A Critical Assessment of the Epistemic Principles of Michel Foucault's Genealogy in the View of Mulla Sadra's Philosophy

Michel Foucault’s genealogy is a theory which emphasizes on his epistemic principles and denies inherent purposefulness and orientation. The most important epistemic principles of this theory are nominalism, power-centeredness, fortuitism, constructivism, historiography, considering intellect and truth as relative, adopting coherent theory about the justification of cognition. These epistemic principles can be evaluated according to the Mulla Sadra's philosophical principles, such as: the principle of reality, dividing existence into independent and copulative, the principle of causality unity of the system of being, and its purposefulness, the existence of divine traditions in managing societies and history, the existence of incontrovertible facts, the possibility of absolute and certain cognition, fundamentalism in the justification of cognition, verisimilitude of cognition, the two-dimensional nature of man, the originality of human soul, awareness, man’s will and purposefulness, the common nature of human beings, and validity of empirical, rational and intuitive methods.