ABSTRACT
An analysis of this critical concept of tashkÊk facilitates our understanding of ØadrÉ’s positions on a wide variety of important philosophical issues such as predication, the problem of reconciling unity and plurality in being, and the God-world relationship. It provides an answer to the age-old problem of the One and the many and attempts to forge a new way, a median way (that is often so critical in Islamic thought following the Qur’Énic injunction for Muslims to strike the median path and be the ‘middle community’) between the ontological monism of the school of Andalusian Sufi Ibn ÑArabÊ [d. 1240] and the metaphysical pluralism of Avicennism. But tashkÊk is much more than a philosophical solution or a way out of the aporia of the diverse unity or unified diversity that we encounter; it is the central hermeneutic concept of Sadrian philosophy, and a means for analysing and interpreting texts and ideas. As such, it extends from the pros hen homonymy of the term ‘being’ to the actual structure of reality and the modes in which we experience and interpret it. Significantly, this fourfold scheme of modes of being may be reduced to three upon which I focus: being-in-language (collapsing spoken and written tokens), mental being, and extra-mental being.
