Seyed Mustafā Shahrā'eenī Shahrā'eenī
Volume 9, Issue 1 , September 2011, , Pages 87-108
Abstract
Afdal al-Dīn Kāshānī (Bābā Afdal) lived and thought in times in which philosophy was in a precarious state due to Gazāllī's well-known criticisms. The former thought that this ...
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Afdal al-Dīn Kāshānī (Bābā Afdal) lived and thought in times in which philosophy was in a precarious state due to Gazāllī's well-known criticisms. The former thought that this situation is caused by addressing the Metaphysica Specialis as the proper object of philosophical investigations. He did not interest in many of the issues that other philosophers (especially Peripatetics) addressed, so that one can say he did not follow the pattern of the great authorities. For him, to live a virtuous life is a part and parcel of the traditional philosophy. In short, Bābā Afdal can be regarded as an innovator Islamic-Persian philosopher who changed the traditional philosophy formally as well as materially. Among the Iranian philosophers, Bābā Afdal is first that he wrote his works mainly in Persian. Moreover, among those who wrote in Persian, he is set apart by the remarkable beauty and clarity of his prose. When reading his writings, we realized that the author implicitly tries to exclude knowledge of God from the realm of philosophy and replace knowledge of self with it. For Bābā Afdal, the heart of the issue in philosophy is self-knowledge that voiced in the Delphic maxim "know thyself".