Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers

Social Theories of Muslim Thinkers

Pure Experience and Knowledge by Presence: William James and Mohammad Hossein Tabātabā'ī on the Pre-Representational Ground of Knowledge

Document Type : Research Article / Original Article

Authors
1 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Payame Noor University (PNU), Tehran, Iran.
2 Associate Professor, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
This paper examines the concept of “pure experience,” developed by William James within his radical empiricism, and the ʿilm ḥuḍūrī (knowledge by presence) of Mohammad Hossein Tabātabā’ī, a figure in the Shīʿī philosophical tradition of al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya (the Transcendent Wisdom) of Mullā Ṣadrā. Although the two thinkers come from very different intellectual backgrounds (American pragmatism and Shīʿī philosophy), both advance the same claim: that the basic level of cognition is pre-representational, an immediate mode of knowing that underlies and grounds conceptual, propositional, and representational cognition. The comparison goes beyond structural description in two directions. First, Tabātabā’ī’s framework explicitly criticizes two persistent problems in James’s account: the absence of a definite and stable mental subject, and the lack of a definition of the objectivity of knowledge. At the core of this critique lie the doctrine of ittiḥād al-ʿāqil wa al-maʿqūl (the union of intellect and intelligible) and the doctrine of nafs al-amr (the objective reality of the known). Together, these doctrines explain how presence (ḥuḍūr) yields truth (ṣidq) without any intervening representation. Second, the essay proposes a trans-cultural epistemological model for addressing the skeptical crisis: the Pre-Representational Foundation of Knowledge (PRFK). The model holds that the solution to the skeptical crisis lies in returning to the pre-representational level, where the fundamental epistemological relation is presence rather than correspondence, as it is in modern representationalism. Through this comparison, the paper shows that theoretical knowledge can advance through dialogue between Islamic and Western epistemologies, and that this dialogue bears directly on contemporary philosophy of mind and on the limits of computational representationalism.
Keywords
Subjects

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Volume 16, Issue 3
Summer 2026
Pages 155-179

  • Receive Date 20 May 2026
  • Revise Date 07 August 2026
  • Accept Date 10 September 2026
  • Publish Date 23 September 2026