Kalin, Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy
The 17th-century philosopher Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, known as Mullā Ṣadrā, attempted to reconcile the three major forms of knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourses: revelation (Qurʼān), demonstration (burhan), and gnosis or intuitive knowledge (ʼirfan). In his grand synthesis, which he calls the “Transcendent Wisdom”, Mullā Ṣadrā 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 a property of the knower on the one hand, and the Avicennan notions of knowledge as abstraction and representation on the other. For Ṣadrā, 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 the possibilities of a “non-subjectivist” epistemology, Ṣadrā seeks to shift the focus from knowledge as a mental act of representation to knowledge as presence and unveiling. For Ṣadrā, in knowing things, we unveil an aspect of existence and thus engage with the countless modalities and colors of the all-inclusive reality of existence. In such a framework, we give up the subjectivist claims of ownership of meaning. The intrinsic intelligibility of existence strips the knowing subject of its privileged position of being the sole creator of meaning. Instead, meaning and intelligibility are defined as functions of existence to be deciphered and unveiled by the knowing subject. This leads to a redefinition of the relationship between subject and object.
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