Leila Kiankhah
Abstract
IntroductionA scrutiny of Fārābī’s works reveals that one of his major concerns and a key philosophical problem in his view was God as the origin of other existing entities as well as His attributes and His relation with the world of being. As a founder of Islamic philosophy, in his efforts ...
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IntroductionA scrutiny of Fārābī’s works reveals that one of his major concerns and a key philosophical problem in his view was God as the origin of other existing entities as well as His attributes and His relation with the world of being. As a founder of Islamic philosophy, in his efforts to establish the intellectual system of Islamic philosophy, Fārābī not only takes the study of God as a metaphysical problem, but also considers it as a key central problem in metaphysics. Indeed, in most of his works, he defines metaphysics in terms of God (the First Existent: al-mawjūd al-awwal) as the study of the First Existent and the study of other existents in that they are caused by the First Existent. Accordingly, in Fārābī’s view, the First Existent is an entity on which other existents depend in their existence, and in fact, other existents deserve to be studied in metaphysics just in virtue of their relation to it. For this reason, it is the most significant and central issue in the study of Fārābī to research into the First Existent and its attributes as well as its relation with other existents. A scrutiny of Fārābī’s view of the First Existent will give us an understanding of the main metaphysical problem in his philosophy, which is crucial to an understanding of other problems of metaphysics as well as the entire system of his intellectual doctrines. Additionally, a major offshoot of this is a more accurate understanding of the relation between Fārābī’s theology (study of God) and Avicenna’s theology, which results in an enhanced study of Avicenna’s philosophy. Accordingly, the main problem tackled in this article is an analysis of Fārābī’s view of God and His attributes.In this way, the article is chiefly concerned with a study of God as the First Existent and His attributes from Fārābī’s perspective. However, since Fārābī’s theological studies largely appear in his Ārāʾ ahl al-madīnat al-fāḍila (Opinions of the citizens of the virtuous city) and al-Siyāsat al-madaniyya (Urban politics), this article focuses on these two works, although it also reviews the rest of Fārābī’s works when they involve a reference to the problem at hand. It is necessary to note that this article overviews and analyzes Fārābī’s views in terms of his own intellectual context and only draws on the jargons prevalent in the works that are attributed to him beyond any reasonable doubt.Discussion and ResultsIn many parts of his works, Fārābī discusses theological issues, but a large part of his theological studies appears in two of his works: Ārāʾ ahl al-madīnat al-fāḍila (Opinions of the citizens of the virtuous city) and al-Siyāsat al-madaniyya (Urban politics). The jargons Fārābī uses to refer to God include the “First” (awwal), the “First Existent,” and the “First Cause” (al-sabab al-awwal). Unlike Avicenna, he does not believe that God is the essentially necessary existent. Fārābī ascribes several names and attributes to the First Existent, in particular its being immemorial and the most perfect. These attributes encompass other divine attributes. Indeed, other attributes ultimately refer to these two. Fārābī explains that although multiple names and attributes apply to the First Existent, this does not add up to the multiplicity of the First Existent, because it includes all those attributes in its essential unity. In Fārābī’s view, when common names are predicated of the First Existent and other existents, they are not predicated by way of univocity (or a common meaning: al-ishtirāk al-maʿnawī). Moreover, because of a resemblance and relation between the First Existent and other existents, the predication is not by way of equivocity (or a vebal commonality: al-ishtirāk al-lafẓī) either. It is indeed a different variety of predication by which common names are predicated of the First Existent and other existents not as univocal, but by virtue of a sort of relation and resemblance and in terms of priority and posterity. This resemblance or relation between the attributes of the First Existent and those of other existents provides us with some kind of knowledge about the First Existent, by which we apply positive attributes to it.Fārābī explains the relation between the First Existent and other existents in terms of the theory of emanation (fayḍ). While he was influenced by neo-Platonic philosophers, particularly Plotinus, and despite his ample influence on Avicenna, there are significant ways in which Fārābī can be distinguished from them to the extent that the theories of emanation put forward by each had better be treated as three separate