Mulla Sadra and Hume on Comparative Analyzing of Causality

Abstract

One of the most important causes for comparative studying on philosophical systems is to find their commonalities for responding common questions and to emphasize on their differences for taking functional answers encountering modern philosophical challenges and problems. Here, causality is chosen as the case study. Causality is of the basic philosophical issues that have been continually considered by both Islamic and Western philosophical traditions, but the answers which have been rendered by modern western philosophers with empirical approach and Muslim philosophers, like Mulla Sadra, with intellectual and intuitive approach, is necessitated to compare such answers and clarify the efficacy of each one towards the other one. Mulla Sadra's philosophical, intellectual and illuminative thought in Islamic tradition, in comparison to Hume's modern empirical and phenomenal tendencies, is able to remove fundamental ahead problems concerning causality and to answer skepticism derived from it. In Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Wisdom, since the whole system of being has its plural hierarchical universes in which there are causal longitudinal relations. In fact, for Mulla Sadra, causality is not merely restricted to the natural world, and our phenomenal knowledge about it is inadequate, but whatever we see in the natural world is only the weak and thin level or surface of the deep and fundamental reality of causality. Meantime, for Mulla Sadra, in such the causal relation, the effect has nothing and no reality except it is as the manifestation, shadow and act of the cause.