Intuitive Perceptions of the Soul in Avicenna's Philosophy and Some of Its Epistemological Implications

Document Type : Scholarly Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor/ Islamic philosophy & kalam department/ Islamic Azad University/ Bandar Abbas branch

2 Professor/ Islamic philosophy & kalam department/ University of Tehran

3 Assistant Professor/ West philosophy department science and researches branch/ Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

There are novel theories in epistemological realm of Avicenna's thought which, despite full incidence in the thoughts of philosophers after him, can be observed explicitly or implicitly in Avicenna's novel ideas. This feature makes it possible to divide the epistemological field of Avicenna's thought into two areas: peripatetic-Aristotelian and oriental. Following his peripatetic predecessors, Avicenna considers soul's perceptions only acquired and relying on the epistemological theories of abstraction and peeling, explains the quality of soul's acheiving these perceptions; however, in his oriental thought, Avicenna ascribes acheiving and preserving intuitive and non-acquired perceptions to the powers of common sense and image due to his novel approach towards these two powers in the last chapter of Isharat. It means that soul's perceptions can also be intuitive and non-acquired in Avicenna's philosophy as well as it is essential not to explain the quality of achieving these perceptions by the process of epistemological abstraction. Understanding soul's existential intensity and considering it as its epistemological hierarchy, unlike the dogmatist position, Avicenna retains a kind of approach in Islamic epistemology which makes it possible to achieve knowledge according to the reality.

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