The Problems of Soul-Body Relation: A Comparison of Avicenna and Mulla Sadra

There is an important rule in Islamic philosophy: everything that originates in time needs a matter. Avicenna and Mulla Sadra adopt different approaches to make their views about soul compatible with this rule. Since Avicenna maintains that the soul is spiritual (immaterial) and originated, and the spiritual entity has the same relation to all temporal entities, he has to take the genesis of a particular humor in the body as what causes the preference of the origination of one soul over another; this has brought him great troubles, including the fact that on this view, the potentiality of a spiritual entity is in a material entity. Given this trouble and his particular philosophical foundations concerning the principality of existence, the hierarchy of existence and the substantial motion, Mulla Sadra can adopt the view that the soul is corporeal at the time of its origination, and thereby he can rid of this trouble and other troubles with which the theory of spiritual origination encounters.