Abstract

Aristotle's definition of imagination is the beginning of philosophers' conceptualizations of this issue. Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Suhrawardi have greatly extended this concept. Farabi defines imagination with three types of function: preserving the pictures of sensibles, manipulating them, and imitations of sensibles and intelligibles by pictures. Ibn Sina conceptualizes what Farabi called imagination and imaginal faculty in four distinct faculties called the faculty of imagination, imaginal faculty, the faculty of estimate, and memory. Suhrawardi believes that imaginal perception is a kind of Ishraqi presential knowledge and clarifies it based on the observation of suspending images. The most perfect theology of imagination for the conceptualization of creativity is that of Farabi, based on which the four different levels of the creativity of imagination are definable. However, these levels are also realized in Ishraqi or Illuminative imagination, which differs from Peripatetic imagination only in the way it is clarified.