Epistemology of Philosophical Concepts in the Minds of Allama Tabataba’i and Ayatollah Mesbah

Analysis and investigation of secondary intelligibles has been focus of attention among philosophers since long ago. Epistemology of philosophical concepts deals with an investigation of these concepts, and in the present article, we have explored the epistemology of philosophical concepts in the minds of Allama Tabataba’i and Ayatollah Mesbah. In this study, it is clarified that Allama Tabataba’i was the first philosopher who put forward the mode of abstraction of the philosophical concepts including the concept of existence and non-existence. He believes that philosophical concepts are abstracted by using intuitive knowledge. Ayatollah Mesbah, unlike Allama, does not consider intuitive knowledge and internal experience as sufficient for abstraction of each of the primary philosophical concepts; rather, he maintains in addition to that, they must be compared with one another, and one must regard a certain relation among them. In his view, Allama’s method in abstracting philosophical concepts cannot be generalized