A Comparative Study of the Views of al-Shaykh al-Raʾīs and Shaykh al-Ishraq on the Quiddity of Pleasure

Avicenna and Suhrawardi have brief and scattered discussions about the issue of pleasure in their various works. One of those topics is the views of the two thinkers on the quiddity of pleasure. Thus, the purpose of this paper is a comparative study of pleasure from viewpoints of the heads of the two schools of Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophy and according to their epistemological and ontological bases. The problem of pleasure is a small part of the epistemic network of the two schools of Peripateticism and Illuminationism. Therefore, to get a better understanding and a deeper perception of the issue, it is necessary to review other aspects of the network, such as the basis of their philosophy. One of the implications of this study is to understand the reason that Ibn Sina distinct between transcendent and human pleasure, while there is no such distinction in Suhrawardi's philosophy, due to their difference in the issue of existence and perception of quiddity in their philosophical systems. Another implication is that although 'perception' and 'appropriate'(agreeable to one's nature) are consistent and repetitive terms in definitions of pleasure, given the epistemological and ontological differences of the two schools in their explanation, we come to a different understanding of pleasure. The most important of these differences are: from the epistemological perspective in Peripateticism, the emphasis is on knowledge by acquaintance. According to Illuminationism, however, the perception is based on the knowledge by presence. Also, the basis of ontology in Peripatetic philosophy is existence, but in the philosophy of illumination, the basis is light.