Mulla Sadra

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Mulla Sadra bigraphy, stories - Iranian philosopher

Mulla Sadra : biography

1571 – 1636

Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, also called Mulla Sadrā ( also spelt Molla Sadra, Mollasadra or Sadr-ol-Mote’allehin; ) (c. 1572–1640), was an Iranian Shia Islamic philosopher, theologian and ‘Ālim who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century. According to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years.Leaman (2007), p.146 by John Cooper

Though not its founder, he is considered the master of the Illuminationist (or, Ishraghi or Ishraqi) school of Philosophy, a seminal figure who synthesized the many tracts of the Islamic Golden Age philosophies into what he called the Transcendent Theosophy or al-hikmah al-muta’liyah.

Mulla Sadra brought "a new philosophical insight in dealing with the nature of reality" and created "a major transition from essentialism to existentialism" in Islamic philosophy, although his existentialism should not be too readily compared to Western existentialism. His was a question of existentialist cosmology as it pertained to Allah, and thus differs considerably from the individual, moral, and/or social, questions at the heart of Russian, French, German, or American Existentialism.

Mulla Sadra’s philosophy ambitiously synthesized Avicennism, Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist philosophy, Ibn Arabi’s Sufi metaphysics, and the theology of the Ash’ari school and Twelvers.Leaman (2007), pp.146 and 147

Notes

Philosophical ideas

Existentialism

According to Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and is thus principal since something has to exist first and then have an essence." It is notable that for Mulla Sadra this was a question that specifically applied to God and God’s position in the universe, especially in the context of reconciling God’s position in the Qur’an verses cosmological philosophies of Islam’s Golden Era.

Mulla Sadra metaphysics gave priority "Ab initio" to existence, over quiddity. That is to say, essences are determined and variable according to existential "intensity", (to use Henry Corbin’s definition), and as such essences are not immutable.Corbin (1993), pp. 342 and 343 The advantage to this schema is that it is acceptable to the fundamental statements of the Qur’an, even as it does not necessarily debilitate any previous Islamic philosopher’s Aristotelian or Platonic foundations.

Indeed, Mulla Sadra provides immutability only to God, while intrinsically linking essence and existence to each other, and God’s power over existence. In so doing, Mulla Sadra simultaneously provided for God’s authority over all things, while also solving the problem of God’s knowledge of particulars, including those that are evil, without being inherently responsible for them — even as God’s authority over the existence of existences that provide the framework for evil to exist. This clever solution provides for Freedom of Will, God’s Supremacy, the Infiniteness of God’s Knowledge, the existence of Evil, and a definition of existence and essence which leaves two inextricably linked insofar as Man is concerned, but fundamentally separate insofar as God is concerned.Sayyed Hussein Nasr, Persian Sufi Literature, Lecture, George Washington University, 2006

Perhaps most importantly, the Primacy of Existence solution provides the capacity for God’s Judgement without God being directly, or indirectly, effected by the evil being judged. God does not need to possess Sin to know Sin: God is able to judge the intensity of Sin as God perceives Existence.Ibid

One result of this Existentialism is "The unity of the intellect and the intelligible" (Arabic: Ittihad al-Aaqil wa l-Maqul. As Henry Corbin describes:

Substantial motion

Another central concept of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy is the theory of "substantial motion" (Arabic:al-harakat al-jawhariyyah), which is "based on the premise that everything in the order of nature, including celestial spheres, undergoes substantial change and transformation as a result of the self-flow (fayd) and penetration of being (sarayan al-wujud) which gives every concrete individual entity its share of being. In contrast to Aristotle and Avicenna who had accepted change only in four categories, i.e., quantity (kamm), quality (kayf), position (wad’) and place (‘ayn), Sadra defines change as an all-pervasive reality running through the entire cosmos including the category of substance (jawhar)."