 This formulation draws heavily upon Suhrawardi’s earlier exposition of presential knowledge (e.g. Suhrawardi 1998: 79–81) but with the distinction that Mulla Sadra explicitly refers to reality in terms of existence whereas for Suhrawardi existence is an empty concept. Knowledge by presence extends the identity thesis posited in the ancient tradition to entities beyond the divine and the pure intellects and in effect reverses the process of making sense of human knowledge that one finds in knowledge by representation. That latter projects this model of human knowledge onto the divine and hence cannot fathom how God might know particulars in their particularity. Whereas knowledge by presence extends the nature of divine knowledge to the human and resolves the problem of God’s knowledge of particulars by insisting upon the unitive nature of that knowledge.