ABSTRACT
The subject of the present paper is one which, it would seem, involves all men, for man, being a thinking being, cannot avoid thought. In whatever society he lives he is forced to think and meditate upon the nature of things. It is possible to put a false way of thinking in place of a true one, but, in any case, it is not possible to be against thought itself, especially since this point of view, when analyzed and dissected, is found to be itself a certain way of thinking. Man cannot, therefore, escape from thought and reflection, and this is true today in the Islamic world in particular as well as in the East in general, where men live in a special situation resulting from the encounter with Western civilization as a result of which a new awareness and evaluation of their own intellectual tradition has become an urgent call and, in fact, probably very much a matter of life and death. In Persia the best proof of this fact is that during the last decade, despite all that has been done in many modernized circles to turn away from purely intellectual matters and to become concerned solely with the practical and the pragmatic, there still can be seen a new kind of awareness of the Islamic philosophical tradition, even among some of the members of the younger generation.
