wahm (estimation) — wahm is estimation, which apprehends particular non-sensible meanings and may supply illusory content; khayāl is imagination, which retains and represents sensible forms.
General Technical Meaning
Imagination is the internal faculty retaining sensible forms after sensation and making them available to further operations.
In ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s Works
Imaginal cognition
In the reviewed Nihāya division of acquired knowledge, ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī calls knowledge of an individual without the presence of its matter ‘imaginal knowledge.’ This cognitive use must remain distinct from khayāl as the faculty that represents and transforms dream-images.
Source: Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah
Representational imagination
Risālat al-Manāmāt wa-l-Nubuwwāt
representational imagination — explanation
Imagination is characterized as representing what it represents through meanings and suitable matters available to it.
Limits of this account
It does not identify imagination with the ontological realm of images.
al-Mīzān fī Tafsīr al-Qurʾān
representational imagination — explanation
Al-Mīzān says directly that dream-vision is a cognitive matter in which imagination has a part, and it treats the imaginative faculty as something acted upon: conditions of the body and its surroundings reach the dream by reaching that faculty first.
Limits of this account
This does not make every act of imagination a dream, nor does it establish that every form composed by imagination discloses something beyond itself.
Pure imagination
In al-Manāmāt, pure imagination is a narrower experimental mode of khayāl in which directed attention and removal of competing sensible attachments can give imagined content sensory force. It is a mode of khayāl, not a separate term.
Source: Risālat al-Manāmāt wa-l-Nubuwwāt
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