ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Critique of Marxist Philosophy Part 2 The Nature of Knowledge The most important issue of epistemology, according to al-Sadr, is the one concerning the reality of knowledge: Is knowledge a material or an immaterial phenomenon? Marxism asserts that knowledge and thought are material, organic processes of the brain.

Scientific exploration of the processes of sensation and consciousness has revealed beyond doubt that there are physical, chemical and physiological events involved in the functioning of the sense organs and the nervous system. However, these findings do not prove that perception, knowledge, thought and consciousness are material processes and that mind is grounded in matter. Such an assertion about the reality of the mind lies outside the scope of experimental science.

Similarly, psychology, either through introspection or objective observation, studies psychological phenomena; but the nature of knowledge and the reality of the mind are questions that have to be dealt by the philosophy of mind. Al-Sadr takes up the nature of the perceived image in visual perception as an example to argue in favour of the immateriality of the mind.

When we enter a vast garden extending for thousands of meters, at a glance we perceive its extent together with most of the trees and objects that are in it. Is the image of the garden that we grasp a material? It is, according to materialism. It image existing in a part of our brain is not, according to the metaphysical view; it is a metaphysical entity outside the realm of the material world.

It is true that the light rays form an image on the retina, and this image is transferred in some form to the brain. Nevertheless, the image transferred to the brain is other than the mental image. Al-Sadr offers two reasons for believing so.

Firstly, he states, the mental image does not have the same "geometrical properties" as those of the material image transferred to the brain, because the former resembles the garden in extent, form and geometric properties, whereas the brain and its image are small and the imprinting of a large thing on a small thing is impossible. Therefore, it must be an immaterial image.

Secondly, the mental image is inclined to stability and does not change in accordance with the changes of the image reflected in the nervous system.