A Survey on the Sequels of Sina i-Sadra i Approaches for the Epistemology of Imagination

In the tenth Namat of Ibn Sina’s Isharat, his philosophical discourse about the faculties of imagination and common sense takes a new form. He attributes to them understanding and maintaining images that transcend matter, belong to the world of unseen and the supreme dominion, and are conceived through vision and non-conceptual knowledge. This approach has epistemological consequences: solving the dilemma of materiality/ immateriality of imagination in Ibn Sina, and his implied admission to substantial motion and activeness of nafs in the process of understanding. Mulla Sadra, however, considers imagination and common sense as one faculty. He introduces the common theory of the materiality of this faculty as an obstacle to accepting bodily resurrection. Instead, he suggests brain to be the locus of manifestation for imagination, and not its place. He ascribes three characteristics to imagination, i.e. imaginal immateriality, creativity, and comprising the opposites, which make possible the explanation of bodily resurrection and angelic metempsychosis.