1 Mulla Sadra's Life, works, and
Philosophy
By: Prof. Sayyid Muhammad Khamenei
Translated by: Dr.R.Khoii.
• Abstracts:
4 Man's
Creativity/Vicegerency in Islamic Philisophy
and Mysticism
4 The World of
Imagination
5 An Ovreview of the Imaymal World(mundns imaginalis)
5 The Soul and
its Creative Acts
6 Conditionals and the Conditions for their
Truth from theViewpoint of Moslem Logicians after Ibn-Sina
7 The Problem of the Existence of Souls
before Bodies in Mulla Sadra's
Philosophy
7 The Relationship between Epistemology and
Ontology
8 The principiillity
of Existence in the Transcemdent Philosophy and in
the West
9
"Cause-Effect Detetminism" and the
"Free Will"
9 Oriental Wisdom
10 The Paradigm
of "Wisdom" and its Role in Solving the Paradox of Absolutism and
Relativism
11 The Cosmological
Argument in Kant and Islamic Philosophers
Mulla Sadra's Life, works, and Philosophy
Prof.S.M.Khamenei
Fayd Kashani
Fayd Kashani
was Mulla Sadra's most
famous student. He was an almost unique scholar in the fields
othadith, exegesis, and ethics, as well
as in gnosis and intellectual intuition. He was born in a family in which all
the members before and after him were considered religious learned men and
provided vast and invaluable service to Islamic knowledge and teachings. Fayd's father, who was one of the well-known jurispridents and scholars of his time, was called Mulla Murtada, known as Shah Murtada. He was honored by being the son-in-law to Zia al-Oraphay-e Razi, who was a man of taste and gnosis and possessed high
spiritual stations. The fruit of
Shah Murtada's marriage to Razi's daughter was the birth of such brave,-j knowledgable and efficient children as Fayd
Kashani .
Fayd's first name was Muhammad. Then he was nickamed
as Muhsen, and later he was given the title of Fayd by Mulla Sadra.
Therefore, he called himself sometimes as "Muhammad ibn
Murtada, entitled Muhsen"
and sometimes as "al-mushtahar bi-Fayd" (famous as Fayd).
Because of having
access to a short biography of Fayd's scientific
life, which he wrote himself, we have a clear idea of
the most prominent points of his life, while this is not the case with most of
our other scientists. In this biography he does not refer to his birth date and
only says that he learned literary sciences, Arabic, logic,...,
and religious sciences, as well as the preliminaries for being a student under
his father and uncle during the first twenty years of his life.
Since his
father (Shah Murtada) passed away in 1009 H.G in Kashan, Fayd must have only
learned the preliminaries, that is, literature and Arabic, under him and acquired
most of his Knowledge under his uncle, the son of Zia
al-Orafaye-Razi. At that time,
I went to
Bohrani (d.1028 H.G) had arrived in
Such words indicate
that, first, he did not stay in
Second, from his saying
that he studied mathematics and other sciences, which regularly included old
medicine, astronomy and astrolable, and the so-called
modern basic sciences in
One of His reasons
for choosing the class of Sayyed Majed
Bohrani, who had just come to Shiraz, was his great
reputation in hadith and in being a
spiritual leader, whose journey or emigration from the suburbs of Iraq and
Bahrain had made a great uproar in the seminaries of those days and attracted Fayd, like many other enthusiasts for hadith,
towards him. His other reason was his so-called tendency for hadith and being a scholar of hadith (traditionist)
which can be inferred from his urgent and fast journey from Isfahan's
Dar al-Ilm (house of sciences) to Shiraz, and also
from his extensive writings and works on hadith.
According to this report,
he went to
However, he was involved
in the learning of hadith, or in his own
words, "ilm-al-hadith", in two ways:
audition (listening to the scholar of hadith) and
recitation (reading the hadith from the
book for the teacher so that he confirms and edits his reading and grants the
reader the permission to narrate or criticize it).
According to the scholars
of hadith, aucition
is the best way, since the teacher makes fewer mistakes in speaking in
comparison to listening. In spite of its relative perfection, reciting hadith and presenting it to the teacher is
not equal to audition in efficiency. Nevertheless, these two methods, or the so-called
tahammal al-hadith
(that is, obtaining and preserving hadith),
are considered the.best methods for learning hadith and creating a relationship with the
teacher of hadith.
It is from here that the degree of the
growth and capabilities of the student of hadith
and even the teacher's methodology and his closeness to the student can be figured
out.
