Metaphysical Penetrations [Kitāb al-Mas̲h̲āʿir]: A Parallel English-Arabic Text

Mullā Ṣadrā (ملّا صدرا, c. 1572‒1640 CE) is one of the most prominent figures of post-Avicennan ʾIslāmic philosophy and among the most important philosophers of Ṣafawid Persia. He was a prolific writer whose work advanced the fields of intellectual and religious science in ʾIslāmic philosophy, but arguably his most important contribution to ʾIslāmic philosophy is in the study of “existence”/“being” (wujūd) and its application to such areas as cosmology, epistemology, psychology, and eschatology. Ṣadrā represents a paradigm shift from the Aristotelian metaphysics of fixed substances, which had dominated ʾIslāmic philosophy, to an analysis of “existence”/“being” (wujūd) as the ultimate ground and dynamic source of things. He posits that all beings derive their reality and truth from their wujūd and that a proper philosophical analysis must therefore start and eventually end with it. The present work’s focus on Ṣadrā’s gradational ontology provides a strong foundation for the reader to understand Ṣadrā’s other works and later texts by other philosophers working in the same field. This edition contains parallel English-Arabic texts and a new translation by preeminent scholar of ʾIslāmic philosophy Seyyed Hossein Nasr (سیّد حسین نصر, b. 1933 CE).
The University of Chicago Press
2014