Ibn Sina

Unlike Aristotle, Lakoff considers metaphor as an integral part of the process of human thinking and believes that humans often automatically and unconsciously learn and use a wide range of conceptual metaphors. A large part of our scientific and philosophical literature is full of conceptual metaphors. According to Lakoff, like other abstract concepts, causation is made of a small literal part which is extended by various kinds of conceptual metaphors in several directions. The current paper shows that a large part of the metaphors introduced by Lakoff, has been used by Muslim philosophers to describe causation. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Mulla Sadra are two of the most significant Islamic philosophers. According to Ibn Sina, causation is based on ‘Causation is Transfer of Possessions’ metaphor. This metaphor depicts causation as a three-component relation in which the boundaries are very strong and sharp. According to Mulla Sadra, causation is based on ‘Causation is Motion out’ metaphor. This metaphor makes causation to have two components and decreases the strength of boundaries between the components of the relation.

The question of what is the soul is one of the fundamental questions in philosophical psychology and the answer to it, along with other psychology questions, has been and is one of the most important and first concerns of philosophers. Among the philosophers, Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi have offered a novel view of the identity of the soul in comparison with their predecessors. In order to know the identity of the soul, Ibn Sina mentions the experience of human beings suspended in space in some of his works, and Suhrawardi, while expressing and modifying Ibn Sina's experience, speaks of other experiences. Through this research, it becomes clear that the efforts of the two in recognizing the soul are not the same, because Ibn Sina comes into existence in the experience of a human suspended in space, which is a hypothetical experience, and Suhrawardi in the experience of liberation from the body and experience in sleep and wakefulness. There are some realities and not assumptions about oneself that both views have been interpreted and evaluated in this article.