Existential Gradation and Appraising Neo-Sadraians Disputes: Allāmah Tabātabā i, Ayatollah Mesbāh, and Ayatollah Javādi Āmoli

The concept of “existence”, and the way it is abstracted, is of great import for the theory of existential gradation in Hikmat Muta‘ālyah. Since “existence” is one of secondary intelligibles, it becomes important to know how it occurs and how it is predicated. The main question, then is: what it means to occur and being predicated? What is the situation of the concept of existence as a secondary intelligible? What difference it makes in the discussion of existential gradation if one considered its occurrence as subjective vis-à-vis objective?This article reviews answers by Ayatollah Mesbah and Ayatollah Javadi Amoli to these questions, and examines how they put their marks on their approaches to the issue of existential gradation. The authors prefer arguing for the occurrence of secondary intelligibles by “the existence of the predicate” axiom, and believe that the argument from the concept of existence suffices for establishing gradation, and in this way, some disputes will end.