Fedor Benevich | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)
Books by Fedor Benevich
This is the first in a series of sourcebooks charting the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d.1037... more This is the first in a series of sourcebooks charting the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d.1037) in the Islamic East (from Syria to central Asia) in the 12th-13th centuries CE. Avicenna was the dominant philosophical authority in this period, who provoked generations of thinkers to subtle critique, defense, and development of his ideas. The series will translate and analyze hundreds of passages from works by such figures as al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and many more. This volume focuses especially on issues in metaphysics, dealing with topics like the essence-existence distinction, the problem of universals, free will and determinism, Platonic Forms, good and evil, proofs of God’s existence, and the relationship between philosophy and theology.
Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies
In Essentialität und Notwendigkeit: Avicenna und die Aristotelische Tradition Fedor Benevich pres... more In Essentialität und Notwendigkeit: Avicenna und die Aristotelische Tradition Fedor Benevich presents the key doctrine of Avicenna’s (d. 1037) metaphysics and epistemology: his theory of essence and the scientific determination of essential and necessary attributes. The book studies central notions of Avicenna’s philosophy such as essentiality, necessity, universality, immediacy, primacy, and specificity. It also provides an unprecedented account of how Avicenna’s views on these issues changed throughout his career, in arguing for his revolutionary “conceptual essentialism”. Avicenna’s position partially follows the Aristotelian tradition yet also departs from it, especially when Avicenna argues against the Baghdad Peripatetic School.
Papers by Fedor Benevich
History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis, 2024
Many social epistemologists suggest that testimonies may be considered valid source of knowledge,... more Many social epistemologists suggest that testimonies may be considered valid source of knowledge, no less than, for instance, direct observation. In this article, I will focus on the accounts of testimonial knowledge in classical kalām and Islamic law. I will present the arguments for why Islamic philosophers and jurists believe that testimonies convey knowledge. I will address the main disagreement in Islamic philosophy
regarding the nature of testimonial knowledge, whether we can apply an internalist model of epistemic justification to testimonial knowledge or not. I will suggest that the best way to understand the traditional view on testimonial knowledge in Islamic philosophy and law is as “weak testimonial reliabilism”: testimonial knowledge typically results from the occurrence of certain external conditions (of which we might be unaware), even though they hold only insofar as our experience of this world tells us
so, and may not hold in another possible world.
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2024
In this article, I will argue that various scholars of kalām unanimously agree that sense-percept... more In this article, I will argue that various scholars of kalām unanimously agree that sense-perception is something beyond the physical processes in the sense organs. There may be something happening in our eyes when we see a red apple, but seeing a red apple is not tantamount to it. We will see that some scholars of kalām argue that sense-perception is akin to being aware or conscious of the object of perception, and, hence, distinct from the physical process in the sense organs. One group will go so far as to accept that sense-perception is not even dependent on any physical processes in the body. Another group will accept that sense-perception presupposes that various physical conditions obtain, yet still regard sense-perception as something distinct from the occurrence of those conditions. I am suggesting that these nonreductive theories of sense-perception are the reason why Arabic-Islamic philosophers, starting from the eleventh century CE, consistently reject the Aristotelian-Avicennian theory of senseperception.
Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 2024
How can I guarantee that I am the same person that I was thirty years ago ? A common view among t... more How can I guarantee that I am the same person that I was thirty years ago ? A common view among the historians of philosophy is that medieval philosophy offered two kinds of replies to this question, either Aristotelian hylomorphism or Platonic substance dualism. In this paper, I am analysing a third medieval alternative, present in the philosophy of the Basran Muʿtazilite kalām, a completely physicalist theory of personal identity. According to this school of thought, the person is what can be called a ‘substantial compound’ that emerges from the combination of core physical elements. This compound is necessarily identical with the person in question (I call this theory ‘bundle essentialism’) and, hence, is responsible for the preservation of personal identity.