Fayd succeeded in getting to the stage of obtaining the
"permission" for hadith (obtaining
the permission for narrating that hadith from
the teacher and the chain of narrators before him). As Fayd
himself said, he became not only a narrator of hadith,
but also a religious jurist in inferring the divine laws. His book of "al-Vafin testifies to the truth of
this claim. In his own words, he composed this book in order to remove the
defects of the four books of hadith (Kafi, Man la yahzar, Tahzib, Istibsar) and valued
it higher than them. Authorities, too, confirm this fact.
Fayd's quitting Sayyed Majed's classes and returning from
Obtaining
the permission for narration directly indicates that he also studied hadith under Shaykh
Baha. If he had not written this sentence, we would
be most likely to assume that considering the needlessness he felt in himself
concerning the acquisition of hadith, he
might have learned the science of exegesis or jurisprudence or the like under
the Shaykh.
Such lack of satiety
for those who are thirsty for hadith and
sunna (tradition) and go
towards every source of hadith and
teachings of the People of the Prophet's House like a dropsic
and drink a drop from every spring of knowledge is a method and tradition among
seminary students and enthusiasts of hadith.
The narrators of hadith sometimes
for hearing even a single direct hadith from
the Holy Prophet or his descendants took the great pains of travelling
long ways. It has been quoted from one of the recent thinkers (from Abaqat al-Anvaf) that,
in addition to his countless journeys, the writer of this book had walked about
one thousand leagues in order to listen to a hadith.
Evidence suggests that
during this journey, Fayd was acquainted with Shaykh Bahai for the first time,
since, although he had been in Isfahan three years
before that, for some unknown reason, he did not have the chance to see the Shaykh; otherwise, due to the siginficanec
of the event, he would have referred to it somewhere and obtained the
permission for narration from him. Moreover, Fayd has
not referred to any other sources of jurisprudence and hadith,
such as Mulla Sadra (as
we will discuss later) or Mir Damad, with whose
teachings he was later acquainted and wrote a commentary on his "al-Ravashih al-Samaviyeh".
This could also be due to his not having the honor of being in their presence and enjoying their lessons for some reasons.
Man's Creativity /Vicegerency
in Islamic Philisophy
and
Mysticism
Prof.S.M.Khamenei
Following the holy Qur'an,
Islamic mysticism introduces God's creation of the world in two forms of
command and making. Unlike making, the divine command means the creation of
things from non-existence. Man, who, according to the decree of the holy Qur'an, has been appointed the divine vicegerent, possesses
both types of creation, too, and his creativity is the same as the divine
command and creation.
One of the
manifestations of this type of man's creativity is his power of imagination.
The free man could even grant exteranl embodiment and
existence to his imaginary creatures through his strong will power and move
them from the conjunctive to the disjunctive imagination or the world of images
and the senses.
Man himself is a
world called the microcosmic world, and the whole world is the great man, and
there is a kind of harmony between them. The origin of aesthetics and human
art, morals and love is the conjunction of these two men.
The
purpose of the present article is to reveal some of the unknown secrets of man's
existence.
The World of Imagination
By:
Dr.Gh.Ibrahimi Dinani
The
"world of images" or the "intermediate world" (isthmus)
exists in the middle of the world of the matter and the world of absolute immaterials (the world of intellects). Some philosophers
believe that there are three types of perception associated with these
three-fold worlds: sense perception, imaginal
perception, and intellectual perception.
Suhrawardi's
"world of sustaining ideas" is related to this very intermediate
world or the world of ideas. Of course, he also agrees with Plato's ideas which
consist of the world of latitudinal intellects and the world of archetypes.
However, the commonality between these two ideas is mainly related to the words
they use rather than their interal meanings.
Suhrawardi also
believes in the existence of three types of man: corporeal man, mental man, and
intellectual man. The relationship among the faculties and perceptions of these
three man consist of the following in an ascending
order: the relation of the shadow to the owner of the shadow or the relation of
the low to the high.
What is more, the
psychological perceptions' description of the aspects of and considerations in
intellectual perceptions confirms the principle of "nothing is emanated
from the one but one".
In Suhrawardi's view, imaginal forms
are not the product of man's imagination; rather, the faculty of imagination is
the manifestation of imaginal forms.
