Abstract

S&dotbelow;adra's concept of knowledge is based on his gradational ontology whereby he defines knowledge as a mode of being . Drawing upon the primacy and gradation of being, S&dotbelow;adra redefines the Peripatetic concept of 'abstraction' as disembodiment, which leads him to formulate intelligibility as ontological intensification. In this view, the more intense a substance is in its ontological plenitude, the more intelligible it is. By articulating a realist ontology of intelligible substances, S&dotbelow;adra goes on to construe intellectual perception as deciphering a particular aspect of being and its modalities. The unification of the intellect with the intelligible reasserts the primacy of being in all cognition in that the self goes out of itself and participates in the intelligible world to grasp the true reality and meaning of things. Since S&dotbelow;adra assumes an isomorphic unity between the knowing subject and the world, epistemic skepticism or the mind-body problem does not arise as an issue for him. ;The second part of S&dotbelow;adra's epistemology pertains to self-knowledge and knowledge-by-presence ---two important tenets of the School of illumination founded by Suhrawardi. While self-knowledge underlies the constancy and primacy of self-consciousness, knowledge-by-presence affirms the ontological foundations of cognition, both sensual and intellectual. S&dotbelow;adra casts all knowledge as mediated through self-knowledge and justifies it on the basis of knowledge-by-presence. An important outcome of this view is the redefinition of knowledge as presence , witnessing , and illumination as opposed to knowledge as mental abstraction and relation . This is where S&dotbelow;adra the philosopher meets S&dotbelow;adra the mystic whereby the three sources and kinds of knowledge are blended into a coherent whole. These are what S&dotbelow;adra calls the qur'an, i.e., revealed knowledge, burhan, i.e., demonstrative-philosophical knowledge, and ` irfan, i.e., mystical and realized knowledge. This, in turn, leads to a notion of knowledge as deliverance and spiritual refinement. Due to its non-subjectivist nature, S&dotbelow;adra's theory of knowledge entails a concept of agency radically different from the Cartesian model of disengaged agent, which assumes the knowing subject to be located essentially outside and over the world. By contrast, S&dotbelow;adra places the knower within the larger context of being of which it is only a part