Philosophical Psychology of Mullā Ṣadrā

The project will investigate Ṣadrā’s key ideas in philosophical psychology. Ṣadrā was the most prominent philosopher of early modern period in the Islamic world and remains a pivotal figure in contemporary philosophy of the Shia world. The project is informed by the proposition that the philosopher advanced process metaphysics which, instead of viewing reality as composed of fixed substances or objects, emphasises that everything is in a state of continuous change. Yet, concomitants of this type of metaphysics in terms of the soul, selfhood and subjectivity have not been explicated in any sufficient degree. The project will thus focus on the theoretical ramifications of Ṣadrā’s flagship theory that the soul is material at the moment of its origination and reaches an immaterial and eternal level in the process of its perfection. This theory stems from one of Ṣadrā’s fundamental ontological doctrines of substantial motion, i.e. his idea, pace Aristotle and Avicenna, that substances themselves, and not only some of the accidents, go through continuous changes. This is radically different from the standard theory of categories which posits that any change in substances can only be instantaneous and lead to their immediate destruction or generation. While substantial motion has been subject to some scrutiny in terms of its broader significance for Ṣadrā’s ontology, its corollaries for his psychology have been largely neglected. The project will bridge this gap in scholarship by positing that Ṣadrā’s psychology leads to: panpsychism, perdurantism, significant transformation of the standard account of powers in Islamic metaphysics. The project will offer philosophically ambitious and historically conscientious research on post-classical Islamic texts. It will have a significant impact on how we understand the post-classical period, and thereby how we perceive Islamic philosophy at large.