فصلنامه تاریخ فلسفه
سال پنجم شماره 4 (پیاپی 20، بهار 1394)

Porphyry or porphyries (meaning clad in purple) is the name of one of the most prominent exponents of Neo-Platonic Philosophy. Both the philosopher himself and his school exercised an undeniable influence over Islamic philosophy in the past. His doctrine of the five universals can be seen in the preface of all logical books of the Islamic period in a more analytic and extensive fashion. His theory of the union of the intellect and the intelligible was first degraded by Ibn Sina and then accepted and expanded by Mulla Sadra. Becoming God-like as the end of ethics was a doctrine which Porphyry had borrowed from his master Plotinus, and which Muslim thinkers unanimously accepted. Moreover, a taint of Porphyry’s belief in transmigration can be observed in some of the words of Farabi and Ibn Sina. However, both of them rejected the Greeks’ idea of transmigration. Porphyry placed logic at the top of the educational system of the Neo-Platonic School, which influenced Muslim Neo-Platonists’ attention to logic. He believed in the fundamental agreement between Plato, Aristotle, and perennial philosophy, both of which clearly affected Farabi’s ideas in particular.

One of the most important consequences of the encounter of the two ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations in Alexandria was the development of a rational school of thought called Hermeticism, which derives its name from the person to whom it is attributed. Later, this school managed to exercise a huge influence over the western world and then over the Islamic world. Some Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers, particularly in the Middle Ages, believed that Hermes was the founder of all sciences. The number of thinkers and scholars who were influenced by Hermetic ideas was not small and, in fact, we must say that they were mostly affected by Hermeticism through their study of Islamic books. During the Renaissance, the western thinkers’ attention to this school of thought did not decline and, generally speaking, the Hermetic School, which promoted a particular philosophy concerning the world and nature, greatly influenced both western and Islamic civilizations. Accordingly, a study of the ideas and origins of this school could be illuminating in inferring the essential features of the intellectual life of the world of Islam and Christianity. The important effects of this rational school are also manifested in Islamic philosophy, particularly in Illuminationist philosophy. The belief in heavenly guidance, which is also called “Perfect Nature”, is the same ideas that we see in Manichean writings in China and the rest of them in the Coptic language. The Manicheans also believed in a truth similar to “Perfect Nature” and called it the “Great Vohu Mana”.

The present paper is devoted to a historical study of some of the developments made by Mulla Sadra regarding the problem of vaporous spirit. Since this spirit is the mediator of the soul’s administration of the corporeal body, he assimilates it sometimes to cloud – which is a gnostic term, sometimes to a heavenly body, and sometimes to the “Throne” or the “Divine Seat”. This is because all of them share the quality of being the intermediary between their higher and lower levels and affect the process of transferring emanation and prudence from their higher worlds to their lower worlds. These similies of Mulla Sadra can be interpreted in line with the principle of the correspondence of the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. Some of these similies as well as his use of the above principle in discussing the vaporous spirit were unprecedented in the history of Islamic philosophy. Mulla Sadra’s other historical innovation was the idea of the gradedness of Man’s existence. In fact, based on his graded view of Man, he considers the vaporous spirit to be the intermediary between the imaginal level and the corporeal body. In this way, he explains the place of the vaporous spirit and its grades in the graded human existence. Accordingly, he solves the problem of establishing a relationship between the immaterial soul and the corporeal body by resorting to the vaporous spirit in a way to avoid the objection advanced against the Peripatetics in this regard. In the Sadrian view, the vaporous spirit is the main body of the soul, and the corporeal body is the sheath and cover of this spirit.

Not the same level of attention was paid to philosophy in schools in different periods of the Safavid era, and there were some ups and downs in this regard under the influence of the various philosophical and scientific trends dominating the society of that time. This paper examines the process of teaching philosophy in schools in two halves of the Safavid era based on historical sources while employing a descriptive-analytic method. During the first half of this era, because of the dominance of rationalism over schools, philosophy, alongside religious sciences, was the focus of great attention, as it was in the pre-Safavid era. We can observe the peak of its growth in the middle of the Safavid era in the philosophical School of Isfahan. However, in the second half of this era, particularly during its last decades, with the revival of the Akhbari school of thought or the school of the people of hadith, the teaching of the Shi‘ite traditions and hadith became prevalent in schools, and the teaching of philosophy in schools was very limited and suffered huge decline. For example, in some schools such as “Sultani” and “Maryam Beigum” in Isfahan they banned the teaching and learning of philosophy and placed it in the list of subversive sciences.

Anthropomorphism and transcendence are related to the quality of Man’s perception of Divine Names and Attributes. The roots of this discussion can be traced back in divine revelation and holy books. In the world of Islam, the anthropomorphic and transcendental verses of the Qur’an have provided the context for several discussions among Muslim mutikallimun. During the Christian Middle Ages, the Holy Book and the thoughts of the philosophers of that period concerning affirmative and negative methods of knowing God promoted some debates about the Divine Attributes. Ibn Arabi and Spinoza are two philosophers from two different philosophical traditions: one is an intuitive gnosis and the other is a rationalist philosopher; however, both of them deal with the knowledge of God and His Names and Attributes based on a monistic approach. Moreover, both of them follow the same approach to anthropomorphism and transcendence and believe in them. In the present paper, the writers initially present the ideas of Ibn Arabi and Spinoza about anthropomorphism and transcendence and then proceed to analyze and compare them.

The “principiality of existence” is considered to be a preliminary and fundamental discussion in the Transcendent Philosophy. It is a discussion in which supporting existence versus quiddity has provided the context for ontological philosophizing. This paper aims to show the root of this issue in a discussion in Ibn Sina’s works in which the attribute of “Truth” is demonstrated for God. A careful study of this discussion and comparing it with the issue of the principiality of existence in the Transcendent Philosophy reveals the profound interaction between them. Undoubtedly, the Qur’anic beliefs of Islamic philosophers have influenced the development of the discussion of God as the Truth in Ibn Sina’s works. The same beliefs have resulted in the expansion of this subject so that it has emerged in the form of an independent discussion entitled the principiality of existence in the Transcendent Philosophy.

The treatise On Generation and Corruption is one of the treatises on nature which Aristotle wrote in about 347-335 BC. This treatise consists of two books: in the first one, Aristotle introduces generation and corruption as two basic properties of sublunary bodies. The other properties of sublunary bodies include transformation, growth and shrinking, contact, action and interaction, and mixing, which are completely distinct from each other in Aristotle’s view. He rejects absolute generation and corruption and criticizes Empedocles’ theory of equating them with transformation. The second book is mainly devoted to a profound investigation of the four primary elements (water, earth, air, and fire), their nature, and the quality of their changing into each other. Aristotle believes that these elements come into being in a cyclical fashion and none is prior to the other.Ibn Sina divided the existents of the world into four groups of intellects or angels, angelic souls, spherical bodies, and the bodies of the world of generation and corruption. He matched the ontological distinction between immaterial beings and those beings which are coupled with matter and are subject to generation and corruption with the astronomical distinction between the spheres and the sublunary world. Ibn Sina followed Aristotle in this regard. In this paper, the authors analyze the concept of generation and corruption in bodies from the viewpoints of Aristotle and Ibn Sina. They also examine the extent of Aristotle’s influence over Ibn Sina concerning generation and corruption, as well as the latter’s innovations in this regard.