Philosophy
ali asghar jafari valani
Abstract
Abstract
Issue
Avicenna presented his "flying man" or "floating man" argument as a means to establish the existence of the soul, its immaterial nature, and its distinctiveness from the body. While originally conceived with an ontological focus, subsequent scholars have often employed this concept ...
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Abstract
Issue
Avicenna presented his "flying man" or "floating man" argument as a means to establish the existence of the soul, its immaterial nature, and its distinctiveness from the body. While originally conceived with an ontological focus, subsequent scholars have often employed this concept in an epistemological context, asserting that Avicenna’s flying man not only exists, but also knows that he exists. Such an interpretation of the flying man argument seems to be at odds with his own principles, his passages throughout his works, and what he pursued to establish through this scenario.
Method
Deploying a descriptive and analytical method, it may be said that
Findings: Avicenna believes that perception begins from senses, and the first stage of the human reason is material or hylic reason or pure potentiality. Moreover, there is a difference between consciousness (shuʿūr) that is actually obtained by humans since the beginning of their existence and consciousness of consciousness (al-shuʿūr bi-l-shuʿūr), which he believes to be a potential character that needs to be acquired, while our primary consciousness of the soul is the existence of our soul. Thus, the flying man is solely the existence and presence of the soul before any actual consciousness.
Results
In view of the fact that man was suspended in space at the beginning of his creation and Ibn Sina considers the human soul to be the event of the body and in the order of the beast intellect and pure power, which lacks any perception and becomes actual through sensory perception, it should be said : The human being suspended in Ibn Sina's space can have an existential quality and in fact, he is observing the position of presence, existence, and mere existence. In addition, Ibn Sina, emphasizing the two positions of consciousness and consciousness to consciousness, believes that consciousness is actually and permanently suspended in man, but consciousness to consciousness is potential in him. Therefore, it seems that the soul at the beginning of creation, although it is present and proven, but it cannot be said that it has knowledge of itself; That is, the soul initially lacks attention to itself, and this lack of attention prevents any self-perception of the soul.
Innovation: In fact, regarding "Avicenna's suspended human being in space", it can only be said that "a human being is conscious (without any actual awareness)", but it cannot be said: "In addition, because this human being is conscious, he knows that he is like this." ».
mostafa momeni; MOHAMAD JAVAD AKHGARI; yaser Salari
Abstract
Introduction: Knowledge by presence (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī) is a problem explicitly discussed by Suhrawardī (Shaykh al-Ishrāq). This issue has since become a significant topic in Islamic epistemology. More recently, Allameh Tabatabai has examined this problem and drawn noteworthy conclusions. According ...
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Introduction: Knowledge by presence (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī) is a problem explicitly discussed by Suhrawardī (Shaykh al-Ishrāq). This issue has since become a significant topic in Islamic epistemology. More recently, Allameh Tabatabai has examined this problem and drawn noteworthy conclusions. According to him, knowledge by presence is an existential concept, and is detached from matter. He establishes the existence of such knowledge by appealing to human self-consciousness, which manifests the presence of the existence of our own selves to us. In his view, the criterion for knowledge by presence consists in the real presence of something (the known) to another thing (the knower). Accordingly, he broadens the instances of knowledge by presence to encompass self-knowledge, a cause’s knowledge of its own effects, the effect’s knowledge of its cause, an effect’s knowledge of other effects of its cause, and human knowledge of his own sensory impressions. As for the reduction of knowledge by acquisition (al-ʿilm al-ḥuṣūlī) to knowledge by presence, Allameh Tabatabai believes that each instance of the former is indeed an instance of the latter. In fact, knowledge by acquisition always involves knowledge by presence. It follows that all human knowledge is by presence through and through. This is because it is always an instance of knowledge by presence that turns into an instance of knowledge by acquisition. This transformation is done through the imaginative faculty, which he dubs the faculty of transforming knowledge by presence to knowledge by acquisition. According to Allameh Tabatabai’s view of knowledge by presence and its transformation into knowledge by acquisition, the soul has an effective agential role with respect to epistemic forms or images, obtaining both universal and particular epistemic forms via “unification.” This implies that the process of perception consists in the “strengthening of the detached (immaterial) existence of the world” and its unification with the intellectual level of existence. Another corollary of his view is that, since knowledge is in fact something existential that cannot be subsumed under any of the quiddity-based categories, it cannot be characterized as corresponding or failing to correspond to the reality, whereas knowledge by acquisition can be thus characterized. Furthermore, his view of knowledge by presence implies that knowledge by acquisition is restricted to the material world, since material entities can neither know, nor be known. Of course, material entities involve immaterial dimensions such as change and ignorance in virtue of which knowledge applies to them.
Method: This research was carried out with the library-analytical method.
Discussion and results: The main conclusion to be drawn from Allameh Tabatabai’s discussion of the nature of knowledge by presence and its corollaries is that it can be used to determine the ground of distinction between real (ḥaqīqī) and constructed (iʿtibārī) perceptions and how they relate to knowledge by presence. Since an instance of knowledge by presence is involved in any instance of knowledge by acquisition, it follows that when knowledge is divided, what is actually divided is knowledge by presence. That is, there are two types of knowledge by presence: pure knowledge by presence and knowledge presence that can be transformed into knowledge by acquisition. Moreover, given the account of the process through which the former is transformed into the latter and how constructed perceptions emerge from real perceptions with the aid of the estimative (wahmiyya) faculty, it can be concluded that the criterion for the division of perceptions into real and constructed, on Allameh Tabatabai’s account, is the same criterion depicted in the distinction between knowledge by presence and knowledge by acquisition. In other words, just as the mind draws on the activities of the estimative faculty to transform knowledge by presence into knowledge by acquisition for purposes of convenience in ordinary life, it utilizes the same activities to derive constructed perceptions from real perceptions.
Conclusion: According to Allameh Tabatabai, it is knowledge by presence that is transformed into knowledge by acquisition through the activities of the imaginative faculty. The activities of the estimative faculty concerning real entities result in the formation of constructed perceptions. The criterion proposed by him for the division of perceptions into constructed and real is the one depicted in the distinction between knowledge by acquisition and knowledge by presence.
This clarifies the ground of the distinction between real and constructed perceptions, as well as its relationship with knowledge by presence. The ground of real perceptions is pure knowledge by presence, while the ground of constructed perceptions is the type of knowledge by presence that can be transformed into knowledge by acquisition. The distinction between these two kinds of perceptions lies in the difference of the knowledge by presence involved in them.
