Critique of Marxist Philosophy (part 1)

Knowledge in Islamic Philosophy

At this point Martyr al-Sadr again recapitulates the main points in the theory of knowledge of .Islamic philosophers. These points are as follows.

  1. Human knowledge is of two kinds: Conception and judgement (or assent). Conception, in its various forms, has no objective value (not in the sense that concepts are not derived from perception of reality, but in the sense that they by themselves are not sufficient to take hold of objective reality in the sense that judgements do). Only judgement has the quality of essentially disclosing reality.

  2. All knowledge of judgement type can be attributed to necessary primary knowledge, whose necessity cannot (and need not) be proved and whose truth cannot be demonstrated (on account of its self-evidence). However, the mind is conscious of the necessity of accepting it. Examples of such knowledge are the law of contradiction and the law of causality. It is on these principles that all other judgements must be based. The objective value of judgements depends on the degree to which they rest upon these principles. It is possible in the light of these principles to acquire knowledge in metaphysics, mathematics and natural sciences.

In the natural sciences knowledge is acquired by applying the primary principles through the mediation of experiment, which is not needed in mathematics and metaphysics. This is the reason why the conclusions of metaphysics and mathematics are, for the most part, certain, in contrast to those of the natural sciences.

Sometimes the drawing of metaphysical conclusions may depend on experimentation. In that case a philosophical theory has the same value and rank as a scientific theory.

The concept we form of an external reality is two sided. One side is the form of the thing it represents. In the other respect, it is fundamentally different from the objective reality of that thing; it enjoys none of the effectiveness and activity of the thing represented. This difference between the idea and reality is the difference between quiddity and existence, as described in Part 2 of this work.