Sadraean Epistemology and the Doctrines of Correspondence and Revolution

The problem of human perception through some mental being and its immanent relation with the soul and the latter’s presential knowledge of the mental being and the correspondence between the mental being and the external reality is indeed the very answer given by Avicenna to the question of the mechanism of the acquisition of knowledge of the external sensory objects. This essay seeks to explain why this analysis changes in Transcendent Theosophy into the theory of intuition by the soul, in the first stage, and the birth of the mental being from the independent notion of the presential knowledge, in the second stage. Amid the era of Avicenna and the era of Mulla Sadra, some philosophers emerged who were devoted to answering the objections against Avicenna’s stance, according to the author’s view, against the mainstream interpretation. The stance of these philosophers was not indeed the rival of Avicenna’s stance though certain objections can be levelled against their stance either. To study the reason of the aforementioned why, the author provides a historical sketch of these ideas from Avicenna to Mulla Sadra in a critical way and assays the reasons of the change in the coordinates of the analysis of the knowledge of the external sensory objects in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy.