Dr.

Ali Akbar Ziaee

His name: Sadr al-Din Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yahya alQawami al-Shirazi, known variously as Mulla Sadra, Sadr alMuta'allihin, or simply Akhund. He was born in Shiraz in central Iran in 979-80/ad 1571-2. He studied in Isfahan with Mir Damad and Shaykh-e Baha'i. He retired for a number of years of spiritual solitude and discipline in the village of Kahak, near Qum. He completed the first part of his major work, the Asfar in Qum. He was then invited by Allah-wirdi Khan, the governor of Fars province, to return to Shiraz, where he taught for the remainder of his life. He died in Basra in 1050/ 1640 while on his seventh pilgrimage on foot to Mecca.

He was the author of over forty works. He devoted himself almost exclusively to metaphysics, He termed a 'metaphilosophy', the source of which lay in the Islamic revelation and the mystical experience of reality as existence. Mulla Sadra's metaphilosophy was based on existence as the sole constituent of reality, and rejected any role for quiddities or essences in the external world. Existence was for him a single unity and an internally articulated dynamic process, the unique source of both unity and diversity.

1. The Peripatetic ( mashsha'i) philosophy of Ibn Sina had been elaborated by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi 2. Illuminationist ( ishraqi) philosophy, originated by Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, had also been a major current. 3. The mysticism of Ibn al-'Arabi had taken firm root in sixteenth century. 4. The theology ( kalam) had increasingly come to be expressed in philosophical terminology. It was Mulla Sadra who achieved a true mixture of all four, forming what he called 'metaphilosophy' ( al-hikma al-muta'aliya), known simply as the Asfar.

The primacy of existence The systematic ambiguity of existence Substantial motion Epistemology Methodology

Aristotle had pointed out that existence was the most universal of predicates ()and therefore could not be included as one of the categories. al-Farabi added to this that it was possible to know an essence without first knowing whether it existed or not, existence thus being neither a constitutive element of an essence nor a necessary attribute. Ibn Sina had held that in the existence-quiddity (wujudmahiyya) or existence-essence relationship, existence was an accident of quiddity. )(

al-Suhrawardi had asserted that if existence were an attribute of quiddity, quiddity itself would have to exist before attracting this attribute in order to be thus qualified. From this, al-Suhrawardi deduced the more radical conclusion that existence is merely a mental concept with no corresponding reality, and that it is quiddity which constitutes reality.

Existence

Quiddity

Existence

Mulla Sadra asserted that it is existence that constitutes reality and that it is quiddities which are the mental constructs. Existence is accidental to quiddity in the mind in so far as it is not a part of its essence.

existence

Definition: Reality and existence are identical is that existence is one but graded in intensity. Reality is pure existence, but an existence which manifests itself in different modes. It is these modes which present themselves in the mind as quiddities. The term 'in the mind', however, is merely an expression denoting a particular mode of being.