Philosophy Lecture

Join us for a lecture by Javad Iakhkhar Toosi, Ph.D.
on The Resurrection of the Body: Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī's Philosophical Solution and Its Place in a Global Conversation

Can the "self" that dies be the very same self that rises again? This question has occupied religious philosophers for over a millennium, but few solutions to it are as philosophically striking as the one offered by Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, d. 1640), the founder of the school known as "Transcendent Philosophy" )al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyah(— one of the three major schools of Islamic philosophy, and the only one to emerge from within Twelver Shia intellectual tradition. This talk focuses on Sadra's theory of "substantial motion", which offers a radical account of how the soul itself generates its own resurrected body, rather than depending on God to physically reassemble scattered matter after death. We will examine why Ṣadrā rejected both the purely spiritual afterlife proposed by earlier Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna and the strict material literalism of Islamic theologians, arguing instead for an entirely different metaphysics of what makes a body — and a self — the same across time. Along the way, the talk will briefly note, without dwelling on it, that this same puzzle about bodily identity has troubled Western philosophers too, from Aquinas to contemporary analytic philosophy of religion — underscoring that Ṣadrā's solution belongs to a genuinely universal philosophical problem, even as it is developed here as a self-contained argument within Islamic philosophy.

Admission is 5$
45 min lecture followed by 15 Q&A

Reach Jack Sezer at 361-443-8694 with any questions