The Methodology of Islamic Philosophy

This article tries to elaborate on the issue of the methodology of Islamic philosophy in the light of the theories of three main currents in Islamic philosophy, namely, peripatetic, illuminative, and transcendental. In the first part, it examines demonstrative method, its premises, and its primary criteria. This section studies the type of demonstration used in philosophy, and concludes the possibility of employing another premise in demonstrations on the basis of analyzing ideas presented by philosophers and logicians.In the second part, the authors deal with the illuminative method, the idea of different philosophers, and the way they have treated it in their systems. The role of illuminative method plays in Islamic philosophy, and its effects on philosophy in general, are discussed too. In the third section, the possibility of employing narrative methodology in philosophy and its framework in Islamic philosophy is appraised. The article comes to an end with a set of suggestions for a more sophisticated philosophical system.