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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophical Instructions Lesson Forty-Eight: Quality The Category of Quality Every human being finds various mental states within himself through knowledge by presence, such as the states of joy and sorrow, fear and hope, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, love and enmity, etc.. Likewise, he perceives some corporeal attributes through his own external senses, which are often changeable, such as colors, tastes, smells, sounds, etc..

Philosophers have included all of these psychic and corporeal states and attributes in a universal concept and have called it quality, which they have taken as a genus for all of them, and defined as follows: quality is an accident which is essentially incapable of division and does not include the meaning of relation. In actuality, they have introduced it as the negation of the features of quantity and relational categories.

It appears that, disregarding disputes which generally occur about the Aristotelian system of genus and difference, quality must not be taken to be a part of the whatnesses of these various material and immaterial accidents; rather they should be considered general abstracted concepts, such as state, configuration ( hay’at ), and accident, which are applied in the form of accidental predication to a number of things which in reality differ.

In any case, among the categories of accidents, those which may be considered definitely and certainly to be objective accidents which possess entified objects are in the category of quality, some of whose instances are perceived through infallible knowledge by presence. On the basis of induction, philosophers have divided quality into four types: psychic qualities, sensory qualities, qualities specific to quantity, and dispositional qualities.

Psychic Qualities A psychic quality ( kayf nafsānī ) is an immaterial accident which only applies to psychic substances ( jawāhir nafsānī ). Until now, no precise and complete table of its kinds has been obtained. Philosophers consider knowledge, power, will, aversion, pleasure, pain, passive states, and mental habits and proficiencies to be among the psychic qualities.

They have had discussions about them which have been related for the most part to philosophical psychology, the science of the soul ( ‘ilm al-nafs ).