Moreover, the
solutions to the problem of calling the material body and sustaining forms as
the intermediate world, and the complexities of appearance and concealing lie
in the fact that the concealment of the material body is not in contradiction
with its being the manifestation of sustaining forms.
An Ovreview of the Imaginal World(mundus imaginalis)
By: Dr .R. Davari
Paying attention to the faculty of imagination or the imaginal world is one of the distinctive features of
Islamic philosophy. In the words of the prominent Islamic philosophers, the
principle of the existence of the imaginal world has
remained completely secure against criticisms, however, its results and
consequences have been open to development, interpretation, or sometimes,
modification.
In contrast, in
modern schools of philosophy, the principle of the existence of such a world,
and naturally, the bases or concomitants of believing in it, are rejected and
even denied. Generally speaking, "imagination" has achieved a
psychological aspect or meaning in modern philosophy. Here, imaginal
forms are considered the product of psychological powers.
Nevertheless,
the author believes that in spite of such a rejection, the idea of the new
world, which is the product of the Utopianist writers
of the Renaissance period, has been primarily developed in their imagination.
Besides, in the present world, which is engaged in a crisis of thoughts and
ideas, there is a place for a second introduction of the world of imagination,
particularly from the view point of phenomenologist
philosophers.
The Soul and its Creative Acts
By : Dr. S. M
. Mohaqqeq Damad
According
to Islamic philosophers, the soul performs two kinds of activily.
The first type is the direct act, which is caulled
the self-dependent act in the terminology of Islamic philosophy, and which can
be put versus Emanation. In this kind of activity, the act is emanated from the
soul, so that there is no intermediary between the source of emanation (the
soul) and the emanated (the product of the act). The source of emanation is
always present and is absolutely annihilated immediately after the disappearance
of the emanated.
When man
imagines the shape of a one hundred-storey tower in
his mind, the mental tower is emanated from the soul, which is present in the reseptacle of its
existence, and immadiately after any kind
of negligence or lack of attantion, there would
remain no trace of the tower.
The second type of the activities of the soul include those matters
which are realized outside the mind, such as a plan that an engineer draws for
a building. In fact, the essence of the plan is of the type of the first group
of activities: i.e, the direct acts of the soul, and
has been developed in the engineer's mind.
However, the form
reflected in the outside as the plan belongs to the second class of activities,
in the sense that the soul of the engineet would play
no role in its subsistence and even if the engineer himself dies out, his plan
will subsist.
With respect to the
two types of the soul's acts, logical considerations force us to agree with two
types of objects, namely, Subjective Object and Objective Object. Mulla Sadra refers to this
classification as "Known by essence" and "Known by accident".
Two of the other
creative acts of the soul are perceiving universals
and creating artistic works. Art is one of the beautiful manifestations of the
creative nature of man's soul and has attracted the attention of the
philosophers of Ancient Greece since long ago. Islamic teachings, too, have
extensively dealt with this issue.
Conditionals
and the Conditions for their Truth
from the Viewpoint of Moslem
Logicians after Ibn-Sina
By : M.Haj Hoseini
After Ibn-sina,
Moslem logicians started to develop and expand the Sinan
logic. In discussing the conditionals they have come closer to the field of
logic by avoiding some of the ontological views in the Sinan
logic. However they have tried to clarity the conditionals the conditions for
their truth and the quality of the validity of universality and particularity
and to determine the place of affirmation and negation in conditional
propositions through using an ordinary language. For the first time they
divided contingent (coincidental) propositions in to general and particular
types and in explaining the conditions for their truth they made a distinction
between the universal and particular conjunctive implications. With respect to
the issue of the criteria for universality they distinguished between general
and necessary contingents and referred to a separate criterion for each. They
have also considered such criteria on the basis of the time and quality of the
state of the proposition as it is stated and not as it is assumed.
In addition to
explaining the views of Moslem logicians this paper also undertakes to prove
that Islamic logic didn't die after Ibn-Rushd;
rather, alongside with the growth of Islamic philosophy it has continued its
life up to the present time.
The Problem of the
Existence of Souls before
Bodies in Mulla Sadra's Philosophy
By: Dr.Yans Eshuts
How does the
philosophical principle of "the soul is corporeal in origination, but spiritual
in subsistence" comes into agreement with the teachings of Divine Law refering to the existence of human soul prior to the
origination of the material body and the general principle of "all things
return to their origin?" Mulla Sadra solves this problem by resorting to three principles:
"the principiality of being", "the gradation
of existence", and "the simple truth is all things".
