingly adopt interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to address complex societal problems, foster innovation, and prepare students for the demands of the twenty-first century. In Iran, recent initiatives—including the University of Tehran’s College of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Technologies, interdisciplinary engineering programs at Amirkabir University, and national interdisciplinary journals—illustrate growing efforts to overcome the “island disease.” This study examines the origins, manifestations, and consequences of academic isolation in Iranian higher education and argues that interdisciplinary thinking is a necessary remedy for cultivating integrated knowledge, collaboration, and problem-oriented education.

Introspection is a method of accessing the contents of the mind. The nature of this access can be categorized into two main perspectives: the first group relates to explanations that consider introspection to be similar to perception, with the difference that the direction of the gaze is inward, not outward. For this reason, they are also known as “inner sense” explanations. The second group are explanations that consider introspection to be a kind of direct acquaintance and understanding of mental states. Believers in the second group, unlike the first group, rule out the possibility of error in introspection. David Armstrong belongs to the first group and Sidney Shoemaker to the second. Although Armstrong's claim is not without its flaws and sometimes even contradicts common intuition, it seems that the challenges facing Shoemaker are much deeper. The most important challenge for him is that his arguments - even assuming apparent clarity and solidity - are ultimately based on first-person testimony rather than objective facts, and therefore are much more difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Our goal in this article is to formulate the opposition between these two ideas in an analytical-critical manner and to criticize them as much as possible, and to show that the problem of introspection cannot be solved in the realm of the mind.

In the present article, we are faced with two phenomenological philosophers who, in two different intellectual traditions, namely philosophical hermeneutics and moral phenomenology, have referred to the concept of the Other as the fundamental possibility of the individual. The other, as an ontological and common concept in the thought of Gadamer and Levinas, is the turning point of the condition for the possibility of understanding and ethics. Focusing on the concept of the other, while addressing the points of difference and commonality between Gadamer and Levinas, this article will show that Levinas’s preoccupation with the other as a philosopher refers to the foundations of ethics, and the condition for the possibility of foundations of ethics is encountering the other. In Gadamer, the turning point is the determination of the possibilities of understanding in dialectical and dialogue-oriented relationships. Without the other, in Levinas’s thought, ethics, and moral matter, and in Gadamer’s thought, the process of understanding will not occur in the form of a fusion of horizons. Therefore, this article shows that the other is a common concept between these two philosophers, which both of them cannot avoid in their philosophical analyses of ethics or the process of understanding. Introduction The analysis of ethics is one of the important and innovative achievements of Levinas’s philosophical intellectual structure. Levinas’s concern is to refer to the foundations of morality itself, regardless of institutionalizing the moral in the form of law, and the foundation of morality is in face-to-face relationships with others. Regardless of Levinas’s plan about the concept of the other, Gadamer imagines the determination of understanding in a new way in the face of the other. The other is the comprehensible strain in philosophical hermeneutics, in such a way that the process of understanding is formed by the presence of the other and the face-to-face encounter with it. According to Gadamer, the other is the factor of openness in the process of understanding. The fusion of horizons is the product of openness and mutual encounters in dialogue, which is not possible without the other. The other is the condition of determining the possibility of understanding in each of the parties who are allowed to reveal a part of their being and allow the other to open up and talk. In fact, understanding is a kind of event that is revealed in a two-way conversation in an event-like way. This type of understanding depends on the presence of another. The main focus of the research is the analysis of the concept of the other, which has been done with emphasis on two important works: Truth and method, Totality and infinity. Body & discussion In general, the process of understanding is a dialogical process, whether the other side of the conversation is a text or a person, the foundation of understanding is formed in a relationship with the other. Determining the other as an independent personality and a different perspective is an ontological determination. The other thinks and becomes meaningful beyond the subject or object and even beyond my intellectual position, it belongs to its own independent world and its own experience. In conversation, it plays a significant role in the production of truth. Openness provides the possibility of dialogue and mutual agreement. In dialogue, the final product is not reproduced. The other condition for the production of the final product is dialogue According to Gadamer, facing the other is facing his world. At the moment of facing me, the other makes his abstract aspects concrete and opens his lived experience to me. He believes that the question-and-answer process is a kind of encounter with the world of experience and openness toward it. According to Gadamer, the process of understanding is the result of dialectical-hermeneutic relations between me (the interpreter) and you (the other). The dialogical relationships that allow each other to enter the other’s history are relationships that are formed based on questions and answers. From Gadamer’s point of view, questions and answers are the opening of a new horizon based on tradition and contemporary history. Levinas phenomenologically refers to the philosophical tradition of the West to reread the process of the formation of the concept of the other. Many commentators and interpreters of Levinas’s works believe that it is possible to determine the foundations of ethics from Levinas’s point of view from face-to-face relationships. The condition for the possibility of morality is to pay attention to others. To describe another concept, Levinas analyzes the negative and positive aspects of this concept. In a negative way, Levinas first answers what the other is not, and for this reason, he criticizes the history of Western metaphysics and the criticism of Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology. Positively, the other is relative to me and different from me. The other is beyond subject and object. The other is not subjugated by any concept and recognizes its independent identity. The other and the encounter with him are the conditions for determining fundamental ethics from Levinas’s point of view. Another condition of concreteness refers to another person. According to Levinas, it is the condition for the formation of moral form. He believes that ethics is a kind of double encounter in the context of bilateral relations. Many moral concepts are formed in relation to a concrete other. In Levinas’s genealogy of ethics, we are faced with the presence of the other in a concrete way and with the subjectivity of the subject in an abstract and a priori way. Levinas specifies two approaches with the description of the other in the form of an infinite idea. First of all, there is an infinite gap between the other and the same. This issue shows its foreignness and otherness, its independence, and being true to its essence towards me. Second, it is the determination of another in a concrete or abstract form, which in both cases evokes an identity independent of me. Conclusion According to the explanations of the concept of the other in the thought of Gadamer and Levinas, we are faced with two phenomenological philosophers who have paid attention to the ontological aspects of the concept of the other in the fields of philosophical hermeneutics and ethics. In Gadamer’s thought, the other is an ontologically dialectical relationship between I-Thou and the starting point of the conversation process. The fusion of horizons is the turning point of the formation of the relation to the other, which is manifested in another area. The other has its own history, world, tradition, and authority, regardless of the formation of dialogical relationships, and has an independent identity. The other is allowed to share his lived experience in the conversation. The other creates new worlds. The other has opened himself and in return can be self-interpreting and self-revealing. Regardless, the other is the consistency of the complex relationship between language and the world. This form of bilateral relations, which is manifested in the presence of another, is a linguistic form that is the cause of a deep connection between language and the world. The other, whether concrete or abstract, is the turning point of our connection with the world in an ontological way. Regardless of Gadamer’s point of view, Levinas returns to another concept in his new thought project entitled “How to determine the possibilities of ethics.” According to Levinas, finding the foundations of ethics and determining the condition of moral possibilities is in facing the other and in face-to-face relationships. The other is concretely a kind of bilateral encounter which is the basis of many moral events and is manifested abstractly in the form of the subject’s subjectivity. This kind of infinite aspect of the other is revealed in subjectivity is implied in sense. Encountering another in an abstract form within itself is the encounter of the subject’s subjectivity with the sense, and the sense is in the encounter with the other. Sense is the basis of the subjectivity of the subject. Sense is a kind of concrete and visual face-to-face encounter that adds to the importance of determining another. Therefore, both Gadamer and Levinas raise many possibilities about the concept of the other, which shows the importance of this concept in the Western philosophical tradition.