The unity of the soul and its abilities in Islamic philosophy

Abstract

Islamic philosophers claim that the human soul is one being because we feel it as such within ourselves. On the other hand, owing to a very wide range of cognitive and practical activities that go beyond the boundaries of the material world, the earlier representatives of philosophical thought in Islam up to Mulla Sadra believed that the abilities of the soul are not an integral part of its essence, but mediators in its various actions. Based on his innovative ideas especially about the primacy of the being and the physical origin of the individual being of the soul, Mulla Sadra Shirazi comes up with the idea of the unity of the soul and its abilities. This view of the soul unites all the lower levels of the soul in man with the intellectual human soul and completely connects the starting point of the soul's developmental path with the lowest ontological level of the material world. Some contemporary Islamic philosophers believe that the vegetative abilities, being exclusively material, cannot be equated with the supramaterial soul. In this paper, we present arguments about the unity of the soul, as well as answers to critiques that can arise on the basis of other theories presented in Mulla Sadra's transcendental philosophy.

Keywords

• man
• soul
• abilities of the soul
• islamic philosophy
• ibn sina
• mulla sadra shirazi
• soul and body
• human soul
• knowledge