An Examination of two different approaches to the problem of sense perception in Mûllā Ṣâdrā’s philosophy, and an intra-structural solution for avoiding its epistemological challenge

The problem of sense perception in Mûllā Ṣâdrā’s philosophy has been drawn in such a way that makes possible two different approaches to it: idealistic and realistic. According to the first approach, considering the superiority and priority of the mind and its concepts to the external world, we can provide an idealistic interpretation of Mûllā Ṣâdrā’s epistemological system, and according to the second approach, there is a unity between man and the external world, according to which there is no preventer between man and the external world. The second approach implies avoiding from subjective idealism. But based on the first approach, the possibility of leaving the objective idealism becomes more complicated. In this paper, I have tried to explain the background of the formation of these two approaches by a descriptive-analytical method, and to analyze the different implications of both of those two approaches. For this reason, by appealing to an intra-structural solution, which is the ideality of the distinction between the world of objects and the world of the mind, I have stated the irrelevance of the challenges of objective idealism with the sense perception in Mûllā Ṣâdrā’s philosophical system.