A Critical Reading of the Relationship between Imagination and Act: Sadrian Thought versus the Modern Philosophy of Act

One of the main problems of the philosophy of act is the explanation of the quality of the realization of human voluntary acts. A study of the ideas of Mulla Sadra, who has dealt with the whatness and functions of imagination following a new approach in his school of philosophy, reveals that, given the diffusion of the final cause and causal role of imagination and the imaginal faculty in acts, we can present a causal and rational explanation of voluntary acts and other-worldly bodies. A comparison of Mulla Sadra’s view and Davidson’s theory, known as the dual theory of “belief-desire”, indicates that this theory fails to provide a comprehensive explanation for the human voluntary actions. This is because, through ignoring the causal role of imagination and the imaginal faculty in voluntary acts, it has not provided an all-inclusive account of the acts that are influenced by imagination and imaginal faculty. Moreover, this theory considers belief to be one of the basic elements of all acts while affirmative belief does not have this function for all acts. For Mulla Sadra, philosophical psychology is a general title for the discussions about the accidents and acts of the soul, and what we call the philosophy of act is a sub-category of this discipline. He has tried to present a consistent and well-reasoned theory including the intention-act-agent relation through expanding and promoting the theory of faculties to the theory of the modes of the soul based on his own specific ontological theories, such as “the union of the intellect and the intelligible”, “the union of the object of desire and the willing”, “the union of imagination and the imagined”, “the theory of gradation”, “the trans-substantial motion of the soul”, and the belief in the diffusion of causality, including the spread of the final cause in the world of being.