EHE Book Reviews

Ways of Knowing Record Type: Review ID: 340
The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence Ha’iri Yaxdi, Mahdi
This work is about a form of knowing in Islam that is "heart-knowledge," or what we call Being Inside the Experiential Paradigm: The author is steeped not only in "knowledge by Presence," but Western philosophy. He points out that although for its own purposes Western philosophy has excluded self-knowledge and mystical knowing, he shows that these ways of knowing "do submit themselves to philosophical inquiry, and that, far from being anomalies to logical thinking, they stand to further the search for the nature of being" (p. 6). He provides a history of knowledge by Presence, discusses its empirical dimension, its prime mode of knowledge, and expands the theory to mysticism in general. Soyyed Hossein Nasr points out in the Foreword that the author makes a rigorous distinction between a knowledge based on the concept in the mind of something that is itself absent from the mind and a knowledge based on something that is itself present in the mind and whose very existence is inseparable from the knowledge of it" (p. xii).
Publisher Information:	Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 232p. Bibl: 217-222; Chap. notes: 191-215; Index: 223-232. [See photocopy for accents in author name]

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The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence