Ma`rifat Falsafi

The problem of “knowledge by presence” is a multidimensional issue, one of which concerns its historical background and searching for the ideas of the preceding philosophers in this regard. The main questions that this article wants to answer are: is this issue a new idea in Islamic philosophy or does it have a history, and if it has a history, what is the role of the preceding philosophers in this regard? The author in this article has pursued this objective through reviewing and analyzing main works of some of the prominent Muslim philosophers. Evidently, his interpretation of them rests on the new findings in the Islamic philosophy. The conclusion is: Muslim philosophers, from the outset, have distinguished knowledge by presence from representational knowledge on the basis of their distinctive features, though under different rubrics. Another finding is that philosophers, at least in some instances, have equated “ta’aqqul” (reasoning) with knowledge by presence.