فصلنامه حکمت معاصر
پیاپی 36 (بهار و تابستان 1402)

By accepting the principle of human mutability, Mulla Sadra considers ethics as something between nature and intellectual will. In other words, he sees the origin of ethics in both nature (creation) and will, and considers it something between these two. Although the forces of human nature have an impact on our creation, but they do not compel us to act in a certain way. Instead, humans perform ethical actions through their own intellectual will, and then through practice and habit, they acquire new ethical virtues. The ethical mechanism of humans involves a type of ethical thinking and reasoning that is stimulating to inclinations and emotional organization, which is influenced by the complex interplay of internal forces, external influences, and human will. Internal forces have various cognitive aspects (knowledge and beliefs), inclinations (emotions, feelings, natural tendencies, instincts), and even physical aspects (temperament, nutrition, brain, sensory tools, genetic backgrounds), as well as factors such as the faculties and secondary personality traits, self-purification, and so on, which are foundational and influential in this realm. Various environmental factors, such as the transmission of social or religious laws and norms (through religion/prophets) or modeling (with the influence of mentors, parents, etc.), and environmental consequences and socialization (socializing with others, associating with good people), affect human ethical growth, which is acquired in interaction with the internal-biological-acquired organism

Farabi is a creative and innovative philosopher and offers new and profound products to scholars and scholars of thought, including ethics, politics and their relationship, which is one of the ancient and very broad concepts. The article measures Farabi's view on the relationship between ethics and politics (issue) based on the theoretical framework of the article, which is a combination of three questions and four approaches: the separation of ethics from politics, the subordination of ethics to politics, two-level ethics, and the unity of ethics and politics (method). The hypothesis of the article, which is the second innovation of the article compared to homogeneous articles, considers some concepts such as utopia, happiness, government legitimacy, justice and citizenship rights as the manifestation and operational intersection of the relationship between ethics and politics in Farabi's political philosophy. (innovation) Based on this, Farabi considers the goal of ethics and politics to be the same; Ethics has a political nature and politics has a moral nature. The theories of the separation of ethics from politics, the subordination of ethics to politics, have been completely ruled out; Two-level ethics is also not acceptable and the principles governing both the fields of ethics and politics are the same. Therefore, he believes in the unity and similarity of ethics and politics in the sense of following politics from ethics (in the sense of compatible ethical standards). (Findings) According to this, Farabi is a philosopher who does not find force and domination, conquest and the sword as a way to build an ethical culture. It considers happiness both in terms of belief and in relation to society. The government is morally based on public opinion and will. He based his utopia on voluntary justice based on virtue and rejects natural justice, and in his opinion, all citizens have rights and have a fair share in society. (Result)

One of the basic discussions in philosophy is the explanation of the changes that are evident in different parts of this world. We can talk about these changes in different ways; However, one of the basic discussions in this field is the explanation of the relationship between the two changing and constant parts. Throughout history, Islamic philosophers have given answers to the mentioned question. The question of this article is that in addition to the disputed solutions in this regard, what stronger solution can be presented in this field? In response to this question, this article firstly, with the descriptive-analytical method, categorized and analyzed the opinions raised in this field, and finally, presented a new opinion based on the final perception of substantial movement. According to this finding, in the final analysis, the essential movement is the existential intensity, and the moving being, in this existential flourishing, is continuously added to its existential capacity, and nothing of its identity and constituents is lost. What is lost in this path is its existential deficiency and limitation. Now, it can be said that the constant cause gives rise to an existence in which evolution and flourishing are hidden in its content, and in the light of this evolution, its existential perfection is not lost, and as a result, the effect does not violate the cause.

Introduction :

The Permanent or Malekat have multiple functions in the thought of Islamic philosophers. Sometimes they are considered in the principles of actions in terms of temperamental principles, sometimes in anthropological aspects in presenting the criteria or standards of human excellence, and in some cases in the basics of psychological states, desires and tendencies. In Farabi's thought, Permanent States in the Soul or The Permanent are considered at the three levels: thought, feeling and behavior. Talking about logical and Rational Permanent States and paying attention to their noncognitive factors in the formation of beliefs reveals the importance of this study. The role of Permanent States in directing and guiding perceptions as mental states as well as giving meaning and processing information is a significant point when facing the works of Farabi. We cannot ignore the role of habits and Permanent States in the psychological: dimension such as possessions, desires, tendencies, decision, choices, and attention. Therefore, there is a need for an independent research to be conducted the functions of Permanent States, especially their cognitive function. In relation to permanent states in the soul Farabi have spoken about the knowledge that is available in the soul and its differences from other knowledge. This knowledge is imprinted in the mind and affects all our perceptual processes. It seems that according to Farabi's there is an order in thoughts, feelings and actions and Permanent States can explain that order.Farabi places the first philosopher at the head of the society and those who persuade and imagine they are immediately placed after first philosopher. It can be said that one of the most important functions of persuasion and imagination in Farabi's thought is about formation these permanent states.

