Suhrawardi on Ontological Commitment

چکیده مقاله

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 paraphrased 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 thing 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, which 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 (I'tibarāt). In addition, Surawardi offers his own rule for ontological commitment named 'Al-Qistās' means 'firm criterion' in Al-Talviḥāt, 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. In contrast to Peripatetics, the metaphysics of material objects 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. It considers how he encounters the issue and finally searches the results of these contemplations on the whole philosophy of illumination.