I thought I was on to a winner with this argument. Sadly not so! Mulla Sadra's Ontological Argument

Whilst researching Descartes' Ontological Argument, I stumbled across an Iranian Islamic philosopher who apparently led the Iranian cultural renaissance of the 17th century. And that's not all, he has also been described as arguably the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. Impressive stuff! So after reading this and glancing over his argument, I thought that he may have dodged the grammar bullet that seems to be taking out a lot of these Ontological arguments. However, that is sadly not the case, and the words 'exist' and 'existence' still appeared within the same argument. Therefore still posing the same problem to the argument as that of Descartes'. 

On the contrary, something I found particularly interesting about Sadra is that unlike Descartes and many other philosophers, his argument comes from the stand point that he is not working a priori and in fact rejects these kinds of arguments on the basis that existence precedes essence. And also that the existence of human beings is more fundamental than their essence. So, to challenge these ideas Sadra put forward an argument called the Argument of the Righteous. The argument attempts to prove the existence of God through the reality of existence. In addition to this the argument proves that a thing is demonstrated through itself, which perhaps reinforces the idea of a necessary God. 

Now, to the argument itself... He starts off by stating that there is a being. Then follows on by saying that this being is a perfection beyond all perfection, and that God is perfect and perfection in existence. After this is actually what caught my eye in the first place with his argument as he goes on to say existence is a singular and simple reality. I found this to be a very unusual way of describing it, as I have not yet come across anyone else who describes it as such. In addition to this he continues to state that singular reality is graded in intensity in a scale of perfection. And finally, that scale must have a limit point, a point of greatest intensity and of greatest existence... And that is when I saw it. The issue with this argument, just like many others. Because unfortunately that was not the final point, and as you guessed, he finished by saying "Therefore God exists".

In doing this, he like many others, jumps from God having existence, to being a God that exists. So by having an unfortunate important incoherence it does open up this argument for criticism. But despite this I found his argument to be an interesting alternative to Descartes' as I like the idea of a scale of perfection, and the way in which everything is presented as singular and together in one reality. Furthermore it also reminded me of Irenaeus' point about our potential to reach perfection throughout our lives, and it gave me an idea that perhaps we slide along Sadra's scale until we reach our own intended desired perfection.