Statement of the problem and Discussion :

Characteristics such as the "states" (hal), "habits" and The permanents (malekat), "temperaments"(kholgh) are significant to understand Farabie's works. States, habits and temperaments are indexed under the name of characteristics of the soul or psychic characteristics in Farabi's texts. In this research I have focused on the cognition role of "The Permanents" in connection with the mental structure. We try to interrogate the effect of these states on wisdom, intellect, intelligence, good understanding, human attention and decision. Its seems to professional philosophers have almost completely neglected mental aspect of The Permanents as a topic of study. To understand this issue, we reviewed all Farabi's books. Considering this subject, we should paid attention to some questions. How The Permanent organizes the mind and behavior? This is the main question of the study.

Farabi is a great thinker in the history of thought in Muslim philosophers. Passing on their ideas, shows he have significant statements about permanent states in the soul (malekat). In this paper we focused on identifying permanent states in the soul (malekat) involved in capacities such as perception, thought, the representation of analogue magnitudes, social cognition, and intentional action. We use the term "permanent states of the soul" to refer to the "malekeh" in Farabi's statements also we can apply the expression "stable states" or "firm states" or "The Permanents" in order to make us understand the term "mleakeh" in Farabies texts. The Permanents are used in three ways: emotions; behavior and deed (kerdar) and in ethic (Kholgh). These permanent states are interpreted as habits at the level of behavior. Whereas the way of imagination, the type of attention, attitudes, psychological processes and as well as the way of thinking are influenced by these mental characteristics, the central purpose of our investigation is on these states and on the mind structures from Farabi's perspective.

Issue: 

Avicenna presented his "flying man" or "floating man" argument as a means to establish the existence of the soul, its immaterial nature, and its distinctiveness from the body. While originally conceived with an ontological focus, subsequent scholars have often employed this concept in an epistemological context, asserting that Avicenna’s flying man not only exists, but also knows that he exists. Such an interpretation of the flying man argument seems to be at odds with his own principles, his passages throughout his works, and what he pursued to establish through this scenario.

Deploying a descriptive and analytical method, it may be said that.

Avicenna believes that perception begins from senses, and the first stage of the human reason is material or hylic reason or pure potentiality. Moreover, there is a difference between consciousness (shuʿūr) that is actually obtained by humans since the beginning of their existence and consciousness of consciousness (al-shuʿūr bi-l-shuʿūr), which he believes to be a potential character that needs to be acquired, while our primary consciousness of the soul is the existence of our soul. Thus, the flying man is solely the existence and presence of the soul before any actual consciousness.

In view of the fact that man was suspended in space at the beginning of his creation and Ibn Sina considers the human soul to be the event of the body and in the order of the beast intellect and pure power, which lacks any perception and becomes actual through sensory perception, it should be said : The human being suspended in Ibn Sina's space can have an existential quality and in fact, he is observing the position of presence, existence, and mere existence. In addition, Ibn Sina, emphasizing the two positions of consciousness and consciousness to consciousness, believes that consciousness is actually and permanently suspended in man, but consciousness to consciousness is potential in him. Therefore, it seems that the soul at the beginning of creation, although it is present and proven, but it cannot be said that it has knowledge of itself; That is, the soul initially lacks attention to itself, and this lack of attention prevents any self-perception of the soul.Innovation: In fact, regarding "Avicenna's suspended human being in space", it can only be said that "a human being is conscious (without any actual awareness)", but it cannot be said.