views. Fārābī’s theory is distinguished from Plotinus’s mainly by his introduction of heavenly spheres into the flow of emanation, the multiplicity and number of intellects, and the possibility of human knowledge of the First Existent and the First Existent’s knowledge of other existents. Furthermore, his theory is discriminated from Avicenna’s by his rejection of accommodating essential necessity and essential possibility in his theory of emanation. Since Fārābī did not even consider the principle of essential necessity and possibility, he does not account for emanation in terms of essential and non-essential necessity or possibility. Although Avicenna was influenced by Fārābī’s theory of emanation, his view is far away from Fārābī’s because he explains emanation in terms of necessity and possibility. It should be noted, however, that Avicenna’s theory is so dominant that, at first sight, it seems impossible to be able to explain emanation without the key elements of necessity and possibility. The main contribution of the present research is the study of Fārābī’s authentic views of God based on the works that are attributed to him beyond any reasonable doubt, and without any mixture with dubious works attributed to him. Accordingly, it turns out that, despite his great influence on Avicenna, Fārābī’s view diverges from Avicenna’s on many key issues such that it seems that they present two distinct intellectual frameworks.ConclusionFārābī believes that God is the origin of all existents, hence His appellation as the First, the First Existent, and the First Cause. In Fārābī’s view, the First Existent is not only an entity on which other existents depend in their existence, but also an entity in relation to which they deserve to be studied in metaphysics. A scrutiny of the First Existent and its attributes as well as its relation to other existents is a major research question in the study of Fārābī’s philosophy. Since there are doubts about the attribution of some works to Fārābī, and those works provide a distinct intellectual framework relative to his definitive works, this article aims to derive and overview Fārābī’s authentic views. According to definitive works by Fārābī, God is not a necessary existent, and the theory of emanation he puts forward as an explanation of the relation between the First Existent and other existents is not based on essential necessity and possibility. For this reason, his view of God is fundamentally different from that of his successor Avicenna.
Philosophy
efat alsadat hashemi; Alireza Kohansal; seyed morteza hoseini shahrudi,
Abstract
There are Quranic verses that cannot be interpreted without rational or intellectual exegeses and merely by drawing on their prima facie meanings, such as those that do not square with explicit Quranic doctrines, including those in which “hands” or “face” are attributed to God. ...
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There are Quranic verses that cannot be interpreted without rational or intellectual exegeses and merely by drawing on their prima facie meanings, such as those that do not square with explicit Quranic doctrines, including those in which “hands” or “face” are attributed to God. Another group of verses of a similar vein are those concerning “treasuries of Allah” (khazāʾin Allāh). The predicament is that people tend to collect valuable things in treasuries only because they have a limited power and cannot have what they want whenever they do, but this is not true of God, because of His unlimited, unconstrained power and knowledge.
According to Quranic exegetes, there are two types of “divine treasuries”:
Worldly treasuries
Otherworldly treasuries (those of the absolute hidden world)
There are different views of the nature of “divine treasuries” proposed by exegetes of the Quran and Muslim philosophers. We begin with views propounded by Quranic exegetes in philosophical-theological exegeses of the Quran. Major views of this sort have been offered in the exegesis of verse 21 of Sura al-Hijr in the Quran. These views might be classified into four:
Rains
Material elements and occasions of creation
Divine predestinations
Divine knowledge
In a number of his exegetical and philosophical works, Mullā Ṣadrā has presented his account of “divine treasuries.” In line with his philosophical principles, he construes divine treasuries as intellectual entities; that is, as a particular stage of divine knowledge (after that of divine grace or ʿināyat), which mediates the emanation of divine blessings or grace to creatures—a stage in which the forms of everything inheres in an intellectual way. A systematic, rational rendering of Mullā Ṣadrā’s account of divine treasuries requires a proper elaboration of his philosophical principles associated with divine knowledge, including the primacy of existence (iṣālat al-wujūd), gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd), objectivity of knowledge and existence, etc.
