Mulla Sadra’s Account of Systematic Analysis of Self-knowledge

Self-knowledge is one of the most strategic Islamic doctrine for man’s exaltation and man’s position of “servitude to God” and “knowing God”. Researchers on religion have proposed different and sometimes contrary accounts of self-knowledge. One account comes from Mulla Sadra whose high position in the study of religion calls for due consideration. Accordingly, the authors have tried to explain Sadra’s account within a comprehensive and interconnected set of conceptual constituents such as, “the foundations of the issue”, “what, why, and how of self-knowledge” and “its cognitive and practical implications”, thus they have hope to offer a systematic analysis of his account.  According to the findings, Mulla Sadra’s account of “self-knowledge” (i.e. inspection in the essence, attributes and practices of the mind) can be suggested as a standard account to have both a conceptual knowledge of God and intuitive knowledge of Him through the fact that the mind is the very dependence on God and the very relation to Him, rather than something dependent on or related to Him. The advantages of his account are: that it is comprehensive, that it enjoys well-grounded foundations in epistemology, methodology and religious study, that it is practical and that it methodologically considers related traditions such as “He who has known himself has known his Lord Almighty”. The article ends in a few considerations and complementary comments.