 Knowledge by presence (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī) is a problem explicitly discussed by Suhrawardī (Shaykh al-Ishrāq). This issue has since become a significant topic in Islamic epistemology. More recently, Allameh Tabatabai has examined this problem and drawn noteworthy conclusions. According to him, knowledge by presence is an existential concept, and is detached from matter. He establishes the existence of such knowledge by appealing to human self-consciousness, which manifests the presence of the existence of our own selves to us. In his view, the criterion for knowledge by presence consists in the real presence of something (the known) to another thing (the knower). Accordingly, he broadens the instances of knowledge by presence to encompass self-knowledge, a cause’s knowledge of its own effects, the effect’s knowledge of its cause, an effect’s knowledge of other effects of its cause, and human knowledge of his own sensory impressions. As for the reduction of knowledge by acquisition (al-ʿilm al-ḥuṣūlī) to knowledge by presence, Allameh Tabatabai believes that each instance of the former is indeed an instance of the latter. In fact, knowledge by acquisition always involves knowledge by presence. It follows that all human knowledge is by presence through and through. This is because it is always an instance of knowledge by presence that turns into an instance of knowledge by acquisition. This transformation is done through the imaginative faculty, which he dubs the faculty of transforming knowledge by presence to knowledge by acquisition. According to Allameh Tabatabai’s view of knowledge by presence and its transformation into knowledge by acquisition, the soul has an effective agential role with respect to epistemic forms or images, obtaining both universal and particular epistemic forms via “unification.” This implies that the process of perception consists in the “strengthening of the detached (immaterial) existence of the world” and its unification with the intellectual level of existence. Another corollary of his view is that, since knowledge is in fact something existential that cannot be subsumed under any of the quiddity-based categories, it cannot be characterized as corresponding or failing to correspond to the reality, whereas knowledge by acquisition can be thus characterized. Furthermore, his view of knowledge by presence implies that knowledge by acquisition is restricted to the material world, since material entities can neither know, nor be known. Of course, material entities involve immaterial dimensions such as change and ignorance in virtue of which knowledge applies to them.

 This research was carried out with the library-analytical method.

 The main conclusion to be drawn from Allameh Tabatabai’s discussion of the nature of knowledge by presence and its corollaries is that it can be used to determine the ground of distinction between real (ḥaqīqī) and constructed (iʿtibārī) perceptions and how they relate to knowledge by presence. Since an instance of knowledge by presence is involved in any instance of knowledge by acquisition, it follows that when knowledge is divided, what is actually divided is knowledge by presence. That is, there are two types of knowledge by presence: pure knowledge by presence and knowledge presence that can be transformed into knowledge by acquisition. Moreover, given the account of the process through which the former is transformed into the latter and how constructed perceptions emerge from real perceptions with the aid of the estimative (wahmiyya) faculty, it can be concluded that the criterion for the division of perceptions into real and constructed, on Allameh Tabatabai’s account, is the same criterion depicted in the distinction between knowledge by presence and knowledge by acquisition. In other words, just as the mind draws on the activities of the estimative faculty to transform knowledge by presence into knowledge by acquisition for purposes of convenience in ordinary life, it utilizes the same activities to derive constructed perceptions from real perceptions.

 According to Allameh Tabatabai, it is knowledge by presence that is transformed into knowledge by acquisition through the activities of the imaginative faculty. The activities of the estimative faculty concerning real entities result in the formation of constructed perceptions. The criterion proposed by him for the division of perceptions into constructed and real is the one depicted in the distinction between knowledge by acquisition and knowledge by presence.
This clarifies the ground of the distinction between real and constructed perceptions, as well as its relationship with knowledge by presence. The ground of real perceptions is pure knowledge by presence, while the ground of constructed perceptions is the type of knowledge by presence that can be transformed into knowledge by acquisition. The distinction between these two kinds of perceptions lies in the difference of the knowledge by presence involved in them.

Although in public belief, futuwwah is mixed with heroic and bandit traits, but in the opinion of futuwwah writers, a person with futuwwah is a moral person whose whole effort is to achieve spiritual virtues and abandon its vices so that he can reach his main destination, which is the heart/nature. In order to be attributed with these good qualities, he performs rituals and customs. The main issue of the research is the relationship between the definition of futuwwah and its symbolic rituals in the futuwahnamehs with the symbolic messages of Sheikh Ishraq, and whether Sheikh Ishraq has provided a place, definition and symbols for futuwwah in his allegorical and mystical texts? The method of this research is a phenomenological and comparative method that It was carried out in a library manner and The findings of this research: Establishing a link between the codes used in the works of Sohravardi and Islamic futuwwahnamehs and the results of this research: are that Suhrvardi may not be considered as an obvious Futuwwanameh’s writer with a brief opinion, but by considering the symbols used in his secret texts, we can get evidences that he also wrote Futuwwa and The Circle of Fetian is aware and mentions it with hidden symbols.Although he mostly uses the terms Fata and Young manliness for Theosis, the hierarchy of the secrets of Young manliness can be seen in his works, and the hidden secrets of his futuwwah are revealed by studying it in comparison with the Islamic Futuwwanameh.

