The Capacity of Transcendent Wisdom on the Concept of "Body" in Analytical Comparisons with Merleau-Ponty's Thought

The subject of "body" is one of the topics that was not taken seriously before Merleau-Ponty, but he made it the basis of his thought with the phenomenology of sensory perception, and since then good studies has been done on the body whose number is increasing every day. In the present article, using a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, we try to examine the capacities of Islamic philosophy on the subject of body while describing the views of Merleau-Ponty and Mulla Sadra. The research concluded that Mulla Sadra's intuitive-argumentative method not only covers to a large extent the achievements of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological method about the body, but also has additional attainments that show the depth, breadth, and explanatory power of his approach and view. Both Mulla Sadra and Merleau-Ponty, in their special statements, refer to the body as being knower, towards the world, active and constructive. But unlike Merleau-Ponty, Mulla Sadra, due to believing in the innate knowledge of the soul for the body, was able to consider bodies other than the material body, such as the analogical body. In addition, he not only did not consider the world to be limited to the empirical and phenomenal world, but he did not even limit it to being in relation to the body, and for example he considered a rational world which is in relation to and united with the level of human intellect.