Body and its nexus to the Perception in Mulla's perspective

Islamic philosophers, particularly, Peripatetic, on the basis of relation between the soul and the body and their essence, have regarded the perception as the act of the soul, not of the body. Accordingly, the soul's knowledge to the body is the acquired knowledge. However, Mulla Sadra maintains that the soul's knowledge to the body is like a self-consciousness which should be considered as knowledge by presence. He holds that the body is not only the object of the soul's knowledge by presence and its self-consciousness, but also it contributes to all levels of perception; so far once the body has been faced a disorder, every level of perception, even the rational one, will be subjected to change. In this paper, firstly, Sadra’s doctrine on the types of body will be explained, and then we will deal with the problem of soul's knowledge to the body and the role of body in perception. Secondly, we will come to the conclusion that the body is the one stage of the soul's various levels, not a substance separated from it. This allows us to assert that the role and the contribution of the body in perception, though not the same as that of the soul in perception, it is not less than that; and one detaches from the idea that the soul plays the role in perception solely. In fact, Sadra’s knowledge of the soul is not merely a suvey of the soul; it is also an explanation of the human essence which is not plausible without paying attention to corporeal dimension of human being.