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, 2023
There are two main methods in philosophy of mind, the first-person view and the third-person view... more There are two main methods in philosophy of mind, the first-person view and the third-person view. The third-person view draws conclusions about human nature and the nature of the mind and the mental solely based on the thirdperson observation of actions, attributes, and behaviours ascribed to humans. The first-person view or introspection suggests turning to our own private experiences of ourselves and to our phenomenal mental states. In this paper, I argue that there is an important transformation in Arabic-Islamic philosophy of mind between the end of the eleventh and the end of the twelfth centuries CE. The traditional physicalist understanding of human beings as corporeal structures (binya) or composites (ǧumla), which clearly dominated Muslim kalām by the eleventh century, meets Avicennian dualism. I will argue that before this meeting happened, the physicalism of kalām was almost exclusively based on the third-person methodology. But the encounter with Avicennian dualism changes the situation. Avicennian dualism is largely based on introspection. As a result of the encounter between Avicenna and kalām, a new method comes about. It combines the elements of the third-person view and introspection, with introspection gradually occupying a dominant position in post-Avicennian philosophy of mind.
Oriens, 2022
It is commonly accepted that the definition of knowledge is not among the main epistemological co... more It is commonly accepted that the definition of knowledge is not among the main epistemological concerns of the period between Plato and Edmund Gettier. Kalām is an exception to the rule. Kalām scholars provide a detailed philosophical analysis of the difference between knowledge and mere true belief. In this article, I am focusing on the analysis of knowledge in one tradition of kalām, Bahšamite Muʿtazilism. I will argue that knowledge is a factive mental state for the Bahšamites. I will also show that the Bahšamite definition of knowledge is a combination of internalism and externalism with respect to justification.
Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, 2021
The aim of this paper is to present an account of how Christian philosophy develops in its Islami... more The aim of this paper is to present an account of how Christian philosophy develops in its Islamic philosophical and theological context. I will focus on the philosophical thought of Gregory Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286). I will show that Bar Hebraeus attempts to harmonize the Neoplatonic Avicennian ontological theory of good and evil with the ethical theories of his contemporary Islamic philosophical theology (primarily, Aš’arism) as well as materials taken from Christian sources. From Avicenna, Bar Hebraeus takes the idea the evil is privation. From the Aš’arites, Bar Hebraeus inherits moral consequentialism and the divine command theory.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2022
Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and... more Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and accidental properties. In this paper, I will address Avicennian essentialism, that is, essentialism as we find it in Avicenna’s own writings and the writings of the immediate post-Avicennian philosophical tradition of the Islamic world. I will consider a number of primary sources, summarize the state of recent scholarship regarding Avicennian metaphysics of attributes, and I will draw comparisons between Avicennian essentialism and modern essentialism. As a result, I will show that Avicennians endorse two different types of essentialism: conceptualist essentialism and de re essentialism. Avicennian conceptualist essentialism only applies to kinds, while Avicennian de re essentialism only applies to particular individuals.
A. Lammer and M. Jas (eds.) Received Opinions: Doxography in Antiquity and the Islamic World, 2022
The Arabic scholarly tradition produced several doxographies and gnomologies of Ancient Greek tho... more The Arabic scholarly tradition produced several doxographies and gnomologies of Ancient Greek thought in Arabic language. In this paper, I will focus on al-Šahrastānī's (d. 548/1153), al-Milal wa-lniḥal (Religions and Sects). Despite the popularity of the work and the scholarly attention it attracted, the final evaluation of Šahrastānī's doxography in terms of its method and sources still remains a desideratum. I will avoid the generalizations inherent in the previous characterizations of the work. Instead, I will focus on the chapter on Pythagoras, carefully reading it sentence by sentence, attentively considering the philosophical import of each passage alongside its potential sources as well as the traces of (and reasons for) Šahrastānī's reworking them. I will argue that Šahrastānī provides a systematic reconstruction of Pythagorean philosophy on the basis of the quotations and paraphrases from previous doxographies and of what he considers as contemporary Pythagoreanism (i.e. Ismāʿīlīsm). Religions and Sects will reveal itself both as a source for the Greek philosophical tradition and as a source of information on the Arabic philosophical tradition as such.
in Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 2020
Avicenna designed his notion of mental existence (wuǧūd ḏihnī) in order to account for an alterna... more Avicenna designed his notion of mental existence (wuǧūd ḏihnī) in order to account for an alternative mode of being that things have when they do not exist in the world. Should we interpret Avicenna’s mental existence as some kind of quasi-existence that falls outside of the real categorial being of things? In this paper, I will argue that one of the most influential figures in post-Avicennian Arabic philosophy, Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), develops Avicenna’s mental existence in a different direction. According to Suhrawardī, what is in our mind are images or representations of things and not things as such. Therefore, what is different about mental objects is not how they are in the mind (that would be a special, intentional, mode of being) but what they are. Unlike Avicenna, Suhrawardī claims that the essences of mental objects are different from their extramental counterparts. I will discuss which elements of Suhrawardī’s theory go back to Avicenna himself and which might originate from ʿUmār Ḫayyām (d. 1123-24) and Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (d. 1164/64). We will see that all four authors share the common attitude that mental beings should not be excluded from the ‘usual’ kind of existence and the real world, since mental forms are properties of our minds.
Theoria, 2020
The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti-sceptic element of the Aristotelian-Avi... more The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti-sceptic element of the Aristotelian-Avicennian epistemology. In this theory, when we distinguish the genus and the specific differentia of a given essence we thereby acquire a scientific understanding of it. The aim of this article is to analyse systematically the sceptical reasons, arguments and conclusions against real definitions of three major authorities of twelfth-century Arabic philosophy: Faḫr al-Dīn al-Razī, Šihab al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī and Abu l-Barak at al-Baġdadī. I focus on showing how their refutation of our capacity to provide essential definitions of things is rooted in their semantic theory: we only know things under certain descriptions which are identical to the meanings of the words that we use to refer to them, yet these descriptions do not capture the essences of things in themselves. The best result one can achieve with Aristotelian-Avicennian scientific definitions is a "nominal definition". With this, Razī, Suhrawardī and Abu l-Barakat will put some serious epistemic limitations on our capacity to attain scientific knowledge of things, at least as Aristotle and Avicenna would have it.
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2020
What are the proper objects of perception? Two famous responses to this question hold that they a... more What are the proper objects of perception? Two famous responses to this question hold that they are either the images of extramental objects, that is, the way in which they appear to us (representationalism), or they are the objects themselves (direct realism). In this paper, I present an analysis of this issue by Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (d. 1164/65), a post-Avicennian scholar whose impact on the history of Islamic philosophy has been largely neglected. Abū l-Barakāt argued against the traditional Aristotelian-Avicennian episte-mological dualism, which distinguishes between the sense-perception of material particulars and the conception of immaterial universals in terms of the perceiver and/or the structure of perception. In Abū l-Barakāt's own theory, all epistemic acts have the unified structure of direct relation between one and the same perceiver (immaterial soul) and the objects themselves-both material and immaterial. His main thesis is that having corporeal organs is not necessary for sense-perception. In the final section of the paper, I show that Abū l-Barakāt's critique of the Aristotelian-Avicennian tradition was received as a breakthrough in epistemology. It may have also determined the epistemologi-cal theories of two of the most important post-Avicennian Islamic philosophers: Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). Résumé. Quels sont les objets de la perception ? Deux réponses célèbres à cette question soutiennent que ce sont soit les images des objets extramen-taux, c'est-à-dire la façon dont ils nous apparaissent (représentationalisme), soit les objets eux-mêmes (réalisme direct). Dans cet article, je présente une analyse de cette question par Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (m. 1164/65), un sa-vant post-avicennien dont l'impact sur l'histoire de la philosophie islamique a été largement négligé. Abū l-Barakāt s'est opposé au dualisme épistémologique traditionnel aristotélicien-avicennien, qui établit une distinction entre la perception sensorielle des particuliers matériels et la conception des universaux immatériels, notamment en ce qui concerne le percevant et/ou la structure de la perception. Selon la théorie d'Abū l-Barakāt, tous les actes épistémiques ont la structure unifiée d'une relation directe entre un même percevant (l'âme im-matérielle) et les objets eux-mêmes-matériels et immatériels. Sa thèse princi-pale consiste à dire qu'avoir des organes corporels n'est pas nécessaire pour la perception sensorielle. Dans la dernière section de cet article, je montre que la critique d'Abū l-Barakāt de la tradition aristotélicienne-avicennienne fut consi-dérée comme une innovation révolutionnaire en épistémologie. Cela peut avoir https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.
