•  10
    Avicenna on the Impossibilia the Letter on the Soul Revisited
    Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 33 (2): 163-213. 2023.
    RésuméLa « Lettre sur l’âme » est intéressante et significative ; elle tente de résoudre des problèmes fondamentaux qui relèvent des frontières de la psychologie, de l’épistémologie, de la métaphysique, de la philosophie de l’esprit et de la logique. Le consensus parmi les spécialistes d’Avicenne est que la « Lettre » est de sa plume. Dans cet article, je vais contester ce consensus. J’examinerai le contenu philosophique et logique de la « Lettre », ainsi que la vision d’Avicenne sur les formes …Read more
  •  13
    Is Avicenna an Empiricist?
    In Mojtaba Mojtahedi, Shahid Rahman & MohammadSaleh Zarepour (eds.), Mathematics, Logic, and their Philosophies: Essays in Honour of Mohammad Ardeshir, Springer. pp. 443-474. 2021.
    I will focus on the following question: “Is Avicenna[aut]Avicenna an empiricist?”. I will introduce Avicenna’sAvicenna language of “signification”, “understood content”, “mentalMental impression” and “conception”. Then, following Kenneth P. Winkler[aut]Winkler, K. ~ P., I will distinguish between origin-empiricism and content-empiricism Empiricism and reinterpret the distinction in Avicenna’sAvicenna language as OEA and CEA. I will show that Avicenna’sAvicenna analysis of the relationship betwee…Read more
  •  9
    The Internal Senses in the Aristotelian Tradition (edited book)
    with Jakob Fink
    Springer. 2020.
    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 that Aristotle recognizes no such internal sense. His medieval Latin interpreters, on the other hand, very much thought that Aristotle did introduce a n…Read more
  •  64
    Ontological Trivialism?
    New Content is Available for Grazer Philosophische Studien. forthcoming.
    _ Source: _Page Count 31 How hard is it to answer an ontological question? Ontological trivialism,, inspired by Carnap’s internal-external distinction among “questions of existence”, replies “very easy.” According to, almost every ontologically disputed entity _trivially_ exists. has been defended by many, including Schiffer and Schaffer. In this paper, I will take issue with. After introducing the view in the context of Carnap-Quine dispute and presenting two arguments for it, I will discuss Ho…Read more
  •  41
    ABSTRACT Recently, in a series of papers, Joshua Spencer has introduced, defended, and developed a modified version of Neo-Russellianism, namely Plenitudinous Russellianism, according to which there are structurally identical but numerically distinct singular Russellian propositions. PR claims to provide novel semantic solutions to all the major problems that NR faces with no radical revision in NR. In this paper, I introduce a semantic puzzle for PR: the view leads to the violation of the princ…Read more
  •  30
    Avicenna on the Origination of the Human Soul
    with Seyed Hasan Saadat Mostafavi
    Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 5 (1): 41-86. 2017.
    According to the common wisdom, among both contemporary scholars and classic interpreters, Avicenna is committed to ‘Co-origination’: The human soul is temporally originated with the human body. Against the common wisdom, we will argue that Co-origination is ambiguous and vague and thus its attribution to Avicenna is in need of clarification and precisification. The problem is broken down into two sub-problems: First, the problem of the origination of different souls/powers, namely the vegetativ…Read more
  •  116
    Empty Names and Pragmatic Millianism
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (1): 49-58. 2014.
    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 descriptions as well as some pragmatic processes to substitute empty names with descriptions associated with. The resultant content should account for the intu…Read more
  •  48
    Ontological Trivialism?
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 94 (1-2): 38-68. 2017.
    How hard is it to answer an ontological question? Ontological trivialism,, inspired by Carnap’s internal-external distinction among “questions of existence”, replies “very easy.” According to, almost every ontologically disputed entity trivially exists. has been defended by many, including Schiffer and Schaffer. In this paper, I will take issue with. After introducing the view in the context of Carnap-Quine dispute and presenting two arguments for it, I will discuss Hofweber’s argument against a…Read more
  •  65
    Concept originalism, recently introduced and defended by Sainsbury and Tye, Tye, and Sainsbury, holds that “atomic concepts are to be individuated by their historical origins, as opposed to their semantic or epistemic properties”. The view is immune to Gareth Evans’s “Madagascar” objection to the Causal Theory of Reference since it allows a concept to change its reference over time without losing its identity. The possibility of reference-shift, however, raises the problem of misleading belief r…Read more
  •  86
    Pragmatics of No Reference
    Mind and Language 30 (1): 95-116. 2015.
    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 against these problems by appeal to pragmatics . I introduce Millianism and the problems raised by empty names for the view, then examine Pragmatic Millia…Read more
  •  42
    Suhrawardi on Innateness: A Reply to John Walbridge
    Philosophy East and West 64 (2): 486-501. 2014.
    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),1 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 understanding of Suhrawardi’s i‛tibārāt ‛aqliyya (beings of reason) and their relationship to fiṭrīāt. As a relevant issue, I will touch on Suhrawardi’s distinct…Read more
  •  35
    Did Suhrawardi Believe in Innate Ideas as A Priori Concepts? A Note
    Philosophy East and West 64 (2): 473-480. 2014.
    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 framework while the philosophical language in which their respective epistemologies are discussed is different” (Aminrazavi 2003, p. 203). I disagree; however…Read more
  •  41
    Avicenna on the Primary Propositions
    with Mohammad Ardeshir
    History and Philosophy of Logic 39 (3): 201-231. 2018.
    Avicenna introduces the primary propositions as the most fundamental principles of knowledge. However, as far as we are aware, Avicenna’s primaries have not yet been independently studied. Nor do Avicenna scholars agree on how to characterize them in the language of contemporary philosophy. It is well-known that the primaries are indemonstrable; nonetheless, it is not clear what the genealogy of the primaries is, how, epistemologically speaking, they can be distinguished from other principles, w…Read more
  •  160
    Gappy propositions?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (1): 125-157. 2011.
    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 will try to argue that apparently promising arguments for the claim that gappy propositions are propositions are not successful (section III). Then, …Read more
  •  215
    Neo-Meinongian neo-Russellians
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (2): 229-259. 2010.
    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 Scott Soames have defended neo-Russellianism against such problems in a novel way; to account for various intuitions of competent and rational speakers …Read more