From Essence to Being: The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger

In a unique parallel analysis, Muhammad Kamal delves into the most controversial subjects of Islamic and Western existential philosophy. He explores the philosophical ‘turn’, ontological difference, becoming, and nothingness in the ontology of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger. He shows how they both held ‘Being’ as the sole reality and opposed Plato’s metaphysics as an established philosophical tradition which led to – in Heidegger’s words – the ‘oblivion of Being’. As Kamal explicates, Heidegger’s opposition to Plato became manifest in his deconstruction of the history of ontology, while Mulla Sadra’s opposition to Plato was through his criticism of Suhrawardi’s doctrine of the principality of essence. These new interpretations of being by two philosophers brought new life to both Islamic and Western schools of philosophy and have formed the basis of much of modern ontology, epistemology, and philosophical psychology.

Muhammad Kamal is a member of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has written extensively on the philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, and Mulla Sadra. He has also written on Western existentialism and modern Islamic thought.