Philosophical Theology in Islam, 2020
Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook, 2019
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2019
Scholarship on medieval philosophy has rightfully acknowledged the historical and systematical me... more Scholarship on medieval philosophy has rightfully acknowledged the historical and systematical merit of Avicenna’s (d. 1037) thought in all divisions of philosophy. Avicenna however did not provide a systematic theory of individuation: matter, existence, ‘individual intentions’, and other candidates equally appear in his works as candidates for the principle of individuation. This systematic gap was to be filled in post-Avicennian Islamic philosophy. In this paper, I will focus on two figures: Avicenna’s disciple Bahmanyār b. Marzbān (d. 1066) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of what has come to be called Islamic Illuminationism. We will see that Bahmanyār, inspired by Avicenna’s Marginal Notes, connects individuation with matter, motion, time, and position. Suhrawardī in his turn will present a revolutionary attempt to break with the Aristotelian-Avicennian tradition of explaining individuation through spatiotemporally designated matter. His position, as I will show, comes close to what we nowadays call primitive individuation.
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, 2019
The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention o... more The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention of Islamic scholars: Does the perishability of worldly individuals entail problems about the perishability of God's corresponding knowledge? Can one eternally know that Zayd will arrive tomorrow to the city? In this paper, I systemically and historically analyze (1) how post-Avicennian philosophers distinguished between two pre-Avicennian kalām views on whether such knowledge is eternal or perishable; (2) how they regarded Avicenna's famous theory that God knows particulars qua universals as connected to the pre-Avicennian kalām debate; (3) and how the authors such as Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) attempted to synthesize Avicenna and kalām epis-temology in their account of God's knowledge as relation or as presence.
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019
When one studies the history of universals in late antiquity, and in the Arabic and Latin middle... more When one studies the history of universals in late antiquity, and in the Arabic and Latin middle ages, the key notion is ‘nature.’ Natures are notions like ‘redness qua redness,’ which are neither universal nor particular in themselves, but are immanent either in universals, which exist only in the mind, or in extramental particulars. All recent studies agree that Alexander of Aphrodisias probably developed the idea of ‘nature.’ Then it travelled either directly or via the Bagdad Peripatetic Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī to Avicenna. From Avicenna, it was transmitted to thinkers of Latin Scholasticism, for instance, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. In this paper, I will show that this historical reconstruction of the inheritance of the notion of ‘nature’ neglects an important shift in the middle of the historical chain: natures are ontologically prior to their instances in Alexander and Ibn ʿAdī, but posterior in Avicenna. This crucial difference will be shown on the basis of the parallel between (a) natures and universals, and (b) the material and generic aspects of common notions. We will see that Avicenna’s reason for disagreeing with the previous tradition on this parallel was a concern regarding the compatibility of the priority of natures with the principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
Islamic Philosophy from the 12th to the 14th Century, 2018
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2018
No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Av... more No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in the Healing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence.
This is the first in a series of sourcebooks charting the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d.1037... more This is the first in a series of sourcebooks charting the reception of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d.1037) in the Islamic East (from Syria to central Asia) in the 12th-13th centuries CE. Avicenna was the dominant philosophical authority in this period, who provoked generations of thinkers to subtle critique, defense, and development of his ideas. The series will translate and analyze hundreds of passages from works by such figures as al-Ghazālī, al-Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and many more. This volume focuses especially on issues in metaphysics, dealing with topics like the essence-existence distinction, the problem of universals, free will and determinism, Platonic Forms, good and evil, proofs of God’s existence, and the relationship between philosophy and theology.
Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies
In Essentialität und Notwendigkeit: Avicenna und die Aristotelische Tradition Fedor Benevich pres... more In Essentialität und Notwendigkeit: Avicenna und die Aristotelische Tradition Fedor Benevich presents the key doctrine of Avicenna’s (d. 1037) metaphysics and epistemology: his theory of essence and the scientific determination of essential and necessary attributes. The book studies central notions of Avicenna’s philosophy such as essentiality, necessity, universality, immediacy, primacy, and specificity. It also provides an unprecedented account of how Avicenna’s views on these issues changed throughout his career, in arguing for his revolutionary “conceptual essentialism”. Avicenna’s position partially follows the Aristotelian tradition yet also departs from it, especially when Avicenna argues against the Baghdad Peripatetic School.
History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis, 2024
Many social epistemologists suggest that testimonies may be considered valid source of knowledge,... more Many social epistemologists suggest that testimonies may be considered valid source of knowledge, no less than, for instance, direct observation. In this article, I will focus on the accounts of testimonial knowledge in classical kalām and Islamic law. I will present the arguments for why Islamic philosophers and jurists believe that testimonies convey knowledge. I will address the main disagreement in Islamic philosophy
regarding the nature of testimonial knowledge, whether we can apply an internalist model of epistemic justification to testimonial knowledge or not. I will suggest that the best way to understand the traditional view on testimonial knowledge in Islamic philosophy and law is as “weak testimonial reliabilism”: testimonial knowledge typically results from the occurrence of certain external conditions (of which we might be unaware), even though they hold only insofar as our experience of this world tells us
so, and may not hold in another possible world.
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2024
In this article, I will argue that various scholars of kalām unanimously agree that sense-percept... more In this article, I will argue that various scholars of kalām unanimously agree that sense-perception is something beyond the physical processes in the sense organs. There may be something happening in our eyes when we see a red apple, but seeing a red apple is not tantamount to it. We will see that some scholars of kalām argue that sense-perception is akin to being aware or conscious of the object of perception, and, hence, distinct from the physical process in the sense organs. One group will go so far as to accept that sense-perception is not even dependent on any physical processes in the body. Another group will accept that sense-perception presupposes that various physical conditions obtain, yet still regard sense-perception as something distinct from the occurrence of those conditions. I am suggesting that these nonreductive theories of sense-perception are the reason why Arabic-Islamic philosophers, starting from the eleventh century CE, consistently reject the Aristotelian-Avicennian theory of senseperception.
Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 2024
How can I guarantee that I am the same person that I was thirty years ago ? A common view among t... more How can I guarantee that I am the same person that I was thirty years ago ? A common view among the historians of philosophy is that medieval philosophy offered two kinds of replies to this question, either Aristotelian hylomorphism or Platonic substance dualism. In this paper, I am analysing a third medieval alternative, present in the philosophy of the Basran Muʿtazilite kalām, a completely physicalist theory of personal identity. According to this school of thought, the person is what can be called a ‘substantial compound’ that emerges from the combination of core physical elements. This compound is necessarily identical with the person in question (I call this theory ‘bundle essentialism’) and, hence, is responsible for the preservation of personal identity.
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales, 2023
There are two main methods in philosophy of mind, the first-person view and the third-person view... more There are two main methods in philosophy of mind, the first-person view and the third-person view. The third-person view draws conclusions about human nature and the nature of the mind and the mental solely based on the thirdperson observation of actions, attributes, and behaviours ascribed to humans. The first-person view or introspection suggests turning to our own private experiences of ourselves and to our phenomenal mental states. In this paper, I argue that there is an important transformation in Arabic-Islamic philosophy of mind between the end of the eleventh and the end of the twelfth centuries CE. The traditional physicalist understanding of human beings as corporeal structures (binya) or composites (ǧumla), which clearly dominated Muslim kalām by the eleventh century, meets Avicennian dualism. I will argue that before this meeting happened, the physicalism of kalām was almost exclusively based on the third-person methodology. But the encounter with Avicennian dualism changes the situation. Avicennian dualism is largely based on introspection. As a result of the encounter between Avicenna and kalām, a new method comes about. It combines the elements of the third-person view and introspection, with introspection gradually occupying a dominant position in post-Avicennian philosophy of mind.
Oriens, 2022
It is commonly accepted that the definition of knowledge is not among the main epistemological co... more It is commonly accepted that the definition of knowledge is not among the main epistemological concerns of the period between Plato and Edmund Gettier. Kalām is an exception to the rule. Kalām scholars provide a detailed philosophical analysis of the difference between knowledge and mere true belief. In this article, I am focusing on the analysis of knowledge in one tradition of kalām, Bahšamite Muʿtazilism. I will argue that knowledge is a factive mental state for the Bahšamites. I will also show that the Bahšamite definition of knowledge is a combination of internalism and externalism with respect to justification.
Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, 2021
The aim of this paper is to present an account of how Christian philosophy develops in its Islami... more The aim of this paper is to present an account of how Christian philosophy develops in its Islamic philosophical and theological context. I will focus on the philosophical thought of Gregory Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286). I will show that Bar Hebraeus attempts to harmonize the Neoplatonic Avicennian ontological theory of good and evil with the ethical theories of his contemporary Islamic philosophical theology (primarily, Aš’arism) as well as materials taken from Christian sources. From Avicenna, Bar Hebraeus takes the idea the evil is privation. From the Aš’arites, Bar Hebraeus inherits moral consequentialism and the divine command theory.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2022
Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and... more Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and accidental properties. In this paper, I will address Avicennian essentialism, that is, essentialism as we find it in Avicenna’s own writings and the writings of the immediate post-Avicennian philosophical tradition of the Islamic world. I will consider a number of primary sources, summarize the state of recent scholarship regarding Avicennian metaphysics of attributes, and I will draw comparisons between Avicennian essentialism and modern essentialism. As a result, I will show that Avicennians endorse two different types of essentialism: conceptualist essentialism and de re essentialism. Avicennian conceptualist essentialism only applies to kinds, while Avicennian de re essentialism only applies to particular individuals.
A. Lammer and M. Jas (eds.) Received Opinions: Doxography in Antiquity and the Islamic World, 2022
The Arabic scholarly tradition produced several doxographies and gnomologies of Ancient Greek tho... more The Arabic scholarly tradition produced several doxographies and gnomologies of Ancient Greek thought in Arabic language. In this paper, I will focus on al-Šahrastānī's (d. 548/1153), al-Milal wa-lniḥal (Religions and Sects). Despite the popularity of the work and the scholarly attention it attracted, the final evaluation of Šahrastānī's doxography in terms of its method and sources still remains a desideratum. I will avoid the generalizations inherent in the previous characterizations of the work. Instead, I will focus on the chapter on Pythagoras, carefully reading it sentence by sentence, attentively considering the philosophical import of each passage alongside its potential sources as well as the traces of (and reasons for) Šahrastānī's reworking them. I will argue that Šahrastānī provides a systematic reconstruction of Pythagorean philosophy on the basis of the quotations and paraphrases from previous doxographies and of what he considers as contemporary Pythagoreanism (i.e. Ismāʿīlīsm). Religions and Sects will reveal itself both as a source for the Greek philosophical tradition and as a source of information on the Arabic philosophical tradition as such.
in Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 2020
Avicenna designed his notion of mental existence (wuǧūd ḏihnī) in order to account for an alterna... more Avicenna designed his notion of mental existence (wuǧūd ḏihnī) in order to account for an alternative mode of being that things have when they do not exist in the world. Should we interpret Avicenna’s mental existence as some kind of quasi-existence that falls outside of the real categorial being of things? In this paper, I will argue that one of the most influential figures in post-Avicennian Arabic philosophy, Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), develops Avicenna’s mental existence in a different direction. According to Suhrawardī, what is in our mind are images or representations of things and not things as such. Therefore, what is different about mental objects is not how they are in the mind (that would be a special, intentional, mode of being) but what they are. Unlike Avicenna, Suhrawardī claims that the essences of mental objects are different from their extramental counterparts. I will discuss which elements of Suhrawardī’s theory go back to Avicenna himself and which might originate from ʿUmār Ḫayyām (d. 1123-24) and Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (d. 1164/64). We will see that all four authors share the common attitude that mental beings should not be excluded from the ‘usual’ kind of existence and the real world, since mental forms are properties of our minds.
Theoria, 2020
The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti-sceptic element of the Aristotelian-Avi... more The theory of essential definitions is a fundamental anti-sceptic element of the Aristotelian-Avicennian epistemology. In this theory, when we distinguish the genus and the specific differentia of a given essence we thereby acquire a scientific understanding of it. The aim of this article is to analyse systematically the sceptical reasons, arguments and conclusions against real definitions of three major authorities of twelfth-century Arabic philosophy: Faḫr al-Dīn al-Razī, Šihab al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī and Abu l-Barak at al-Baġdadī. I focus on showing how their refutation of our capacity to provide essential definitions of things is rooted in their semantic theory: we only know things under certain descriptions which are identical to the meanings of the words that we use to refer to them, yet these descriptions do not capture the essences of things in themselves. The best result one can achieve with Aristotelian-Avicennian scientific definitions is a "nominal definition". With this, Razī, Suhrawardī and Abu l-Barakat will put some serious epistemic limitations on our capacity to attain scientific knowledge of things, at least as Aristotle and Avicenna would have it.
Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2020
What are the proper objects of perception? Two famous responses to this question hold that they a... more What are the proper objects of perception? Two famous responses to this question hold that they are either the images of extramental objects, that is, the way in which they appear to us (representationalism), or they are the objects themselves (direct realism). In this paper, I present an analysis of this issue by Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (d. 1164/65), a post-Avicennian scholar whose impact on the history of Islamic philosophy has been largely neglected. Abū l-Barakāt argued against the traditional Aristotelian-Avicennian episte-mological dualism, which distinguishes between the sense-perception of material particulars and the conception of immaterial universals in terms of the perceiver and/or the structure of perception. In Abū l-Barakāt's own theory, all epistemic acts have the unified structure of direct relation between one and the same perceiver (immaterial soul) and the objects themselves-both material and immaterial. His main thesis is that having corporeal organs is not necessary for sense-perception. In the final section of the paper, I show that Abū l-Barakāt's critique of the Aristotelian-Avicennian tradition was received as a breakthrough in epistemology. It may have also determined the epistemologi-cal theories of two of the most important post-Avicennian Islamic philosophers: Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). Résumé. Quels sont les objets de la perception ? Deux réponses célèbres à cette question soutiennent que ce sont soit les images des objets extramen-taux, c'est-à-dire la façon dont ils nous apparaissent (représentationalisme), soit les objets eux-mêmes (réalisme direct). Dans cet article, je présente une analyse de cette question par Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī (m. 1164/65), un sa-vant post-avicennien dont l'impact sur l'histoire de la philosophie islamique a été largement négligé. Abū l-Barakāt s'est opposé au dualisme épistémologique traditionnel aristotélicien-avicennien, qui établit une distinction entre la perception sensorielle des particuliers matériels et la conception des universaux immatériels, notamment en ce qui concerne le percevant et/ou la structure de la perception. Selon la théorie d'Abū l-Barakāt, tous les actes épistémiques ont la structure unifiée d'une relation directe entre un même percevant (l'âme im-matérielle) et les objets eux-mêmes-matériels et immatériels. Sa thèse princi-pale consiste à dire qu'avoir des organes corporels n'est pas nécessaire pour la perception sensorielle. Dans la dernière section de cet article, je montre que la critique d'Abū l-Barakāt de la tradition aristotélicienne-avicennienne fut consi-dérée comme une innovation révolutionnaire en épistémologie. Cela peut avoir https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.
