Abstract

One of the important problems in the field of humanities is identity and developing an identity in Mulla Sadra's view. Relying on the principle of the trans-substantial motion and the principle of the union of the intellect and the intelligible, he has placed the problem of the soul-body relation, which had been previously discussed by many thinkers, in a new field. As a result, he has reached some important conclusions and compensated for many of the defects of the previous approaches. He believes that the soul is "corporeal in origination" and "spiritual in subsistence". Moreover, he states that the soul's relation to the body is based on the perfection of ontological virtues and maintains that the perfection of each human soul lies in his attaining intellectual immateriality, which is realized after his going through the three-fold vegetative, animal, and human stages of the soul. The picture that Mulla Sadra presents from man's identity and its process of development greatly emphasizes the inner and other-worldly dimension of human beings. Basically, he believes that presenting any kind of knowledge of human identity without paying attention to this other-worldly dimension will be incomplete.The purpose of this research is to investigate Mulla Sadra's approach regarding the generation of the soul and, as a result, the process and stages of developing an identity by following an analytic-descriptive method and benefitting from library sources. The results of this study indicate that, on the basis of Mulla Sadra's view of the generation of the soul, the development of man's identity consists of three stages which are different for each human being considering the conditions of one's soul at various ages and periods of one's life