Abstract

Secondary philosophical intelligibles are general philosophical concepts such as existence, non-existence, cause, effect and accident on which the life of Islamic philosophy depends. Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'I has tried to propose a comprehensive theory about the way through which secondary philosophical intelligibles are originated. He believes that these intelligibles are first understood through relational concepts and then non-relational concepts are abstracted from those relational ones and generalized. This article tries to give a clear formulation of the theory with four phases using Tabataba'i's works and Motahhari's comments. The resuts of this research study shows that these concepts are not delusion. It also depicts that these concepts are not extracted from internal or external experiences or primordial human nature but are created from perceptive faculty. In addition, some other key issues to which Allameh has not paid enough attention, such as how to generalize the concept of secondary intelligible which has been abstracted from a special mental state to the whole world and the relationship between secondary intelligible obtained in the mind and the object to which the secondary intelligible refers, have been stated and the researcher has tried to find answers for these questions.