Evaluating the Similarity of Mullā Sadrā's and Hume's Views on the Perception of Universals in the Context of Mesbah Yazdi's Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Vahid Davari Chahardeh ¹
• Mansour Imanpour ²
• sohrab Haghighat ³

¹ Daneshgah shahid mafani azarbaijan

² Associate professor, Islamic Philosophy, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University

³ Daneshgah shahid madani azar baijan

10.22067/epk.2024.89015.1353

Abstract

Intellectual perception is one of the most prominent philosophical issues and an arena of conflicting opinions among philosophers. Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi favors Aristotle's view in this regard and holds that it is the most valid position. He considers Mullā Sadrā's view (observing an immaterial being from a distance) as reminiscent of Hume's view (vagueness in sensory perception) and, with the same method and analysis, he argues that both views are questionable. Misbah Yazdi tries to refute Hume's view by presenting criticisms such as the way of abstracting absurd concepts and philosophical secondary intelligibles, and considers Mullā Sadrā's view to be the same as Hume's and completely negates both. He argues that concepts that fail to have an idea in the intellectual world indicate the invalidity of Mullā Sadrā's view, and since these concepts do not exist outside so that their vague individual can result in intellectual perception, Hume's view is also baseless. Therefore, with analyses based on the method of comparing the two perspectives, contradiction analysis (scrutinizing the contradictions of Misbah Yazdi's view in his various works on Mullā Sadrā's position on the perception of universals) and analysis of the word vagueness (in the sense that it is compared lexically in their views), as well as with analysis of the argument of the claim, Misbah Yazdi's argument in this case is evaluated and, by denying the similarity of Mullā Sadrā's and Hume' s views on the perception of universals, this article presents another explanation for comparing the perspectives of the two philosophers.

Keywords

• Mesbah Yazdi
• Mullā Sadrā
• Hume
• universals
• vagueness
• commonality
• critique of similarity

Main Subjects

• Islamic Philosophy and Kalam

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©2025 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

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