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Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy. By Muhammad Kamal. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 136. Hardcover $89.95.
Mulla Sadra is one of the most significant philosophers of the later period of Islamic philosophy. Unfortunately there is still not a single comprehensive study on his system as a whole apart from the late Fazlur Rahman's 1975 work, The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra.1 After the publication of Rahman's book, Sadra, his doctrines, and his philosophical system attracted wide interest. There is also a journal, Transcendent Philosophy, published by the Islamic Research Institute of London, in which there is a considerable number of articles on various philosophical theories of Sadra's. In Tehran, an Institute was established devoted completely to the study of his philosophical system. One recent study, Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Philosophy by Muhammad Kamal, a comprehensive investigation of Sadra's philosophical doctrines, is an attempt to capture the general outlook of Sadra's system as a whole. The thesis of this book is primarily what the author calls "Sadra's ontological turn," which is claimed to be similar to Heidegger's project in Being and Time. This is clearly expressed in a number of places in the book-for example, "Mulla Sadra's philosophical 'turn' or shift from the philosophical position of the primacy of essence to the primacy of Being and to thinking of being as the primordial metaphysical reality is similar to the ontological enterprise of Being and Time by Martin Heidegger" (p. 106; my emphasis). The phrase "primacy of Being" is repeated over and over again in the book.
It is not correct to use this phrase in relation to Sadra's ontology and more particularly to his doctrine of Being. I do not recall him saying that "essences are not primary but being is primary." All he says throughout his magnum opus, Asfar, is that "essences are not real, being is real." What the phrase "primacy of being" means is that there are a number of realities and that Being is primary among these realities, whereas Sadra claims that there is no other reality deserving to be identified as existent other than Being-hence the absolute monism, wahdat al-wujud (unity of being). There is a study by Megawati Moris that Kamal did not consult which establishes that there is only...