Mojtaba Afsharpoor
Abstract
Perception, as one of the vital signs of the human soul, arises from the perceptual faculties by which the soul demonstrates its effect. In the peripatetic philosophical anthropology, the fivefold perceptual faculties, which are common sense, imagination, illusion, memory, and intellect, and the consideration ...
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Perception, as one of the vital signs of the human soul, arises from the perceptual faculties by which the soul demonstrates its effect. In the peripatetic philosophical anthropology, the fivefold perceptual faculties, which are common sense, imagination, illusion, memory, and intellect, and the consideration of animal perceptual faculties and their threefold perceptions as their outcome is a stablished view. In Mulla Sadra's works, there are seemingly inconsistent statements about the nature of perceptual faculties and their number. In some cases, similar to the Peripatetics, he speaks of the five faculties, in some other cases he denies illusion, in some other ones he calls common sense and imagination the strong and weak levels of a single faculty, and there are also cases in which he inspires the union of soul and faculties. The present article is an attempt to explain the ultimate form of Mulla Sadra's theory of inner perceptual faculties and to investigate the possibility of reconciling his seemingly inconsistent views. With an analytical-descriptive method, we try to explore the anthropology of transcendental wisdom through an analytical-descriptive method. The conclusion inferred from a comprehensive look at all the works in which Mulla Sadra has focused on perceptual faculties, is that he goes through several stages to reach his final theory, and that each seemingly inconsistent view is related to one of the stages of reaching his goal.