The Imagination Faculty and Imaginative Perception in Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi

What is the function of imagination faculty among other cognitive faculties? Is imaginative perception a material entity, related to the world of sensible objects, or an immaterial one? Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi introduce the imagination faculty as one of the inner faculties, and imagination as one of the stages in perception. In the present article, first we state the cosmological and psychological bases of Ibn Sina’s view. He poses the imagination faculty in his own Peripatetic school of thought. He regards the imagination faculty as one holding in itself the forms existing in the common sense, and limits – in the course of imaginative perception – fantasy to the sensible world. We, then, will state the cosmological and functionalist bases of Suhrawardi. Suhrawardi, discusses the imagination faculty within the framework of an Illuminative school of thought. He, like Ibn Sina, regards it a material faculty; but he does not accept, in the course of imaginative perception, Ibn Sina’s theory, and regards the forms perceived in the imagination faculty as forms just appeared in the imagination faculty. For him, we have another world apart from the material world wherein the reality of everything exists, and in the course of imaginative perception, the forms existing in that world appear in the imagination faculty. He calls it ‘the world of ideas’ (pendent forms).At the end, we will deal with the common points and differences between these two philosophers.