Document Type : Scientific Review
Authors
1 PhD student in Transcendent Wisdom
2 PhD student at the Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies
Abstract
Introduction
Two complicated and difficult problems in the Islamic philosophy are knowledge and intellect. These were of great significance to philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to such Muslim philosophers as Avicenna, Fakhr al-Razi, Suhrawardi, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi as well as to the Schools of Shiraz and Isfahan. Following them, Mulla Sadra raised the question of knowledge throughout his philosophical work. As the Sadrai thought is still dynamic and can be pursued, examined, critiqued or reconstructed, Muslim thinkers continue to publish their research in the form of books, dissertations, and articles on the issue of knowledge and the intellect. It goes without saying that in order to prevent doing what others already do or have already done the evolution of research on a problem needs to be brought to the researcher’s attention. Therefore, literature plays an important role in the research process, and the present article intends to assist researchers on Mulla Sadra with the literature review. It goes over scientific productions in the area of dissertations and articles from 2001 to 2020 on the subject of knowledge in Sadra’i philosophy. This includes 218 works, out of which 85 articles, 32 master’s degree dissertations and 9 PhD theses are written in the field of the intellect. Master’s degree dissertations and PhD theses on the subject of knowledge are 35 and 9 titles respectively, which does not show a marked difference to the field of the intellect. This is while the articles in the field of knowledge are 45 titles i.e. half as many as the articles written in the field of intellect.
The research method
As a systematic review, using the search engines and data bases such as Noormags, Comprehensive Portal of Human Sciences, Magiran, and the Treasure System (sāmāni-yi ganj) in the Iranian Research Institute for Information, Science and Technology (IranDoc), and Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), this article has searched titles of articles, dissertations, and PhD theses and conducted a statistical study of those Farsi titles written between 2001 and 2020 in Iran in the areas of knowledge and intellect in Mulla Sadra’s transcendent wisdom.
A discussion of results
More attention has been paid to the question of knowledge than that of the intellect. Within the subject of knowledge, discussions of divine knowledge are of the highest frequency, but less attention has been paid to the levels of the Creator’s knowledge and the status of the Creator’s knowledge in creation, or, to put it the other way, to the levels of knowledge in parallel to the levels of creation. When it comes to theology in the more specific sense, less attention has been paid to the knowledge-led Shia theology versus power-led Sunni theology, and the basics and results of such a discussion are not examined. Within the subject of intellect, discussions of the epistemology of the intellect are of the highest frequency, whereas less attention has been paid to various meanings and usages of the intellect in Islamic sciences including theosophy, philosophy, ethics, and to their distinction from the intellect in common parlance.
Conclusion
Among the conclusions is that there are methodological limitations: lack of attention to a needs assessment in the process of deciding research topics; lack of proper attention to other researchers’ findings (which leads up to many problems including repetitious work and lack of attention to certain topics, as witnessed by the results of the present study); lack of variety in the articles (for the most part, they are written for academic research journals, while a helpful research activity of high efficiency and influence relies on a whole variety of introductory studies, including reviews, which are visibly missing in the field of Islamic philosophy); and finally the lack of information about research activities in the field in the international arena and even Islamic countries.
Keywords
)