Suhrawardi on ‘Ontological Commitment’

The concept of ‘ontological commitment’ proposed by V. W. Quine has played a significant role in contemporary metaphysics and ontology. The idea behind this notion is how a sentence should be translated in a logical sense so that one can measure its ontological requirements. Sometimes natural language leads us to accept some strange and absurd nonexistent objects such as Unicorns. Also, in some cases, the absurdity of an accepted object is not much evident. So, despite the denotation of sentences in natural language, we need a criterion to distinguish between what really is and what is not. Suhrawardi is aware of this idea and it can be recognized in several positions of his philosophy of Illumination such as a long discussion with peripatetics which entails proposing the concept of mind-dependent notions (Iʿtibarāt). In addition, Surawardi offers his own rule for ontological commitment named ‘Al-Qistās’ means ‘firm criterion’ in Al-Talvihāt, which assists him in recognizing mind-dependent notions versus objective notions. The result of these considerations is the appearance of a type of ontological parsimony in suhrawardi’s philosophy. The metaphysics of material objects in contrast to peripatetics has become parsimonious in his philosophy to the possible extent. This paper investigates the instances showing that Suhrawardi was aware of the idea behind ontological commitment and the ontological problems raised by natural language, then it considers how he encounters the problem, and finally searches the results of these contemplations on the whole philosophy of Illumination.