Philosophical Theology in Islam, 2020
Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook, 2019
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2019
Scholarship on medieval philosophy has rightfully acknowledged the historical and systematical me... more Scholarship on medieval philosophy has rightfully acknowledged the historical and systematical merit of Avicenna’s (d. 1037) thought in all divisions of philosophy. Avicenna however did not provide a systematic theory of individuation: matter, existence, ‘individual intentions’, and other candidates equally appear in his works as candidates for the principle of individuation. This systematic gap was to be filled in post-Avicennian Islamic philosophy. In this paper, I will focus on two figures: Avicenna’s disciple Bahmanyār b. Marzbān (d. 1066) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), the founder of what has come to be called Islamic Illuminationism. We will see that Bahmanyār, inspired by Avicenna’s Marginal Notes, connects individuation with matter, motion, time, and position. Suhrawardī in his turn will present a revolutionary attempt to break with the Aristotelian-Avicennian tradition of explaining individuation through spatiotemporally designated matter. His position, as I will show, comes close to what we nowadays call primitive individuation.
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales, 2019
The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention o... more The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention of Islamic scholars: Does the perishability of worldly individuals entail problems about the perishability of God's corresponding knowledge? Can one eternally know that Zayd will arrive tomorrow to the city? In this paper, I systemically and historically analyze (1) how post-Avicennian philosophers distinguished between two pre-Avicennian kalām views on whether such knowledge is eternal or perishable; (2) how they regarded Avicenna's famous theory that God knows particulars qua universals as connected to the pre-Avicennian kalām debate; (3) and how the authors such as Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) attempted to synthesize Avicenna and kalām epis-temology in their account of God's knowledge as relation or as presence.
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019
When one studies the history of universals in late antiquity, and in the Arabic and Latin middle... more When one studies the history of universals in late antiquity, and in the Arabic and Latin middle ages, the key notion is ‘nature.’ Natures are notions like ‘redness qua redness,’ which are neither universal nor particular in themselves, but are immanent either in universals, which exist only in the mind, or in extramental particulars. All recent studies agree that Alexander of Aphrodisias probably developed the idea of ‘nature.’ Then it travelled either directly or via the Bagdad Peripatetic Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī to Avicenna. From Avicenna, it was transmitted to thinkers of Latin Scholasticism, for instance, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. In this paper, I will show that this historical reconstruction of the inheritance of the notion of ‘nature’ neglects an important shift in the middle of the historical chain: natures are ontologically prior to their instances in Alexander and Ibn ʿAdī, but posterior in Avicenna. This crucial difference will be shown on the basis of the parallel between (a) natures and universals, and (b) the material and generic aspects of common notions. We will see that Avicenna’s reason for disagreeing with the previous tradition on this parallel was a concern regarding the compatibility of the priority of natures with the principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
Islamic Philosophy from the 12th to the 14th Century, 2018
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2018
No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Av... more No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in the Healing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence.
Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, 2018
Oriens, 2017
The essence-existence distinction was a central issue in metaphysical disputes among post-Avicenn... more The essence-existence distinction was a central issue in metaphysical disputes among post-Avicennian thinkers in the Islamic world. One group argued that what a thing is is different from that it is only conceptually. A rival view would have it that the distinction between essence and existence is real. The purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical core of the dispute, by isolating the main arguments and their metaphysical foundations. I will study four central issues of the essence-existence debate: (1) the argument that existence is distinct from essence because one can conceive of an essence without knowing whether it exists; (2) the argument that if existence were really distinct from essence, existence would itself have to exist, leading to an infinite regress; (3) the question of whether God is responsible for the existence of essences only or also for their essential content (this relates to the problem of the ontological status of the non-existent); (4) the problem of whether essences are prior to existence.
Philosophische Symposien der Deutschen Foschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 2019
Die Unterscheidung zwischen Potentialitat und Moglichkeit im Arabischen Avicennismus