Suhrawardī’s Ishrāqī “philosophy of appearance” and Noetic

The 6th/12th century was a period of thriving critical assessment of Ibn Sīnā’s legacy. Like al-Ghazali, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi, Suhrawardī’s critical appraisal of various aspects of Ibn Sīnā’s philosophical system led him to propose novel philosophical ideas in logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, etc. This paper will focus on Suhrawardī’s critical appraisal of Ibn Sīnā’s Peripatetic noetic, i.e. the study of the nous (‘aql). Ibn Sīnā’s Peripatetic noetic derives from the works of earlier Arab philosophers, some versed in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions, namely Farabi. We will attempt to identify a number of distinctive “Illuminationist” elements of Suhrawardī’s ishrāqī noetic, which reconfigures some important components of traditional Peripatetic noetic. In fact, Suhrawardī rejects, modifies, innovates, and develops the noetic of his Illuminationist model (ishrāq/ẓuhūr). For instance, at the heart of Suhrawardī’s new “science of Lights” (‘ilm al-anwār) rests an ontology and an epistemology of light in which Light becomes tantamount to the presence (ḥuḍūr), the appearance or the manifestation (ẓuhūr) of various intensities of luminosity. Light not only partakes in the process of intellection (abstraction), but also in the process of self-awareness and intuitive apprehension. Suhrawardī also increases the number of active celestial intelligences/Light, angels are also redefined in terms of their partaking of the active light principle. To achieve this, we will focus primarily to the second part of The philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq) (completed 582/1186) where Suhrawardī develops his distinct metaphysics of Light, which encompasses both ontology and epistemology, important dimensions for his reconfiguration of a novel ishrāqī “philosophy of appearance” noetic.