Mulla S&dotbelow;adra's theory of knowledge and the unification of the intellect and the intelligible (ittih&dotbelow;ad al-'aqil wa'l-ma'qul)

S&dotbelow;adrā's concept of knowledge is based on his gradational ontology whereby he defines knowledge as a mode of being (al-wujūd ). Drawing upon the primacy (as&dotbelow;ālah) and gradation (tashkīk) of being, S&dotbelow;adrā ) 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;adrā goes on to construe intellectual perception as deciphering a particular aspect of being and its modalities. The unification of the intellect with the intelligible (ittihād al-`āqil wa'l-ma`qūl) 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;adrā 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;adrā's epistemology pertains to self-knowledge and knowledge-by-presence (al-`ilm al-h&dotbelow;ud&dotbelow;ūrī )—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;adrā 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 (h&dotbelow;ud&dotbelow;ūr ), witnessing (shuhūd), and illumination ( (id&dotbelow;āfah). This is where S&dotbelow;adrā the philosopher meets S&dotbelow;adrā the mystic whereby the three sources and kinds of knowledge are blended into a coherent whole. These are what S&dotbelow;adrā calls the qur'ān, i.e., revealed knowledge, burhān, i.e., demonstrative-philosophical knowledge, and ` irfān, 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;adrā's theory of knowledge entails a concept of agency radically different from the Cartesian model of disengaged agent, which assumes the knowing subject (cogito) to be located essentially outside and over the world. By contrast, S&dotbelow;adrā places the knower within the larger context of being of which it is only a part.