Power of Imagination as Animate Soul; Restudying the Power of Imagination as Viewed by Sadr ul-Mutuallihin in the Light of Explaining the Principles and Analyzing Functions

The faculty of imagination in the philosophy of Avicenna and his followers is known as a mental capacity for preserving particular forms perceived by common sense. Sadr ul-Mutuallihin, yet, when defining the faculty of imagination, has given two various, but interconnected and logical, views, that are inferential from and describable on his methodological analysis in the field of human soul. The basic issue of the current research is to describe Sadra`s final view of the what-ness of the human soul and to compare it with that of peripatetic philosophers. The main finding, being achieved in a logical and analytical method and relying on the propositional and systematic analysis of the statements of Sadr al-Mutuallihin in two positions of "explaining the foundations of the knowledge of the faculty" and "giving the Functions of the faculty," has shown the validity of the claim. At first, he thought as the well-known peripatetic and, then, relying on the gradation of the mental faculty gave another view on which the faculty of imagination is known as the animate soul and as the very logical particularity of human being in animate level, which is based on power-regarded state of the three levels of the human soul in his philosophical system.