Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy

Ibrahim Kalin

Hardback, 344 pages

9780199735242

Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition

This study looks at how the seventeenth-century philosopher Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, known as Mulla Sadra, attempted to reconcile the three major forms of knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourses: revelation (Qur'an), demonstration (burhan), and gnosis or intuitive knowledge ('irfan). In his grand synthesis, which he calls the 'Transcendent Wisdom', Mulla Sadra bases his epistemological considerations on a robust analysis of existence and its modalities. His key claim that knowledge is a mode of existence rejects and revises the Kalam definitions of knowledge as relation and as a property of the knower on the one hand, and the Avicennan notions of knowledge as abstraction and representation on the other.

For Sadra, all these theories land us in a subjectivist theory of knowledge where the knowing subject is defined as the primary locus of all epistemic claims. To explore the possibilities of a 'non-subjectivist' epistemology, Sadra seeks to shift the focus from knowledge as a mental act of representation to knowledge as presence and unveiling. The concept of knowledge has occupied a central place in the Islamic intellectual tradition.

Contents

1. The Problem of Knowledge and the Greco-Islamic Context of the Unification Argument

- The Greco-Alexandrian Background

- Islamic Philosophy

2. Mulla Sadra's Theory of Knowledge and the Unification Argument

- Sadra's Ontology

- Existence, Intelligibility and Knowledge

3. Sadra's Synthesis: Knowledge as Experience, Knowledge as Being

- Epistemology Spiritualised: Is Mystical Knowledge Possible?

- Knowledge as Finding Existence

Appendix: Treatise on the Unification of the Intellector and the Intelligible