The following are the questions we consider in this paper:
How do theological exegeses of the Quran account for the notion of “divine treasuries”? What problems do they face?
What are Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophical principles underlying his account of divine treasuries? How does his account treat the problems faced by other accounts?
What other account of divine treasuries might be yielded, which is still compatible with the principles of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy?
To answer these questions, we begin with a literal definition of “treasuries of Allah” and then overview the accounts provided by exegetes and their problems. Next, we offer a detailed account of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophical principles as preliminary to a proper account of “divine treasuries.”
Articles have been published about “divine treasuries,” including “Divine treasuries” by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ḥishmatpūr (2005), “A critical analysis of Mullā Ṣadrā’s view of treasuries in light of structural semantics” by Mahdī Bāqirī and Aḥad Farāmarz Qarāmalikī (2018) and “A critical application of the theory of conceptual mixture in al-Mīzān’s reading of divine treasuries” again by Mahdī Bāqirī and Aḥad Farāmarz Qarāmalikī (2017).
We conclude that, of the four accounts outlined in this paper, the first three suffer from numerous problems, and thus they fail to yield an adequate account of the Quranic notion of divine treasuries. In our view, the fourth view—that is, Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophical account—has failed to offer a full-fledged account of instances of divine treasuries. Accordingly, we propounded a fourth view, which is an extension of Mullā Ṣadrā’s account. We argue how a proper, reasonable account of the notion of divine treasuries can be made possible by an elaboration of Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophical principles concerning divine knowledge and its degrees, and by drawing on characteristics of divine treasuries as outlined in the Quran, particularly verse 21 of Sura al-Hijr. We show that this revised Sadraean account is immune to the objections raised against other theories. On this account, divine treasuries suggest God’s knowledge of the measures of everything before its descent; that is, its creation. Moreover, on Mullā Ṣadrā’s principles, treasuries are of two sorts: worldly and otherworldly, where the latter is of two kinds in turn: objective and subjective (or cognitive). Objective treasuries are entities existing in imaginal (mithāl) and intellectual (ʿaql) worlds, and subjective treasuries are entities existing in the world of divine names and attributes. This is an “existential account of divine treasuries,” which might apply to all degrees of existence and creation.
Sayyed Ahmad Ghaffari Gharabagh
Abstract
IntroductionThe question of the role of knowledge in the realization of the known is crucial to philosophical and mystical theological studies. Mystics and Sadraean philosophers have adopted different views of the efficacy or inefficacy of knowledge in the known as well as their account of how knowledge ...
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IntroductionThe question of the role of knowledge in the realization of the known is crucial to philosophical and mystical theological studies. Mystics and Sadraean philosophers have adopted different views of the efficacy or inefficacy of knowledge in the known as well as their account of how knowledge affects the known. The goal of this research is to uncover the view of Islamic mysticism and Transcendent Wisdom concerning the issue. MethodThis research draws on the method of analysis and comparison to provide an analytic comparative consideration of the mystical and Sadraean view of the issue. Moreover, it was carried out based on library data. ResultsWhen it comes to the semantics of the relation between knowledge and the known in the mystical approach, we might discern three different positions in the words of mystics. First, the known is not made by knowledge in the sense that God’s knowledge does not play a role in how Immutable Entities (al-a‘yān al-thābita) are. Indeed, God knows such entities as they are, without making or changing them. By an analogy of our knowledge of the impossible, Ibn ‘Arabī explicates the notion of knowledge being subordinated to the known, in that it is not our knowledge that makes it impossible, nor can it stop it from being impossible. The second notion of subordination is the correspondence between knowledge and the known. That is, what is original is the known entity as it is present an Immutable Entity, and it is knowledge that corresponds to it, although the ontological subordination of the known with respect to knowledge is a well-acknowledged fact in Islamic mysticism. This remark by Fanārī is in obvious conflict with the first view concerning the semantics of the subordination of