Khafri’s Views on Individual Unity of Existence

The unity of being, as the most fundamental pillar of mysticism and transcendent Wisdom, has been the locus of exchanging views among scholars in these two fields of sciences. The present study tries to investigate whether or not the individual unity of existence was reasonably proposed by philosophers before Mulla Sadra in philosophy. Shams al-Din Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Khafari is one of the philosophers of the ninth and tenth centuries AH who has raised this issue and presented an argument for it. Proposing two arguments from Khafri, including the analysis of the causality and the analysis of the unity of the concept of existence, we come to the conclusion that he has expressed the individual unity of existence in a reasoned manner during his philosophical discussions, through declaring subjects like principality of existence, particular gradation, copulative existence, and so on, long time before Mulla Sadra.