A Late Ottoman Example of "Understanding the Body" (mental being) in Islamic Philosophy: İsmail Gelenbevi

The nature and origin of knowledge, and the problem of truth are of perennial problems of philosophy. In Islamic philosophy the epistemologic inquiry primarily concerns perception and the threeway relationship between the percept, the perceived object, and perception. The Meşşai (Peripatetic) account of knowledge as the “illustration” of the reality of the perceived object in the soul, or the presence of its essence in the soul, lead the confusion of categories between substance and accident. Thus in response other theories of knowledge were posited such as knowledge as the quality by correlation, knowledge as imaging of forms, and knowledge as the inherence of the quiddities of the perceived ob-ject in the soul. In the Islamic world, it can be spoken of a series of thinkers who were interested in the subject directly as well as in-directly. Among them whose names may be mentioned are Fârâbî, İbn Sînâ, Sühreverdi, F. Razi, Nasır, Recep Ali Tebrizi.Of these thinkers, philosophical or theological or both, we person-ally interested in especially in Nasır Tûsî, Ali Tûsî, Erdebili, Dev-vânî, Kemal Paşazâde, and İsmail Gelenbevi.