Tag: Ibn Sina

Islam & The Meaning of Life

The course explores how Islamic thought engages questions such as: What is the ultimate purpose of human existence? What is true happiness? How can human beings overcome alienation and find inner peace? How are faith and reason related in the search for meaning? What grounds moral obligations, justice, and human dignity? And how does belief in God shape the understanding of human destiny? The course approaches the meaning of life from three complementary perspectives within Islamic intellectual tradition: The Qur’anic perspective, the mystical perspective, and the philosophical and rational-theological perspective.

Rational Perception in Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra

The article zeroes in on the controversial concept of rational perception in Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra’s receptive oeuvres, defining it as the complex abstraction, combination and production of universals. The role of sense perception, along with its relationship to intuition, features prominently here. The author emphasizes the break with Ibn Sina in his discussion of Mulla Sadra’s view of a certain mutability of the human soul and the three different worlds in which it exists. Emanation is posited as an existentialist relationship mired in activity rather than passivity.