In Mulla Sadra's view, such an
existence of the soul is based on the issue of causality, or as he explains,
the existence of the truth before the descended being, which not only conforms
to the existence of the cause before the effect and the existence of the
archetype before the ectypc, but is also the same as
it. Such priority is essential and possesses at least two existential aspects:
the rational aspect and the imaginal aspect.
Moreover, by the corporeal origination of the soul and its spiritual subsistence,
the writer does not mean the origination of the reality of human soul, the
fixed entities of particular souls, or the source and resurrection of the soul.
Rather, he means the two prior (worldly) and posterior (otherworldly) aspects
of the soul.
What is more, on the
basis of the parallelism and proportion among the stages of the descent and
ascent arcs, each of the levels of the soul in the arc of descent has an
equivalent in the arc of ascend.
And finally, the soul
enters the world of immaterial intellects as a result of the completion of the
body.
The Relationship between Epistemology
and Ontology
By: N.Arab Momeni
Nowadays epistemology
is a familiar term to philosopheers and all of them
are acquainted with its problems in proportion to their background knowledge. A
few centuries after the birth of this science and with the everincreasing
expansion of its related issues in the west, our philosophy has also had some
share in this ergard in recent years and taken notice
of the discussions related to knowledge in different ways following a new
approach. Everyone, has tried to demonstrate the "fact exposing"
facet of science. For example in a series of articles written recently, it has
been tried to relate epistemology to some ontological issues such as the principiality of being or the principiality of quiddity, the
gradation of existence, the principle of the One, the possibility of the
noblest etc. This paper is in fact a critique of such a method of
demonstration. After explaining and evaluating this method the writer deals
with Shaykh Ishraq's theory
on vision and sense perception in general. Following a short reference to Mulla Sadra's ideas in this
regard, he evaluates Suhrawardi's theory on
justifying the "concordance" between the mind and the world of
reality as being more powerful and revealing than other theories. However this does
not mean that the problem has been solved and in fact there is still a long way
to go to come up with a straight forward solution.
After the
introduction, this paper covers the following titles: the principiality
of existence and concordance, criticism and speculation, Illuminationist
ontology and the theory of knowledge a reference to Mulla
Sadra's thoughts and the final note. In the last part
and after concluding the paper the writer has found it fruitful to discuss one
of Mulla Sadra's reasons
for refuting the argument ofshabah which could indicate
the concordance between the essence and the mind.
The principiality of Existence in the Transcemdent
Philosophy
and in the West
By: T.Kermani
According to Mulla Sadra's theory of the principiality
of existence, the concept of existence is a self-evident concept which directly
occurs to mind. Confirming the evidence of the concept of existence itslf is also self-evident. This idea is shared by both
Mulls Sadra and Heidegger,
since this western philosopher ,too, believes that existence
is a fundamental concept to which all concepts could be reduced. Their other
commonality is the meticulous distinction they make between the two descriptive
and actual forms of existence.
In Mulla Sadra's view, unlike the
concept of existence,the
reality of existence is ultimately hidden and evades direct conceptualization.
Therefore, it could not be perceived as anything other than the "direct
data of the innersense". Heidegger ,too, believes
that in spite of its sell-evidence at the level of a priori perception,
existence will remain an ambiguous concept.
Mulla Sadra maintains that it is
existence and not quiddity which is principial. In the west ,too,
existential philosophies, in spite of their numerous differences, comprise a
unitary school of thought, called existentialism. This fact indicates that in both
the east and the west, the idea of the principiality
of existence is an original
and inclusive one and, particularly in Islamic philosophy,
involves confessing the Oneness of The Most High.
"Cause-Effect
Detetminism" and the "Free Will"
By : A.Arshad Reiahi
A perfect cause necessitates the existence of an effect,
and such a causal determinism provides the grounds for the development of a
definite and stable system which, according to a number of thinkers, leaves no
place for will. However, Islamic philosophers believe that there is no
contradiction between these two issues and one can both accept the causal
necessity and conceive of man's acts as being voluntary and optional. This is
because the free will is the last component of the perfect cause of voluntary
acts; therefore, the apparent inconsistency between the "causal
determinism" and "voluntary acts" can be easily removed.
