Ma`rifat Falsafi

According to Frege and Strawson's approach in analytic philosophy, awareness of any object in the external world is possible only through concepts and descriptions (the “descriptive” theory). However, Russell and early Wittgenstein did not embrace this theory and rejected it for various reasons, citing numerous arguments. According to one argument, awareness of the properties of a thing in the context of the external world becomes possible only when we first have direct awareness of that thing itself and of its actual existence outside the mind -without describing it through any concept. Otherwise, awareness of the external world would not be possible, because its subject matter itself is absent (the theory of logical atomism). By eliminating the mediating role of the mind and the concepts within it, this approach is compelled to secure the distinction between subject and predicate in actual propositions by positing their ontic distinctness within the context of reality itself. Adopting a descriptive-analytical method, the present article first explicates this argument and then evaluates it on the basis of the foundations established in Islamic philosophy. Having admitted the rule of subordination (far’iyyah), Islamic philosophers do not believe in the concomitance of the direct awareness of a subject’s properties in an actual proposition with the direct awareness of the concept. Accordingly, the distinction between subject and predicate is a mental one; thus, asserting an external distinction between them results from confusing mental judgments with objective ones.