The Ontological Discourse of al-Ghazali and Maimonides revisited.

Journal of Islamic thought and civilization, 2022

In contrast to the West, which considers God as a myth and negates values about reality and truth, the Muslim philosophers and Sufis base their knowledge on the concept of God that has been established in Islam. This article describes the approach of the Sufis and the Muslim philosophers regarding God as reality and truth. By using the descriptive analysis method, this study draws conclusions based on various arguments: first, there is a meeting point between the two, especially in terms of 'al-Haqq' as one of the 'Names' (asmā) of Allah which also means 'reality' and 'truth' which are linguistically unified. Therefore, everything that is called 'reality' has to do with the existence of God which provides wisdom behind all reality as God's creation. Because God created reality with a 'true' purpose. Second, despite the fundamental differences in various worldviews, the West has never assumed that God is Reality in itself because its worldview has negated the Diversity of metaphysical reality. This is also affirmed, only at the metaphysical level as 'speculative science' or 'noumena' in Kant's account. Third, different from the West in Islam, there are various treasures of intellectual property discussions about God as Reality. Although there are many schools in understanding God as Reality, the Muslims have almost the same opinion because they affirm revelation as the only authoritative source of explanation for the concept of God.

Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques

The Argument for God’s Existence is one of the major issues in the history of philosophy. It also constitutes an illuminating example of a shared philosophical problem in the entangled intellectual histories of Europe and the Islamic World. Drawing on Aristotle, various forms of the argument were appropriated by both rational Islamic Theology (kalām) and Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna. Whereas the argument, reshaped, refined and modified, has been intensively discussed throughout the entire post-classical era, particularly in the Islamic East, it has likewise been adopted in the West by thinkers such as the Hebrew Polymath Maimonides and the Medieval Latin Philosopher and Theologian Thomas Aquinas. However, these mutual reception-processes did not end in the middle ages. They can be witnessed in the twentieth century and even up until today: On the one hand, we see a Middle Eastern thinker like the Iranian philosopher Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī re-evaluating Kant’s fundamental critiq...

2020

Avicenna is an influential philosopher whose contributions in ontology led to the transformation of Greek philosophy into philosophical theology in the Middle Ages. He distinguished between existence and essence, divided beings into necessary and contingent beings, and believed in the objectivity of existence. This article discusses Avicenna’s innovations in philosophical ontology and its influence on Christian ontology and theology, especially on Aquinas’ thought. The article focuses on the distinction between existence and essence and its implications in Avicenna’s philosophy and studies its influence on Aquinas’ theology. It will show that although Aquinas, especially in his De Ente et Essentia, is influenced by Avicenna’s ontology, his understanding of Avicenna’s views are sometimes inaccurate, and this has led him to disagree with Avicenna in some cases.

2010

The medieval Islamic philosophers held a certain conception of the divine unity that assumes the necessary existent to be both one and simple. The oneness of the necessary existent meant that it is the only necessary existent and its simplicity meant that it admits no composition whatsoever – it is pure essence and its essence is necessary existence. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers al-Ghazali presents, with elaboration, an exposition of the philosophers' conception of the divine unity, several arguments for its two components (i.e., oneness and simplicity), and his critique of these arguments. In this paper I focus on six of the arguments attributed to the philosophers. Following the textual evidence, I reconstruct these arguments and offer two possible interpretations of them. The first interpretation, which I call the many-argument interpretation, sees one of the arguments as employing the simplicity of the necessary existent to establish its oneness and the other five arguments as invoking oneness to establish simplicity. The second interpretation, which I call the one-argument interpretation, doesn’t offer a new reading for the first argument but sees the other five arguments as defending the simplicity of the necessary existent based on its basic concept. I argue for the superiority of the one-argument interpretation.

The current philosophical literature on God and abstract objects has taken an exhilarating turn in recent years. Although the discussion has remained broadly within the inherited Hellenic trichotomy of realism, nominalism and conceptualism, nuanced metaphysical positions have been argued within that trichotomy. The debate assumes particular importance for classical theism in that one of its core doctrines is God as a “self-existent being” (qā’im bi-nafsihi; aseity), i.e. He exists by virtue of Himself. If abstract objects are entities that exist necessarily (as is claimed by its proponents), then that would imply a compromise of that doctrine. Moreover, it also leaves open the question of how they are to be accounted for. This short paper will explore some possible options open for the Islamic theist to account for abstract entities drawing on contemporary debates and ideas to enrich the philosophical positions espoused by Muslim thinkers in the formative and post-formative period.

Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2019

In this article, I examine key passages from the Aš῾arite theologian Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's (d. 606/1210) final work, Al-Maṭālib al-῾āliya (" The lofty inquiries "), in order to theorize Rāzī's cosmology and angelology. In his attempt to prove the existence of these beings, Rāzī divides reality into material and intelligible realms. Angels, which signify the celestial intellects and spheres, exist as non-space-occupying beings and represent an aspect of the intelligible world. Of these, some are associated with celestial bodies, and others are entirely unassociated with materiality. I then present evidence for the possibility that Rāzī believed that these celestial spiritual beings are pre-eternal with God. These positions indicate a certain degree of conceptual continuity with the falsafa tradition, and reflect al-Ġazālī's (d. 505/1111) previous integration of the philosophical structure of reality into some of his texts. Additionally, one may look to other philosophical currents that developed in the Islamic world beyond the falāsifa, and connect Rāzī's cosmology to both the Hermetic tradition and the Epistles of the Iḫwān al-Ṣafā᾿. Dans cet article, j'analyse des passages cruciaux de la composition finale du théologien Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), Al-Maṭālib al-῾āliya (« Les nobles en-quêtes »), afin de théoriser sur la nature de deux de ses études : la cosmologie et l'angé-lologie. En cherchant à prouver l'existence de ces êtres, Rāzī divise la réalité en deux do-maines : matériel et intelligible. Les anges, qui symbolisent les intellects et les sphères, existent dans une réalité intelligible comme des êtres qui n'occupent pas d'espace. Par-mi eux, certains sont associés aux corps célestes, et d'autres ne s'associent à aucune chose matérielle. Dans un deuxième temps, je présente des arguments suggérant que Rāzī pensait peut-être que ces êtres célestes sont prééternels avec Dieu. Ces conceptions montrent une continuité avec la tradition philosophique islamique, et elles la structure philosophique de la réalité intégrée par al-Ġazālī (d. 505/1111) dans quelques textes théologiques. De plus, on a examiné d'autres courants philosophiques développés dans le monde islamique qui ont pu agir sur la cosmologie de Rāzī, en lien avec la tradition hermétique et avec les Épîtres des frères de la Pureté.

22-3, 2018

Whether God has a knowledge is a controversial issue both philosophy and theology. Does God have a knowledge? If He has, does He know the particulars? When we assume that God knows particulars, is there any change in God’s essence? In the theistic tradition, it is accepted that God is wholly perfect, omniscience, omnipotent and wholly good. Therefore, it is not possible to say that there is a change in God. Because changing is a kind of imperfection. On God’s knowledge, another controversial issue is whether God knows particulars or not. Most of theist thinkers argued that God is wholly perfect; because of perfectness, He must have perfect attributes. Knowing and goodness are a kind of perfect attributes. Ignoring and evil are a kind of imperfectness. If God is perfect being, He should have the perfect attributes and must know the particulars. For me in this subject, there are some similarities between al-Ghazālī and Maimonides. In this study I took into consideration the idea of al-Ghazālī and Maimonides on this subject. Based on Griffel and Stroumsa’s argument, I tried to show similarity between al-Ghazālī and Maimonides on God’s knowledge.

In the Middle Ages, in both the East and the West, the problem of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge was one of the issues of controversy between philosophers and theologians. In this article, I will compare the approaches of Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Bonaventure (d. 1274), two representatives from the Islamic and Christian theological traditions respectively, to the problem of knowledge and their criticism of philosophical knowledge. For this purpose, I will first examine their approaches to the nature, sources and limits of knowledge with particular reference to their mystical inclinations. Then I will give their classifications and evaluations of philosophical sciences. Finally, I will discuss their approaches to the problem of the eternity of the world to show in more detail, the similarities of their approaches in their criticism of philosophical knowledge.

The Academy of the Islamic Sciences and Culture, 2023

This monograph is the first and most comprehensive study of the main arguments found in the Imami، Muʿtazili، and Ashʿari theological writings concerning the existence of God. Undertaking an expansive investigation into the vast corpus of Islamic theological heritage، it presents and delineates the historical developments and diverse formulations of the six major arguments for God’s existence، namely، the Kalam cosmological argument; the argument from origination of attributes; the argument from design; the argument from particularisation; the argument from contingency; and proof of the truthful (burhān al-Ṣiddīqīn). This study aims to trace and analyse the historical developments of these arguments in Islamic theology during the tenth to the seventeenth century.

Nazariyat Dergisi

Although it is asserted that studies on Islamic thought in Turkish have recently reached a high level of sophistication, the interaction points between the research disciplines of theology, philosophy, Sufism studies and the bases for Islamic metaphysical thinking in these disciplines have not yet been brought to light. The first studies in this area, which observed the Akhbārī tradition that developed after Ibn al-Arabī, examined the wahdat al-wujūd (unitiy of existence) and the sources of this school in pre-Islamic traditions of thought. Disabled by reductionism, this approach frequently caused an ambiguity that prevents determination of the kind of contributions Muslim thinkers provided to metaphysical thinking at any point in the history. The present study by Demirli, first, claims to offer a step toward eliminating this ambiguity.