Sunday, October 20, 2013

Maʿrifat Series on Mullā Ṣadrā

A while back I mentioned an excellent TV series on philosophy and the intellectual life in Shiʿi Iran with the renowned public intellectual and Tehran University Professor Ghulām-Ḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī.
He did a series of 12 episodes on the thought of Mullā Ṣadrā earlier in the year which have been uploaded onto YouTube.

Here are some of them:
In this first episode which lays the foundations for the discussion, they try to define what one means by transcendent philosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya), and part of this is Dīnānī's contention - that accords with something I wrote in my doctoral dissertation years ago and I guess it might have been the result of conversations with him back in the late 1990s - that tashkīk, the notion of modulation in the structure of being, is central to Mullā Ṣadrā's philosophy so much that it is the main hermeneutic of being.


This episode focuses on his conception of motion in substance (a Neoplatonic but anti-Aristotelian doctrine):

The core of Mullā Ṣadrā's thought concerns his position on being, its manifestation and its provision of ontological foundations in the study of reality: