The Role of Self-Knowledge in Basis of Knowledge in Terms of Conceptual Knowledge and Knowledge by Presence in Shihab Ad-Din Al-Suhrawardi

Abstract

The knowledge problem is based on the questions of what people can know, how they can know, and how they can reach the all-encompassing knowledge of the object. These problems have had an important place in the history of thought from the classical period to the contemporary period. In the history of Islamic thought, the problem of knowledge has been discussed as a fundamental issue. In this article, we will examine how Shihab ad-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191), an Islamic philosopher who lived in the 12th century, handled the problem of knowledge. Suhrawardi deals with and criticizes the conceptual knowledge, which is the knowing as the philosophers called Peripatetic. The conceptual knowledge, which is defined as the occurrence of an image of something in the mind, suggests that in order to know something, it is necessary to have an image of that thing. Such type of knowledge, according to Suhrawardi, is far from giving the essence of the object because it is a type of knowledge which realized through an image or sense data. Rather, he proposes knowledge by presence, a type of knowledge that is acquired through direct cognition of reality. In knowledge by presence, one knows something directly without any prior knowledge and any mediation such as form or representation. Self-knowledge is a type of information obtained through knowledge by presence. With the thesis of knowledge by presence, Suhrawardi tries to show that Aristotle's epistemology cannot give exact knowledge and aims to show that certain knowledge can only be obtained through knowledge by presence.