The Humanistic Turn in Contemporary Islamic Studies

One of the first concerns of the thinkers was to know the human. Muslim thinkers also have had a great deal of effort to offer a comprehensive theory and viewpoint about the human. This article is a secondary study about the patterns of Muslim thinkers to know the human and it compares the Ṣadrian pattern with the Neoṣadrian one. It does not aim at judging the content of these patterns; it investigates the principles of the structural turn of Neoṣadrians in the contemporary Islamic studies. Ṣadrian anthropology is of the kind of philosophical psychology, though it has many differences with earlier philosophical viewpoints. Although contemporary Shī‘a thinkers are completely influenced by the Ṣadrian theosophy in their ontology and theology, they are faced with a revolutionary change of content and structure in the issue of human which shows an anthropological turn. Both the subject of matter and the principles and theorems are developed in this turn. The root of this turn is the attention of the Neoṣadrian to the philosophy of humanities and the anthropological basics of behavioral and social sciences. In the second part, the essential teachings of Islam about the human as the Islamic anthropology principles and in the third part, the theoretical principles of contemporary anthropology are investigated.