A Comparative Study of the Concept of Faith from Mulla Sadra's and Jasper's Viewpoints

Faith is one of the central concepts in religious thought and in philosophy of religion. But there is not a unique understanding of this concept among theologians and philosophers. Some define faith as belief in proposition and others, criticizing the propositional view of faith, define it as facing God, belief in God, and committing to him. In this paper we will compare the views of two philosophers from two different cultures in this subject. We should consider both revelational and philosophical elements in Mulla Sadra's concept of faith while Jasper's faith is not based on revelation but only on his philosophical concepts such as existence and its different levels, God and transcendence, human's freedom and free will, and historical and subjective dimensions of the truth. Mulla Sadra has a propositional view in this relation and sees faith as an epistemological issue. So we can find some similarities between these two thinkers.