Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology

The intellect and revelation are two categories that have always attracted the attention of thinkers and philosophers. Perhaps one of the most important achievements of Mulla Sadra is his synthesis of the intellect and revelation. A study of his method in accomplishing this task can serve as a luminous torch guiding many of the seekers of the truth.This paper examines two important approaches followed by Mulla Sadra in this regard: the first is clarifying the problem of esoteric interpretation and equating (...) it with perfectional interpretation, and the second is distinguishing rational rules from estimative and imaginal ones. Both of these methods play significant roles in the structure of Sadrian philosophy and connect Sharia'h, the intellect, and gnosis. (shrink)

We compare two approaches given to the parallelogram law as a fundamental notion in eighteenth century mechanics. The authors we study are Kant and d’Alembert and we use the context created by Newton’s Principia as our point of departure.En este artículo comparamos dos caminos seguidos en el tratamiento de la ley del paralelogramo como noción fundamental en la mecánica del siglo XVIII. Los autores que estudiamos son Kant y d’Alembert y utilizamos el contexto creado por los Principia de Newton como (...) nuestro punto de partida. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to critically analyse some of the versions ofthe oneness of existence 1. It seeks to argue thataccording to Mulla Sadra, the concept of “existence”2 is one, and itsextra-mental reality, then, must also be one, because one singleconcept cannot be obtained from a number of “realities” “Existence”is one single “reality” comprehending everything.3 The “reality”behind the veil of many different things is “pure existence” withouteven a trace of multiplicity, and the “quiddities” which are the sourceof this multiplicity (...) are but different degrees of the one single“reality’’. (shrink)

As the title suggests, this paper presents a comparative study of the commonalities and differences between the Illuminationist philosophy and Transcendent Theosophy. The writer has tried to make a comparison between the significance of "light" in Suhrawardi's philosophy and that of "existence" in Mulla Sadra's school of thought. To accomplish this task, he has also made some references to Ibn-Sina's ideas and the differences between his ideas in this regard and those of these two philosophers.The author believes that in certain (...) cases Suhrawardi considers the Peripatetic principles as being valid; however, he does not favor their fundamental principles. The most important book of this philosopher, hikmat al-ishmq, is a philosophical book, whose principles have been devised through using a series of intellectual reasons based on necessary propositions. The Illuminationist philosophy, on the one hand, is in conformity with the school of the principiality of existence in denying the metaphysical difference between existence and quiddity, and on the other hand, it stands against this school in emphasizing the mentally-posited nature of existence and the principiality of quiddity. (shrink)

The question of "existence as a predicate" enjoys an outstanding significance from the historical and comparative point of view.Kant, the eminent German philosopher claimed that existence could not be a real predicate for its own subject, since existence is not a concept that could add anything to an object. According to Kant, existence in its logical sense is, merely, copula , rather than either of the terms. The copula on the proposition, of the other hand, does not indicate something that (...) owns a real referent. Its exclusive role is, rather, to establish a nexus between the predicate and the subject.Mulla Sadra, the great Muslim Philosopher, has acknowledged the concept of being as an independent, and predicative concept. His remarks concerning the contents of the simple proposition, i.e. "A is existent" are similar to that of Kant in some respects and different from them, in others. In so far as the content of the proposition signifies the subsistence and the realization of the subject, rather than the subsistence of something for the subject, their respective remarks are quite similar, but in so far as Mulla Sadra, on the basis of his philosophical stance "the principiality of being" demonstrates that what is principial in the external reality is "existence" rather than "quiddity", he is quite different from the philosophical view point of Kant. The quiddity in his opinion is a mentally posited that is either abstracted from the limits of being, or is the manifestation of the limits of being in the mind.A comparative study of Mulla Sadra 's and Kant's views concerning the existence as a predicate, of any other issue in general, without taking into account their whole systems as well as the basic principles of Mulla Sadra's ontology will be impossible. The being that is applied by Mulla Sadra, like other Muslim Philosophers, as a predicate in the existential proposition is totally different from that of Kant. Mulla Sadra just as his predecessors examined the concept of being, God, and reality from an aspect, wholly different from that of Kant. Accordingly, Kant and Muslim philosophers despite their similar methods of applying the concepts in their philosophical arguments believe in two exactly distinctive worlds. Therefore, to compare them, it is not possible to consider certain concepts such as "being" or "necessity", and ask about the soundness of either one. However, the chief aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative study of the philosophical systems of the two philosophers.The present article, is a comparative study of Kant's denial of existence as a real predicate, on the one hand, and Mulla Sadra's acknowledgement and demonstration of such predicates, on the other. Hopefully, this study will pave the ground for an inquiry into one of the most important philosophical problems, and through the demonstration of such philosophical propositions, the way for a study of the "reality of being" in Mulla Sara's philosophy will be prepared. (shrink)

