فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال پانزدهم شماره 3 (پیاپی 59، پاییز 1389)

There have been different issues regarding the soul-body relation: soul-body distinction, variety of souls, faculties of the soul, temporal emergence (hoduth) and eternity (qedam) of the soul, the motion and perfection of the soul, immortality of the soul and the soul-body interaction. In this paper I will try to give an account of the soul-body relation consonant with Quran and narrations (hadith) which touches the main soul-body issues.

Ibn Roshd (Averroes) maintains the unity of the intellect (rational soul) in all humans, which leads to the denial of the individual immortality. Proponents of Ibn Roshd admitted consequence and in order to defend this view along with the doctrine of individual immortality they had to subscribe to the weird theory of the double truth (the possibility of the truth of two contradictory propositions in two different domains). The source of the theory of the intellectual unity is in Aristotle’s view of the active and passive intellects. According to Ibn Roshd’s interpretation of Aristotle, the active intellect is –besides the passive one- an intellect which separates from the human body at death and enjoys an immortal life. However given the fact that the active intellect is numerically one and it is not the case that each human person has their own active intellect and the passive intellect dies with the death of the body, we should come to the conclusion that the theory of intellectual unity entails the denial of the individual immortality. According to this theory, what remains after death, is one universal immaterial entity (the active intellect). Ibn Roshd has sometimes been explicit on this consequence. The underlying reason for this claim is that the source of numerical plurality is matter; therefore, if the soul is immortal, there will only be one soul when the bodies disappear. Nonetheless Ibn Roshd proposes the possibility of there being a fine-grained matter, which might be the grounds for the plurality of the souls after death.

Muslim philosophers regard the intellect or the rational soul as the constituent of the nature of men which is what distinguishes humans from other creatures. The intellect has two major powers: the power to know and the power to act. In this paper I will deal with the role of the intellect in happiness and its degrees on the basis of the degrees of the soul’s rational faculty. According to Ibn Sina, the happiness and atrocity of humans in the afterlife depends on the theoretical and practical position of the rational soul and since the immortal happiness and atrocity depend on the theoretical condition of the intellect, there will be two main groups of people: those who have achieved the theoretical perfection of the intellect (thus enjoy happiness), and those who do not enjoy such a perfection (thus in atrocity). Therefore, Ibn Sina merely emphasizes on the spiritual and intellectual immortality and believes that bodily characters do not bring about any changes in the essence of the rational soul.

Some philosophers take sense qualities to be the qualities of external objects. According to some proponents of this view, we are aware of these qualities in our perception without any medium, while others believe that we are aware of these qualities by being aware of things that mediate between us and the external objects. However, others take these qualities to be qualities of the mind. In this paper, I will show that Avicenna subscribes to a particular version of indirect realism; the view that takes sense qualities to be the qualities of external and the subject becomes aware of these qualities by being aware of their abstract forms.

This paper aims to introduce some of the issues concerning the soul-body relation from a different perspective. The paper consists of some sections, the second problem of which is more central. The most important problems in this paper are: (1) anything which occurs in the soul or in the body, it will affect only that part (the soul or body), (2) the mutual interaction of the soul and the body; that is, any state, concept, or proposition that occurs in the soul will affect the body too; likewise any volitional bodily act will affect the soul, (3) in addition to this universal interaction, each psychological character has a manifestation suitable with the bodily aspect; in fact the body and its acts are translation or reflections of the psychological characters and properties; likewise each volitional bodily act has a particular expression in the soul. That is why the plurality of the types and individuations of an act leads to the plurality of the function of the soul, (4) I will examine the different forms of relations between objects and the place of the soul and body in this regard, and will introduce the paths of the soul-boy interaction and I will give a philosophical explanation of the cases which seem to be counter-examples to this general rule.

In this paper I will deal with the question of the nature of the human person in Quran; does Quran take humans to be oneaspectual or double-aspectual? I shall examine three claims in this regard: (1) Quran takes humans to be double-aspectual, (2) the other aspect of humans (besides his material, bodily aspect) is not the soul as a substance in the philosophical sense, (3) since the material aspect corrupts after death, the other non-bodily aspect is immortal. This entails that the criterion for the personal identity of the worldly and afterlife persons is his non-bodily aspect, and the bodily aspect is merely peripheral. This paper has two sections, one of which deals with the verses which demonstrate the double-aspectuality of humans and the other with the verses which show their immortality.

As to the problem of the soul, Allameh Tabatabai is generally a dualist and specifically a defender of Sadraean transcendental philosophy, though his view has its own characteristics. Firstly, he widely appeals to Quran and Rivayat; secondly he is disagreement with Sadra on various points, for instance, in the way he states the soul-body relation. In this paper, I will investigate Allameh Tabatabai’s view regarding the significant problems of the soul, such as the meaning of Ruh (spirit) and Nafs (soul) in Quran and Rivayat; the proofs of the existence of the soul, the immateriality of the soul, the nature of human and their implications for an account of religious doctrines such as the afterlife and the resurrection.