Squaring the Circle: The Suspended Person Thought Experiment’s Conditions Approved Apperception as an Onto-Epistemic Basis for Mullā Ṣadrā’s Existentialist Psychology

Abstract

This study is a philosophical engagement with historical texts in philosophy, arguing that, with proper application, Abū ʿĀlī Ibn Sīnā’s (d. 415/1037)Suspended Person thought experiment produces a self as existence. However, this existential self lies hidden in its trajectory from its founder to Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrahīm b. Yaḥyā Qawāmī Shīrāzī’s (d. 1014/1636). In the latter, we find an existentialist system close enough in pedigree to the Suspended Person’s origins yet sufficiently augmented to support the original conditions-induced existential self. The objective of this analysis is to show how Shīrāzī’s Transcendent Philosophy (al-Ḥikmah al-mutaʿāliyah) manages to excavate an otherwise overlooked apperception in his application of the Suspended Person thought experiment. Here, the existential self’s parallel in Ṣadrā’s onto- epistemology is quickly ascertained. However, as far as the nature of self- consciousness is considered, Ṣadrā’s system is mostly a synthesis of elements of the ideas of Abū ʿĀlī Ibn Sīnā (d. 415/1037), Shihab al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d.569/1191), al- Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Shaikh) Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muhammad Ibn ʿArabī al-Ḥātimī al-Ṭāʾī (d.618/1240). Thus, the idea of the self as existence must be demonstrated through the gradual revelation of the conditions-based apperception via the various contributing philosophical developments provided by the thinkers mentioned above in each mode of the Suspended Person (or onto- epistemically similar situation) over time. These crucial developmental elements gather in Transcendent Philosophy’s knowledge by presence (al-ʿIlm al-ḥuḍūrī). Through it, the latent intuitive knowledge granted through Avicennian epistemology, largely exposed through Suhrawardian turns on the subject, is brought to the foreground on an existential basis, as informed by Akbarian thought, in a way prepared to ascertain the existential field of the Suspended Person’s first-hand experience. Ṣadrā inadvertently excavates the original conditions-approved apperception previously buried under the initial Avicennian oversight, as gradually exhumed through the critique of these thinkers. The results of the Suspended Person’s apperceptive conditions outstrip each of the systems engaging it until it reaches Shīrāzī. However, true to the Suspended Person’s nature, Shīrāzī’s oversights with the thought experiment are also shown to present challenges in his onto-epistemology.