Explaining and Evaluating the Sense Perception from the Perspective of Mulla Sadra and Allameh Tabatabaei

Accepting the immateriality of the soul, one of the important issues in the philosophy is that while the soul is incorporeal, how does it know sensible things and how is the process of perception? Mulla Sadra’ view on the issue is very different from the view of the philosophers before him so that in his idea, the sensory scientific forms are incorporeal and the soul itself creates these forms and the forms of the material things become known for the soul through these forms. Thus, the soul observes the forms of material things in the continuous imagination. Allameh Tabatabaei explains the sensory perception in another way. According to his idea, there is an immaterial archetypal thing in discrete imagination versus a material thing that the soul in sense perception observes the archetypal thing in imaginal world through immediate knowledge. Thus, the sense perception regarded as a kind of intuitive knowledge not conceptual knowledge. In this paper, at the first, it has been presented the ideas of these two philosophers about sense perception and then, the accuracy of these two views has been critically reviewed and it has been stated that the problem of sense perception can be resolved based on Mulla Sadra’s theory but the arguments of the theory of Allameh and its implications is untenable.