An Analysis of the Suhrawardi's Epistemic Theory and Replying the Objections

According to Suhrawardi, human knowledge about material beings, the knowledge of soul about the body and its faculties, and the knowledge of all visual things are innate. For Suhrawardi, the innate knowledge means that if man wants to know anything he will find it innately and there is no need to the mediation of forms, and only the illuminationist relation is enough. While he acknowledges that the innateness of the visual knowledge about the material world and the innate knowledge of soul about the body and its faculties are based on the soul’s inner intuition and with the help of rational argument, this theory apparently disagrees with some of his teachings and principles. Hence, he confronts with some objections: innate knowledge has no effect on soul; percipient hasn’t existential mastery over the perceived; innateness would be restricted to the abstract beings; and some of the sciences would be acquired. In the present paper we will try to reply to these objections by appealing to the elements of Suhrawardi’s philosophy and proving the following cases: effect includes mental form but is more than that; the condition of percipient existential mastery over the perceived is not limited to causal mastery; the cause of material perception is not material existence; soul can get a form from its innate knowledge and convert it to acquired knowledge.