Human Nature and its Role in Humanities; Comparative Study of Ayatollah Mesbah’s View and That of Abraham Maslow

In the sphere of anthropology, there are two major approaches: philosophical anthropology and empirical anthropology. This study seeks to compare the views of two contemporary anthropologists representing those approaches regarding human essentials and investigate the consequences of their basic common points and differences in humanities. Therefore, we consider the views presented by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah on the basis of Islamic sources and transcendental philosophy, and among the humanist psychologists, Abraham Harold Maslow’s views on the basis of romantic philosophy, existentialist philosophy and empiricism. This study, in the concluding section, considers the limited and formal common points and many deeply-rooted differences between those two thinkers regarding those fundamental issues. This is in a way that the aforementioned differences have caused think differently regarding the description of human phenomena, explanation of human relations, determining the research issues and subject matters, and choosing the tools and sources of recognition; they even have contradicting judgments on determining behavioral norms as well as in valuing, policy-making, and recommending human behaviors and issues.