An Analytic Study of Mulla Sadra's Responses to the Questions of Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi and Mulla Muzaffar Hossein Kashani about the Subsistence of the Soul

The subsistence of the soul after its parting with the body is one of the most challenging problems in the field of philosophy. This problem has been discussed by both philosophers who consider the soul to be pre-eternal and immaterial and philosophers who believe in the spiritual origination of the soul, and both groups have adduced various arguments in this regard. Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi, who is a Peripatetic philosopher, has posed the following question: Why, in the view of philosophers, are the body and bodily preparedness concomitant at the beginning of the origination of the soul but not at the stage of subsistence and separation? He has probed the response to this question in a treatise which he wrote about the subsistence of the soul. At the same time, he asked this question from his contemporary philosopher, Shams al-Din Khusrawshahi, but he did not receive a response. Mulla Muzaffar Hossein Kashani, who was contemporary with Mulla Sadra, asked him the same question, since it seems that the problem of the subsistence of the soul is apparently inconsistent with Mulla Sadra’s theory of corporeal origination. He provided a response to the question of Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi and Mulla Muzaffar on the basis of the fundamental principles of his own philosophy and defended the problem of the subsistence of the soul after its separation from the body.