Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the ...

CHAPTER 6
Epistemological Questions:
Relations among Intellect, Reason,
and Intuition within Diverse
Islamic Intellectual Perspectives
The question of how one knows is of course central to every philosophical
tradition, and Islamic philosophy is no exception. Although
centered on the study of Being and its manifestations, Islamic philosophy
has also dealt extensively with the issue of epistemology and the
means available to human beings to acquire authentic knowledge.
Here again the presence of prophecy has loomed large on the horizon
as the supreme source of knowledge, influencing the views of different
schools of Islamic philosophy on this matter. Islamic philosophers
have consequently had to deal with the relation between what is
humanly accessible in the domain of knowledge and what has been
revealed through prophecy. They have also had to deal with the matter
of how human beings are able to gain access to revealed knowledge
and come to know God and His messages as well as messengers.
Moreover, functioning in the world of prophecy in its Abrahamic form,
they have had to explain how God knows the world, a question alien
to most of classical Greek philosophy especially as far as divine knowledge
of particulars of the world of multiplicity and individual human
actions are concerned.
It is not our aim to deal here with the vast subject of various
schools of Islamic epistemology and how each school has dealt with
the relation between faith and reason, 1 intellect/reason and intuition,
human knowledge and prophecy, and so on. Rather, our goal is to
deal with the understanding of the exact meaning of intellect and
intuition in the major intellectual perspectives in Islam and show how
the discourse of various schools on the epistemology was affected in
one way or another by the sapiental dimension of prophecy and means
of knowing made available by the prophetic agency. Within the Islamic
world, a millennium of discussion on the relations among demonstration
(burhån) related to the faculty of intellect/reason, gnosis
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