The Role of Philosophy in Understanding Religious Texts from the Tafkik School’s point of view... Presentation and Criticism

Hossein Mozaffari

Abstract
The topic of this article is a presentation and criticism of the role of philosophy in understanding religious texts from the Tafkik School’s point of view. After I give an overall definition of this school at the beginning of the article, I referred to its followers' views regarding the role of philosophy in understanding religious texts and their evidence. After emphasizing on the need for rationality to understand religion, I explained how they separate between prudence and philosophizing. They claim that philosophizing is not necessary in this matter, and then they sometimes accept the influence of philosophy in understanding religious texts instrumentally, at times they deny this positive effect, and some of them claim that philosophy is a barrier and a veil to understanding religious texts. As for us, after discussing and criticizing their evidence in this matter, we have come to the conclusion that philosophy is a branch of reasoning, in addition to that philosophizing has a positive effect on understanding religious texts. It is not possible to understand some of the rational knowledge in religion for ordinary people without philosophizing, such as God’s non-numerical oneness, being ahead of time and space, being with everything not by comparison, being different from everything not by equilibrium, being first and last, evidently and objectively, and so on.

Key words: Philosophy, religious texts, the Tafkik School, reasoning, philosophizing.

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)