Abstract

The issue of the role of imagination and its importance and position in Islamic epistemological structure, especially for Farabi and advocates of Gnostic approach, has established the chance to achieve a theoretical framework in understanding Islamic epistemology. For Gnostic approach advocates, wisdom and truth have appearance, essence, perception, and intuition in a way that imagination as a means of abstraction of objects and shapes from their material reality has an active and decisive role in creation of wisdom and truth, it can also interpret human conscience and inner being; therefore, as a theoretical means for thought and analysis, the basis for imaginative reaction is to symbolize and interpret. From this perspective, every sensory experience and awareness necessarily contains a certain level of imaginative nature and quality.There is a special type of dualism in Farabi’s approach and imagination which is related to his interpretation of religion and religious reality. He believes that religious truth is a metaphorical, artistic, literary, and imaginative truth. For him, human possess another unique value which is the value he generally possesses towards art and aesthetic work. Another important point according to Farabi is the difference between philosophy and religion. According to him, philosophy inclines towards sense and experience while religion deals with intuition, predictions, and speculation. In intuition, philosophy supports necessity whereas philosophy supports essence, and this is what causes to think that these two are of different types. Due to their differences, specific transverses have appeared in them. This division cannot be solved except for Farabi’s philosophy and his epistemology theory which is based on the unity between nature and essence (from the beginning) and totally deals with maintenance of balance.Farabi’s epistemology theory in imagination is a philosophical-rational theory that is based on logical credits and rational preliminaries and bold dependence on the relevant results. From this perspective, Farabi was creative in philosophical speech and has exceeded the words of Plato and Aristotle, and through imagination his theories proposed a new critical epistemology in associations like religion and philosophy, art and science, and wisdom and essence, which was effective in the history of philosophy after him.

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