In developing his concept of existence Mullā Ṣadrā works against the backdrop of Shihāb al-Dīn Yahyā Suhrawardī's essentialist metaphysics on the one hand, and Avicenna's rather incomplete and occasionally imprecise remarks on being on the other. Suhrawardī had defended essence (māhiyya) as the sole reality and as the proper subject matter of metaphysics. For him, existence (wujūd) is a common term and a secondary intelligible, shared by a multitude of objects without corresponding to any particular being. Suhrawardī proposed two objections against the primacy of existence. First, if existence is to be the real attribute of an essence in the extramental world, then this essence will have to have an existence of its own before receiving existence as an attribute. In this case existence will be the attribute of something that...