Concept tag
#creation
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Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs, and perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from the sun: necessarily, eternally,…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning
The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam6 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Why did Maimonides say he could have read Genesis figuratively, if eternity had been proved?
I guide visitors around the old Jewish quarter in Córdoba, where there is a statue of Maimonides in a small square. Visitors photograph it and ask me what he believed. Usually I say something about reason and faith and move on. A…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto5 replies