Only few philosophical works, such as Hadi Sabzavari’s Sharḥ al-manẓūma (literally, commentary on verses concerning philosophy), are used as textbooks. Consisting of didactic verses composed and explained by Sabzavari, the book is regarded as one of his valuable works and a main textbook on Islamic philosophy. The research question is how we can examine and evaluate this work as a textbook, or how we can re-write it to provide a more useful textbook.I aim to foster a discourse of critique and evaluation of existing textbooks, encouraging and motivating the academic community to enhance and supplement these texts, and to provide up-to-date and useful versions of philosophical textbooks. Some critical views of Sharḥ al-manẓūma have been proposed in a number of books and articles, including Teaching philosophy: a comparative study of Sharḥ al-manẓūma and Nihāyat al-ḥikma (Izadi 2013, 59), “Haj Mulla Hadi Sabzavari and his Sharḥ al-manẓūma” (Fani 1983, 44), “A Comparative Study of Sharḥ al-manẓūma and Nihāyat al-ḥikma” (Taba’i Izadi 2001, 58), “Teaching Transcendent Philosophy or obfuscating and destroying it?” (Shijari 2016, 51).Given its significance, Sharḥ al-manẓūma merits thorough examination and review to capitalize on its strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.  The present article contributes by discussing specific passages of Sharḥ al-manẓūma to illustrate certain educational difficulties within the text in a tangible manner. In light of these challenges, suggestions are put forth for the improvement of this and other philosophy textbooks.    

This article addresses a theoretical question using the library research method. In this method, after formulating the question and developing schematic and detailed plans, sources were provided, notes were taken, and an initial edit was conducted through thematic categorization of the notes. Subsequently, the finalized version was prepared after further reconsiderations. 

Apart from its strengths, Sharḥ al-Manẓūma, like all human creations, has weaknesses that are analyzed in detail in the article. One such weakness is its explanation of the content through versification and commentary mixed with the text. This has placed Sabzavari in a challenging position, making it difficult for him to clarify phrases and shape the structure of sentences, resulting in the complexity and difficulty of understanding phrases in Sharḥ al-manẓūma. Furthermore, other drawbacks of Sharḥ al-manẓūma include theoretical complications, criticisms of other views, and elaboration of objections. At times, Sabzavari unexpectedly adds fuel to the fire of lengthy theoretical debates and controversies, which do not align with the structure of the discussion and the reader’s capacity.Among other issues with Sharḥ al-manẓūma is its excessive optimism towards views, a tendency to justify them, and taking a charitable stance towards them without due regard for the facts of the history of philosophy. Moreover, Sabzavari attributes and justifies various views in terms of religious teachings. This approach has cast doubts on some of the citations in the book (Mutahhari 2011, 304). Furthermore, the prominence of Mulla Sadra’s Transcendent philosophical approach in Sabzavari’s Sharḥ al-manẓūma, and latter’s alignment with mystical principles and discussions, have sometimes led Sabzavari to make intricate mystical remarks. However, understanding these remarks requires a beginner in philosophy to be relatively or even fully familiar with the issues of theoretical mysticism.       

Conclusion and Suggestions:

Although sharing many outstanding characteristics of standard textbooks, Sharḥ al-Manẓūma suffers from issues such as the complication of its versification, difficulties arising from the blending of texts and commentaries, literary digressions, inclusion of mystical allusions, excessive justification and a charitable stance, neglect of historical context, digressions in explanations of reasons, and personal interpretations of Quranic verses and hadiths. In these respects, the book lacks some characteristics of a textbook. A contribution of this article is its content analysis of some parts of the text in a concrete and tangible way. Finally, this study suggests that Sharḥ al-manẓūma should be re-written preserve its authenticity and yet be transformed to an up-to-date and useful textbook with as many faults removed as possible.