Mulla Sadra's al-Hikmat al-Muta'aliyah ischaracterized by eclecticism in the sense that this is an attempt ofreconciliation of and, at the same time, reaction against his predecessors likeAristotle, Ibn Sina, Ibn-'Arabi, the Illuminationists and etc. Our thinker hasan intellectual approach though he rejects rational conceptual process as asole way of approaching to reality. Instead, he focuses on two ways to unveilreality: intuitive experience and logical reasoning.In this paper, I will further compare Mulla Sadra's ideas in relation to laterWestern philosophers, Martin Heidegger (...) and Edmund Husserl. In particular,I will examine and compare his concept of traveling the gulf between theReality of One Existence and the other beings, as well as his concept oftrans-existentiation as an attempt to translate mystical and intuitiveexperience into the language ofreason or empirical evidence. (shrink)

God's knowledge of material things is among the most complicated philosophical problems the complexity of which stems from the status of the changing existence of material objects. Accordingly, such knowledge must be explained in a way that the cognitive relation between Almighty Necessary and changing material things does not lead to the rise of any change or plurality in His Essence. Mulla Sadra's general view of solving the cognitive relationship between Almighty Necessary and material things comparing to that of Ibn (...) Sina enjoys particular comprehensibility and has removed the defects of his theories in this regard, such as considering God's knowledge of other than God as acquired knowledge and their failing to demonstrate the Necessary's essential knowledge of other than Himself. Mulla Sadra's fundamental innovation regarding the Necessary's knowledge of material things is benefitting from the principle of truth in its simplicity in demonstrating the fixed essential knowledge of Almighty Truth. On the other hand, he considers Almighty Necessary's actual knowledge of material things to be the same as their external presence before Him. Since he attributes God's cognitive perfection to His essential knowledge, he argues that the changeability of actual knowledge does not prove the existence of any defect in His almighty essence. This is because, in his view, actual knowledge, which is the same as act, is considered the cognitive perfection of act rather than that of the agent. Of course, Mulla Sadra has some seemingly contradictory statements in his explanation of God's knowledge of material things which are justifiable if viewed from two different perspectives. (shrink)

Although one would not wish to classify Copernicus’ own intentions as belonging to the late-medieval and Renaissance tradition of nominalist philosophy, if we are to turn our consideration to what was responsible for the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution, we must also attend to other features of the dialectical context in relation to which the views of Copernicus and his followers were articulated, interpreted, and evaluated. Accordingly, this paper discusses the significance of the erosion of the Aristotelian prohibition against (...) metabasis to the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented here, (...) two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This volume, originally published in 2002, assembles the historical sequence of writings that Kant published between 1783 and 1796 to popularize, summarize, amplify and defend the doctrines of his masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781. The best known of them, the Prolegomena, is often recommended to beginning students, but the other texts are also vintage Kant and are important sources for a fully rounded picture of Kant's intellectual development. As with other volumes in the series there are copious (...) linguistic notes and a glossary of key terms. The editorial introductions and explanatory notes shed light on the critical reception accorded Kant by the metaphysicians of his day and on Kant's own efforts to derail his opponents. (shrink)

Although T.L.S. Sprigge described idealist philosophy as the stage beyond religion, his pantheistic idealism, while not itself a religion, offers a conception of God that seeks to meet the aspiration of human beings to understand their own place in the universe. While he shared with most mid twentieth century British philosophers a basic assumption of the primacy of experience, Sprigge took this strong empiricist assumption in a Berkeleyian rather than a Humean direction. This enabled him to find a place for (...) the phenomenon of religious consciousness, which he saw as the source of a yearning that can be met by absolute idealism's conception of a 'Whole' that encompasses ourselves and all aspects of our world. He describes this recognition as the faltering adumbration of a truth - one that is sometimes encountered in aesthetic experience, and sometimes more directly in the lives of mystics.The metaphysical basis for this form of absolute idealism is provided by a concept of time in which each fleeting 'now' has a fixed and permanent place, and by a theory of identity according to which personal individuality is dissolved in a unitary 'Whole'. (shrink)