Nevertheless, the contradiction between "causal defemininsm"
and the "free will" can not be as easily obviated, since if another
will is the last component of the perfect cause of the will, the succession of
wills will be necessary. Accordingly, philosophers such as Farabi,
Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra believe that man's
will is the effect of causes and concommitants
outside his will and, in fact, will is imposed on man from the outside. However,
this theory is not acceptable, since it leads to nothing but determinism.
Imam Khomeini obviates the contradiction between "causal
determinism" and the "free will" by arguing that although will is not the effect of another will, it is free and voluntary.
This is because in order for an act to be free, it does not have to be the effect
of will, and there are different kinds of free agents which have no will in addition
to their essence.
Oriental
Wisdom
By : M.Sane Pour
Some people consider Ibn-Sina a Peripatetic philosopher and merely a comentator of Aristotle's works.However
even a facile study of the works of this eminent philosopher reveals that this
is absolutely wrong.In fact, the differences between Ibn-Sina's theories and those of Aristotle are so great in
number that we cannot even enumerate them in this paper.Nevertheless,
it seems that towards the end of his short life, Ibn-Sina
intended to found a new philosophical system, called "Oriental
Wisdom" (versus the Peripatetics' occidental
wisdom), but he couldn't achieve this purpose due to his untimely death. Today
the only available part of the book of "Oriental Wisdom" is the chapter
on oriental logic.
Therefore,
the purpose of the wirter in this paper is to explore
those issues which play a central role in Ibn-Sina's
oriental thought and stand in opposition to the views of the Peripatetic
philosophers, particularly Aristotle. Such issues include:
1. Ibn-Sina
and Aristotle's disagreement concerming the
relationship between the soul and the body.
2. Ibn-Sina
and Aristotle's disagreement concerning the active intellect.
3. The conjectural intellect
and the sacred intellect, which are among Ibn-Sina's
innovations.
4. Ibn-Sina's
gnostic disposition which is based on emananation and illumination from the outside and is in
contradiction Aristotle's intellectual and senseless paganism.
The
Paradigm of "Wisdom" and its Role in Solving the
Paradox
of Absolutism and Relativism
By : M.Khaqani
Believing
in the interplay of all sciences, including human sciences and religious sciences,
is one of the bases of relativism. In order to explore the truth of this interplay,
it has firstly been tried in this article to discuss the "paradigm of
wisdom" from the Islamic point of view.
The
writer has also discussed the scientists' unsuccessful experience of establishing
a relationship between the universalism of wisdom and particularism
of experimental sciences, that is, deduction and universalism versus induction
and particularism.
In still
another part, with reference to the interplay of human sciences, the writer has
reviewed the ideas of returning to universalism in frameworks such as the philosophy
of science, the general systems theory, semiotics (the study of sign systems)
and hermeneutics.
Finally,
the interplay of "the unity of wisdom" and "the multiplicity of
sciences" has been introduced in contexts sunh
as the paradox of the Quran and the criterion (furqan), the path (sirat),
religion and Divine Laws, the troops (al-zumar) and mankind
(al-nas), and the issue of lack of division in shiite exertion (ijtihad) as a
strategic theory in Islamic culture in order to deal with this philosophical
challenge.
The Cosmological Argument in
Kant and Islamic
Philosophers
By: A.Hesami
Far
One of the important arguments adduced
on the existence of God is the cosmological argument, which has been introduced
and explained in different ways and under various titles such as the motion,
causality, contingency and necessity arguments in Islamic and western schools
of philosophy.
In
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant views the arguments of proving the existence of
God in the supernature as a product of the debates of
the pure reason, coming into being as a result of applying the pure concepts of
understanding to the ideas of reason (God, world, soul). In his view, the mo.st important arguments adduced on the existence of God
consist of ontological, cosmological and natural-theological arguments. When criticizing
these arguments, he reduces the second and third arguments to the first one and
then rejects it. This is because, firstly, existence is not a real predicate,
and, secondly, predicating existence on the concept of God presents a synthetic
(and not an analytic) propisition that could be considered
neither an a posteriori synthetic proposition (since God is insensible), nor an
a priori one (since a priori synthetic propositions can only be used in relation
to the world of phenomena).
In
this article, first a summary of Kant's critical approach to the cosmological argument
will be presented on the basis of his critique of pure reason. Next, reference
will be made to the ideas of some of his commentators and critics in this regard.
Finally, in order to portray a clear picture of this argument, some of the related
explanations given by Islamic philosophers will be presented and, among all of
them, the ones provided by Mulla Sadra
and Mutahhari will be dealt with in more depth.