Title: Knowledge in later Islamic philosophy : Mulla Sadra on existence, intellect, and intuition /
Authors: Kalın, İbrahim.
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm,; Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm,; Knowledge, Theory of (Islam); Islamic philosophy.
Abstract: "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). Inhis 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 aproperty 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 thepossibilities 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.
Contents: The problem of knowledge and the Greco-Islamic context of the unification argument -- Mullā Ṣadrā's theory of knowledge and the unification argument -- Ṣadrā's synthesis : knowledge as experience, knowledge as being -- Treatise on the unification of the intellector and the intelligible.