Contrary to what its title suggests, this book is not a prescriptive argument about principles of hermeneutics but a study of Greek and Roman (and early Christian) views on what preliminary issues (philological, biographical) should be dealt with before actually reading the texts of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, medical writers such as Hippocrates and Galen, and the Bible....

in this research, the viewpoint of mīzā mahdī iṣfahānī, as the founder of tafkīk school (separatism), concerning the most important epistemological issues like the quiddity of cognition (or episteme), types of cognition, truth, and justification of knowledge (ma‘rifa) are studied. given the fact that epistemology has not been regarded as an independent science in the muslim world, but the musli...