knowledge with respect to the known according to which the former is posterior to the latter. Such differences in the semantics of subordination indicate that there is no consensus over the notion of knowledge being subordinated to the known, as it shows that the dispute is not merely verbal. The third notion of subordination refers to that of the relation to its relatum. Moreover, on the Sadraean view, knowledge’s subordination to the known is accounted for in the third mystical sense. To illustrate, we should note that by the known here we mean the essentially known, which consists in the Immutable Entity or the epistemic form. Accordingly, for knowledge to be knowledge it needs to belong to a known entity, where belonging is a relation that needs, and is posterior to, its relatum, although the posterity is hierarchical rather than temporal, and thus it does not lead to the occurrence of events in God’s essence. Furthermore, when he deals with the problem of knowledge’s subordination to the known, Mullā Ṣadrā often distinguishes active and passive knowledge, tethering the response to the question of knowledge’s subordination of the known to the varieties of the distinction. That is, since knowledge is the origin of the instantiation of the external known entity, it cannot be posterior to the known, but in passive knowledge as such, the knowledge in question is necessarily posterior to the external known entity. What is more, Ṣadr al-Muta’allihīn provides a significant research concerning the differences between the views of Muslim mystics and Mu‘tazilī theologians, in which he notes the differences between the two views, referring to epistemic and objective (concrete) obtainment (or immutability) as two varieties of obtainment. He accounts for the view of Muslim mystics that Immutable Entities obtain prior to their concrete or objective existence in terms of epistemic obtainment. In this connection, he also points to the mode of existence of Immutable Entities. According to Mullā Ṣadrā, since such entities exist by God’s existence, they are not created by God, which is unlike the existential condition of existential objective entities that are made and created by God. ConclusionIn Mullā Ṣadrā’s view, knowledge’s subordination of the known corresponds to the third mystical sense. Moreover, relying on his principle of the primacy of existence, Mullā Ṣadrā tends to believe that the known is not made by knowledge, with knowledge not contributing to the known. Sadraean and mystical accounts agree over the idea that Immutable Entities are essentially determined, non-made realities, which is why the divine knowledge does not affect such entities in God’s essence.
mehdi bagheri; ahad faramarz gharamaleki
Abstract
AbstractMulla Sadra in presenting his theory about Allah's knowledge of objects has innovative achievement in which he has utilized Quranic application of word KHAZAIN. Because of that, it becomes more important to have a comparative study of KHAZAIN by the use of Quranic conceptualization. The main ...
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AbstractMulla Sadra in presenting his theory about Allah's knowledge of objects has innovative achievement in which he has utilized Quranic application of word KHAZAIN. Because of that, it becomes more important to have a comparative study of KHAZAIN by the use of Quranic conceptualization. The main issue in this article is how much Mulla sadra has paid attention to structural-analytic semantics component? While Mulla sadra utilizes Quranic application of KHAZAIN, he has presented philosophical explaining of both properties and conceptual components. Because Sadra attends Quranic conceptualization significantly (e.g. 'being in Precreation',' preservative', ' boundlessness' and etc. ), we can understand that he has done more than a sheer philosophical interpretation in encountering with this word. we can call this approach: ' exegetical philosophy'.
maryam barooti; Reza Akbarian; mohammad saidimehr
Abstract
Allameh Tabatabaie’s dominate view, at semantics of divine attributes including divine knowledge, is “basis of meaning” view. But this view, inattention to context of speech, causes appearance of difficulties at divine attributes; we are trying at this article to express defects of ...
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Allameh Tabatabaie’s dominate view, at semantics of divine attributes including divine knowledge, is “basis of meaning” view. But this view, inattention to context of speech, causes appearance of difficulties at divine attributes; we are trying at this article to express defects of this view by explaining speech context and presenting it to “ basis of meaning” view and introduce the view that addresses itself to extension of this meaning in different contexts, attending to core of meaning (primitive meaning and ‘ verbal explanation’ meaning). This method is investigated in divine knowledge attribute to empty meaning of divine knowledge from simile.
