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Could the constants have been different? Spinoza says no; the Ashʿarites say God could change them tomorrow
I model oil reservoirs. Every model has parameters, and every morning I change some of them to see what would have happened. So the question "could the physical constants have been different?" feels very concrete to me, and I've found two answers…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-BassamAnswer first (no replies yet) -
What did Ibn Sina mean by the “internal senses”?
In my history of psychology course, Ibn Sina was mentioned for his theory of "internal senses", and the lecturer said it was an early version of cognitive psychology. I'd love a clear explanation of what the internal senses were and how they…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
How does Ibn Sina’s proof of the Necessary Existent avoid the infinite regress problem?
I understand the basic structure: things that exist are either necessary in themselves or possible (contingent) in themselves. Contingent things need a cause. So there must be a necessary being. But why can't there be an infinite chain of contingent beings, each…
Started by Omar Ragab2 replies -
I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
I am very afraid of spiders. Last week one sat on my monitor for an hour. I knew it was a harmless house spider. I could have recited the facts about its venom. I still couldn't touch the keyboard. A friend who…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Essence and existence: why Ibn Sina’s distinction mattered to Aquinas
In the metaphysics of the Shifa', Ibn Sina distinguishes what a thing is, its essence or quiddity (mahiyya), from the fact that it is, its existence (wujud). You can understand what a triangle or a phoenix is without knowing whether any exists.…
Started by Layla Sfeir4 replies -
The floating man is not the cogito: Ibn Sina and Descartes compared
Ibn Sina's "floating man" appears in the De Anima of the Shifa' and again in the Isharat. Imagine a person created all at once, fully mature, suspended in the air, eyes covered, limbs apart so they don't touch, with no sensation at…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
Reading group: Porphyry’s Isagoge and the three questions he refused to answer
Porphyry wrote the Isagoge, a short "Introduction" to Aristotle's Categories, in the late third century. In the opening lines he raises three questions about genera and species, and then declines to answer them because they need a deeper inquiry: Do they subsist,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
Udayana, Ibn Sina and Leibniz: three arguments for a first cause that do not need a beginning
People often assume that arguments for a first cause depend on the universe having a beginning. I want to compare three that don't, from three traditions. Udayana (Nyāya, eleventh century). In the Nyāyakusumāñjali he gives a series of inferences for Īśvara, starting…
Started by Meera Kulkarni6 replies -
Did the Latin scholastics really receive Aristotle through Arabic?
Almost every group I walk around Córdoba wants the same simple story: the Arabs preserved Greek learning during Europe's dark ages and then handed it back, and that is how Europe got Aristotle. I tell it with less and less confidence. I…
Started by Rafael Lucena Prieto4 replies -
Gundissalinus didn’t read Arabic: philosophy translated through spoken Castilian
The mechanics of translation are my daily bread, so I can't stop thinking about a detail I've just learned about the twelfth-century Toledo translations. Dominicus Gundissalinus, the archdeacon who put Ibn Sina's work on the soul and parts of his Healing into…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Can someone explain Ibn Sina’s propositions that are necessary ‘as long as’?
I started reading the history of logic because the Ash'ari material I love keeps assuming you know Ibn Sina. A survey chapter on Arabic logic lost me at one point, and I'd like a patient explanation. It says Ibn Sina split a…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam5 replies -
If I know myself “by presence”, why am I so bad at knowing my own motives? Suhrawardi meets psychology
In my psychology courses, self-knowledge is treated as a model the brain builds of itself, and a fairly unreliable one. People misreport their own motives all the time. So I was surprised to find, in a book about Persian philosophy, the claim…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Does a diagnosis name a real condition, or a useful bundle of symptoms?
I work as an interpreter at a hospital in Addis Ababa. Some diagnoses I translate every day feel like discoveries: a particular infection, caused by a particular organism, with a test that finds it. Others feel more like agreements. "Metabolic syndrome" is…
Started by Tsion Bekele5 replies -
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 -
The Cartesian circle: can clear and distinct perception vouch for itself?
Every year I read Descartes' Meditations with students who arrive expecting an enemy of faith and leave rather fond of him. And every year, around the Third Meditation, a sharp student raises the objection that Antoine Arnauld put to Descartes in 1641.…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies -
The contingency argument fails because a collection of contingent things needs no explanation of its own
The argument from contingency is one of the most elegant in philosophy, and because it comes apart cleanly into steps, I think I can show exactly where it breaks. Roughly: everything is either necessary or contingent; contingent things depend on something else;…
Started by Derek Hollis6 replies -
Ibn Sina begins the Canon by defining medicine. What does that definition assume about health?
I recently reread the opening of Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for a reading group at the hospital, and I was struck by how much philosophy is packed into the first sentence. Paraphrasing: medicine is the knowledge of the states of the…
Started by Omar Ragab5 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 -
Reading group: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma on the firmest principle
Several recent threads keep coming back to Aristotle's defence of the principle of non-contradiction, usually second-hand. Let's read it. It's short and much stranger than its reputation. Text: Metaphysics Book Gamma (IV), chapters 3 to 7. Ross's translation is freely available; Christopher…
Started by Nikos Theodoridis5 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Even if the proof works, whose God has it reached? The gap from “first cause” to God
I teach adults in Jerusalem who often arrive believing that philosophy and religion are enemies. One thing I show them early is that even a successful argument for a first cause or a necessary being leaves a large question open: why call…
Started by Miriam Adler5 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: what if things change in their very substance?
I am an architect in Shiraz, and Mulla Sadra, who was born here, keeps pulling me back to questions about being. This one has been on my mind since I started reading about persistence. In Aristotle's framework, which Ibn Sina refined, a…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Analogy, negation, or “without asking how”: how can finite words say anything true of God?
Every year one of my students asks the question that underlies everything else: when we say "God is good" or "God knows", what do the words mean? If they mean what they mean of us, God becomes a large human being. If…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies -
Brute facts are not a cop-out: some things just are, and the universe may be one of them
When I talk with believers in the villages where our association works, the conversation often reaches this point: "But who made the universe? Everything has a cause." When I say the universe may simply exist, with no further explanation, I'm told I…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
When rhetoric and poetry were counted as logic: the Arabic Organon and al-Jāḥiẓ on eloquence
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street. People come in for poetry far more often than for logic, and they are surprised when I tell them that for centuries the two were shelved together. In the Arabic tradition, following late-antique practice,…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Reading group: al-Bīrūnī’s India, the preface and the chapter on why understanding is hard
Around 1030 the scholar al-Bīrūnī completed a book usually known in English as India (or Alberuni's India). He had learned Sanskrit, read Indian works with pandits, and set out to describe Indian religion, philosophy and science as their adherents understood them. It…
Started by Layla Sfeir5 replies -
What does Ibn Sina mean by a thing that is “possible in itself, necessary through another”?
I am an architect, not a trained philosopher, so forgive me if this is basic. In reading about Ibn Sina I keep meeting a three-way division: the Necessary Existent in itself, things possible in themselves, and things that are possible in themselves…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Al-Ghazālī was right: much of what philosophers call demonstration is only probable reasoning
I teach religious studies at a school in Bradford, and al-Ghazālī has been my companion for twenty years. I want to defend a claim about him that I think is often misunderstood. People remember al-Ghazālī as the man who attacked philosophy. But…
Started by Bilal Rashid6 replies -
Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina
My students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle. My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without Ibn Sina. The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies