چکیده:
Early Muslim philosophers, theologians, logicians and experts in jurisprudence understand knowledge as “firm true belief supported by evidence”. They consider conjectures as a kind of ignorance, the domain of certain knowledge confined in necessary truths; and the domain of uncertain knowledge limited to contingent facts. From their definitions and postulates, we can conclude that they took “having appropriate source” as the criterion of knowledge. For this reason, they included the qualifications “firm” and “immutable” in their definition of knowledge in lieu of distinction between the definition and the criterion of knowledge and separation of cognitive characteristic features of beliefs from the non- cognitive ones. Their approach in epistemology is externalistic but it accommodates foundationalism and fallibilism while evading epistemological relativism. In this approach, knowledge is defined as true belief with proper source. Having proper source is a criterion for knowledge which is not explicitly stated but is implied by different qualifications introduced by them. A source of belief is proper iff it bears a causal relation of some sort to the state of affairs the belief depicts.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Keywords: Islamic Intellectual Sciences, knowledge, certainty, conjecture, belief, truth “As to virtue leading us to happy life, I hold virtue to be nothing else than perfect love of God. For the fourfold division of virtue, I regard as taken from four forms of love” (St. Agustine, cited in Stumpf, 1987, p.
In philosophical theology, questions of definability of knowledge, definition of knowledge, varieties of knowledge, sources of knowledge, the criteria of knowledge and of ignorance, the difference between two sorts of knowledge: (Ilm) and (maarefah) and division of knowledge from the knower’s point of view are addressed.
Bahrani (1215-1258) says: “some philosophers and theologians like Abul Hussein and Fakhr Razi and their followers thought that the concept knowledge is self-evident so it needs not be defined.
The second definition Khajeh Nasir (1200-1274) defines knowledge as true, firm and certain belief (Khajeh, 1407, p.
The third definition Fazel Meqdad (1365-1455) defines knowledge as true certain belief supported by evidence (Meqdad, 1422, p.
This definition differs from the previous one in that it allows a true certain belief based on accepting experts’ opinion to be called knowledge.
Bearing in mind that most Muslim thinkers impose the restriction that belief must be supported by evidence in order to deserve the name knowledge (therefore beliefs formed by accepting experts’ opinion are not knowledge), we can infer that from their point of view it is very important what the source of belief (assent in their terminology) is.