The Act of Being

The English publication of Jambet's challenging work on the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā entitled L’Acte d’être (Paris: Fayard, 2000) is an exciting event. It signals a new maturity in the study of Islamic philosophy because it is an attempt by a philosopher (a Platonist at that) to make sense philosophically of Mullā Ṣadrā's vision and exposition of ontology as ‘revealed’ in the scripture and in Prophetic wisdom. The book does not reflect a merely antiquarian interest in ideas of the past, nor is it a historian's attempt to reconstruct and evaluate a particular line of thought; rather, it seeks to understand the ontology of ‘reality’ (ḥaqīqa, aletheia) and ‘presence’ (wujūd, parousia) that Mullā Ṣadrā proposes as a reading of the Qurʾanic revelation. It is significant that the book has been published by a press specializing in philosophy and is distributed by MIT Press, which is internationally renowned for its publication of cutting-edge continental philosophy. What the book demonstrates is that philosophy in the Islamic tradition is much more than the Graeco-Arabic falsafa tradition and researchers attempting to make sense of it need to address other disciplines and genres of writing in Islamic learned culture. Similarly, by proposing that the book is a study of the philosophy of Islam, of the ‘philosophie prophétique’ that Henry Corbin outlined as essential to intellectual life in Islam, Jambet is attempting to make a serious claim about the role of philosophy in Islamic culture, one that is often denied by specialists who focus on al-Ghazālī's condemnation of speculative metaphysics and cosmology in Tahāfut al-falāsifa. The approach that Jambet adopts (somewhat akin to his earlier reading of Platonisms in Islam, La logique des orientaux [Paris: Seuil, 1983]), is one that locates the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā both within the paradigm of (Shiʿi) prophetic philosophy of revelation (influenced by Jambet's teacher, the late Henry Corbin) and a new Platonism within continental French philosophy that ironically admits the influence of Heidegger in its emphasis upon the philosophy of being

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