MullāṠadrā's Realist Ontology of the Intelligibles and Theory of Knowledge

The metaphysical system of Sadreddin Shirazi, better known as Mulla Sadra, is based on the priority of existence over reality. Sadra deseribes reality as a global concept that the human mind uses to understand and classify objects. He insists that the basic aspect of reality is existence. Sadra's theory of epistemology, as applied to an existence-centered metaphysical system, predicates existentialistic and metaphysic attributes of knowledge. Sadra objects strongly to those scholars who deseribe knowledge as an 'attribute' of the subject or asa 'relationship' between subject and object. He also criticizes Ibn Sina's description of knowledge as being purely abstract (tajarrud) and incomplete. Instead, Sadra merges his existence-centered metaphysical system with Suhreverdi's existentialist theory (ilm-i huzuri), describing the action of knowledge as the unification of the subject with the form of the object. This unification is only possible when the subject is connected to the world of the predictable and when it eventually joins it. In general terms, Sadra follows the Islamic-Platonic tradition. He tries to develop a realistic 'prediction metaphysics'. He deseribes the forms of universal reality in the world of predictions as a category of existence that contains reality within itself, as opposed to abstract intellectual concepts. Thus, Sadra's understanding of knowledge is on the one hand subjectivist, as knowledge is not an attribute of the subject, while on the other hand it is existentialist and mystic, as being connected with the world of the predictable also resultsina change in the existence mode of the subject. Therefore, Sadra's views on epistemology show interesting parallels to the epistemic claims of modem philosophy which discuss the place and relationship of the subject in relation to itself, existence and other objects.