ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophical Instructions Lesson Twenty-Four: Existence and Whatness The Relation between the Topics of Existence and Whatness According to the previous lessons, as was indicated on numerous occasions, when entified reality is pictured in the mind (the locus of acquired knowledge), it is pictured in the form of a simple question ( halliyyah baṣīṭah ), which is composed of at least two independent substantive concepts, one of which usually serves as the subject and is a whatish concept, which can be considered in the conceptual framework of limits to an existent, and one of which is the predicate, the concept of ‘existent’, considered to be a secondary philosophical intelligible which denotes the occurrence of the instance of that essence.

In this way two different concepts are obtained for one simple truth, each of which has its own rules and characteristics. With regard to the concept of existence, or existent, philosophers have contented themselves with mentioning that they are self-evident intellectual concepts, without saying how the mind obtains this concept. Only recently has the late ‘Allāmah Ṭabāṭabā’ī, may Allah be pleased with him, attempted to explain how it is abstracted.

Regarding the appearance of whatish concepts, there are various opinions, which were mentioned in the section on epistemology. The opinion which we accepted was that there is a special mental power called the intellect which acquires these concepts automatically from specific percepts. The characteristic of this intellectual picturing is this very universality and ability to correspond to countless instances.

Many philosophers, especially the Peripatetics, have explained the acquiring of whatish concepts in a way which has been the source of many disputes and arguments in the course of the history of philosophy, and in most philosophical discussions, it has been especially influential.

The result of their explanations is this: when we compare several persons, for example, we see that these people, despite their differences in height, weight, skin color and other specific characteristics, all have a common truth which is the source of the common effects in them. The specific attributes of each person are really the particular specification of that person which distinguish him from others.

So, the mind, by deleting the individual specifications acquires the universal perceptual concept of man, which is called the essence of human beings.