A Critical Review of the Construct of Meanings in Genealogy from the Perspective of Islamic Wisdom

In this article, the constructivist view of genealogy about the formation of meanings has been criticized from the perspective of Islamic wisdom. Therefore, a description of the genealogy view on meanings has first been presented and the role of the power and discourse functions has been analyzed in the construction of meanings. In the following, using the common principles of Islamic wisdom, the critiques and the defects of the constructivist approach to genealogy have been identified in two parts: the foundational critiques and the epistemological consequences in the humanities. Ontological reductionism, objectification of the meanings, unteleological historicism, the primacy of will to perception, and negation of the essential relationships in the formation of semantic systems are among the most important foundational critiques of this approach. We then outlined the consequences of this view in the humanities. The most important of these was the unjustified reductionism and generalizing the characteristics of constructed meanings to all meanings, unconscionable socialism in the formation of meanings, relativism and the lack of criteria for measurement and evaluation, the death of truth and the denial of the matching of meanings with the reality of the objects per se, and the desacralization of science. In the end, the viewpoint of Islamic philosophy on the meanings and their types is expressed, and the possibility of constructing meanings from the perspective of Islamic wisdom in terms of conventional meanings is examined and the distinction of this view with the constructivist reading of genealogy is explained.