Philosophy of Childhood in Mulla Sadra

It is irrational to claim that Muslim philosophers have not presented any theories regarding the training of children. This is because, basically, this problem belongs to the recent period, particularly to the 20th century, and either did not exist in previous periods or was approached differently. Accordingly, in the present paper, it has firstly been tried to provide a schema of the main contemporary approaches in the field of children’s cognitive and moral development. Then the writer provides a general picture of the theory of children’s cognitive development in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy. At the end, reference is made to the concomitants and consequences of Mulla Sadra’s theory of epistemological (psychological) development. The theories of children’s development can be examined in two ways: from the viewpoint of “stage-by-stage” development and from the viewpoint of “loop development”. The theory of loop development has been propounded for the first time in this paper and has no precedent among other related theories. In the stage-by-stage or cognitive development theory, which was initially proposed by Piaget, children are the same small adults who need to go through the stages of development one by one in order to attain cognitive development. In contrast to Piaget’s theory, in the theory of loop development, each loop of children’s cognitive development is unique and distinct from any other period of childhood or adulthood. This paper mainly argues that, as stated by Mulla Sadra, the first stage of cognitive development does not begin with birth; rather, it begins before birth. In other words, human beings start their process of development during the embryonic period, when spirit appears in body. Moreover, based on Mulla Sadra’s theory of psychological development, Man’s development does not end with his death; in fact, death is the beginning of another stage of development which can continue until eternity. These two features are indeed the two lost loops of all theories related to children’s cognitive development in today’s psychology and philosophy.