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The experience of our conscience belongs in the same category as feeling, thinking and wanting. However, it has a special aspect, namely the presence of other human beings as absolute entities. The process of experience is concerned with the way to best promote your own interests, with how far you will go in actualising your essential characteristics as an absolute entity. The discussion of our urge for survival shows that we can go quite far in that respect, and that to actualise that urge, there are in fact no boundaries; everything is permitted. The same can be said about actualising our other essential characteristics, but the difference is that our need to do so is perhaps less cogently present; it is not our life, or at least not our continued material existence, that is at stake. Nonetheless, we can and may even choose to go to extremes in this respect and thus to give ourselves priority over others. Respect for the interests of others is based on self-respect, which may lead you to decide to subject your dealings with other people to a set of standards for yourself. Here we enter the area of morals and ethics, to which we can attach a complete moral philosophy and on the basis of a belief, a moral theology. At the end of this road is total love of yourself and others, because you have come to realise that it is the only way that can lead to the fourth essential characteristic of human beings as absolute entities, namely self-fulfilment. You will then have developed in a way that allows you to give yourself and others the scope we need as absolute entities (compassion, solidarity). Self-fulfilment is achieved through self-development, i.e. discovering and honing our gifts and talents and thus finding our own identity (development), a process by which the lives of human beings as absolute entities acquire purpose (the search for meaning). Self-fulfilment is self-actualisation, the state that results from the realisation of the essential characteristics of human beings as absolute entities, and it leads to satisfaction derived from ourselves or our activities, a sense of being satisfied with what we have accomplished.

Drawing upon the hermeneutic basis that understanding and interpretation of a text is conditioned by the reader’s preunderstanding, this article examines ʾAllamah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s interpretive preunderstandings. In so doing, the article first, will explore ʾAllamah’s constitutive and non-constitutive preunderstandings. As the foundation of his Qur'anic interpretation, the constitutive category is divided into three subcategories: text-specific, interpreter-specific, and interpretation-specific. The non-constitutive category is studied under the following two subcategories: the imposed and non-imposed preunderstandings. Although the article studies ʾAllamah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s interpretive preunderstandings, this categorization can be applied in studying any scriptural hermeneutic discourse. The contribution of this article to the field, is not limited to Allamah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s interpretive preunderstandings. The method applied in this study can be used in the study of any scriptural hermeneutics.

Maintaining strong flavor of Aristotelian theory of perception, Farabi as well as Avicenna have appended new phases to the theory. Depicting imaginary perception with its crucial jobs, Farabi explains these three activities: storing sensory forms, composing and decomposing sensory forms, as well as imagery. What Farabi names the imaginary faculties, is conceptualized as three inner perceptions, i.e., imagination, estimative and memory faculties in Avicenna’s works. Evolving existing theories of perception, Avicenna delivers an account of five inner perceptions. Beforehand Farabi did not consider any difference between imaginary perception and motekhayelah. However, he mentioned one faculty doing both activities and was usually calling it motekhayelah and sometimes imaginary perception. Conceptualizing imaginary perception with its functions, Farabi deals with three primary activities: storing sensory forms, composing and decomposing sensory forms, and imagery. In other words, Avicenna defines what Farabi calls the imaginary faculties as three inner perceptions, i.e., imagination, estimative and memory faculties.