An Analytical and Comparative Consideration of the Concept of Substancein the Philosophies of Aristotle and Mullā Ṣadrā

The problem of substance has been a key and central problem in philosophy such that a philosopher’s position on this problem plays a crucial role in the whole of his or her philosophy. Moreover, the comparison among different views is one of the best ways to analyze and understand different philosophical approaches, which is why this paper employs a descriptive and analytic method to provide an analytic consideration of the views of two major philosophers in the history of philosophy—Aristotle and Mullā Ṣadra—about the concept of substance in comparative way. We conclude that both Aristotle and Mullā Ṣadrā seek to find the reality and origin of individuation and objecthood of things, seeing substance as what really exists and other things as existing in virtue of these substances, while Aristotle sees the “form” as the primary substance, holding that other candidates for serving as substance are merely secondary substances, and Mullā Ṣadrā draws on his primacy of existence (iṣālat al-wujūd) to introduce existence as a single and graded substance of which all entities are determinations.