A New Analysis of Ontological Features of Mental Action of Subjective Consideration (Iʻtebar)

The propositions pertaining to the common affairs of life include certain affairs such as address, house, bank account, seminary school, university, president, inflation and law, which are not in the group of objective affairs such as existential characteristics of things. In the literature of Islamic philosophy, these are called ‗conventional‘ affairs, to which no ontological reality is attributed. However, there are serious and unresolved philosophical questions in this regard. Among these questions are two things that are clearly distinguishable: one is ‗convention‘ as the source of subjectively considered affairs, and the other is the conventional affairs themselves. In the present article, some issues pertaining to ‗convention‘ are discussed and investigated. The main issue in this article is as follows: ―what ontological feature does the ‗convention‘ have?‖ Under this question, other subsidiary issues such as the relationship between convention and awareness, its being abstract or material, and the nature of its destination are discussed as well