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Avicenna on the PSR and Causal Necessity in the Natural World
By Kara Richardson, Syracuse University College
Avicenna's account of causal necessity in the natural world is a key part of his metaphysical system and it is also historically significant. Yet, there is little scholarly discussion of the philosophical basis of his view. This is surprising not only because the topic is important, but also because the view is challenging to interpret. Scholars frequently locate Avicenna's main defense of causal necessity in Metaphysics I.6.6 of The Book of Healing. A few look to Metaphysics II.1 of The Book of Salvation, where he seems to liken causal necessity to logical necessity using the example of fire's power to burn a suitable patient. In this paper, I maintain that neither of these arguments provides a satisfactory defense of the claim that causes necessitate their effects, or the related claim that natural bodies function as necessitating causes. In this paper, I examine a different Avicennian path to these claims, spanning Metaphysics IV.1 and Physics I.13 of The Book of Healing, which I call ‘the argument from the PSR’. I maintain that, through this argument, Avicenna makes his best case for causal necessity in the natural world.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.70000
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Tags: #Avicenna #Metaphysics #PSR #Causality
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Muslim Perceptions of Buddhism: A New Approach
By Sheridan Polinsky, Concordia University
Most pre-modern Muslim scholars engaged Buddhism by documenting and often refuting its teachings. In modern and contemporary times, many Muslim authors have begun to see Buddhism as a religion with divine origins. The objective of this article is to take account of this shift, which has hitherto been neglected in secondary literature, by examining the writings of some notable Muslim scholars and thinkers from various parts of the world. I concentrate especially on the authors’ attempts to reconcile their monotheism with what they see as the absence of a supreme, personal deity in Buddhism. I also consider the significance and relevance of their views for contemporary Muslim–Buddhist relations, pointing out both their irenic potential and their limitations.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2025.2460357
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Tags: #Religion #Islam #Buddhism
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Is the cosmological argument intuitive?
By Shaun Nichols and Justin Steinberg, Cornell University
The cosmological argument for the existence of God seems to have significant intuitive resonance. According to a familiar version of the cosmological argument, there must be some explanation for why the universe exists, and God provides the explanation. This argument seems to depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which, if something exists, there must be an explanation for why it exists. As we detail, recent evidence indicates that people presuppose something like the PSR in their explanatory outlook. However, the other key part of the cosmological argument is that God is supposed to be self-explanatory – God’s existence is necessary. We examine this empirically and find that people do not generally think that the existence of God is necessary in the sense relevant for the cosmological argument.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000046
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Tags: #God #CosmologicalArgument #PSR
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Al-Insāniyya by Sīdī Salāma al-Rāḍī: A Sufi Treatise Against Modernity
By Francesco Alfonso Leccese, University of Calabria
The Sufi dimension is usually underestimated within the debate on Islam and modernity as well as in discussions about resistance to Western ideas within contemporary Islamic culture. In contrast, Islamic modernism is often defined as the result of a coherent process of modernization and reform, which stems from cultural confrontation with European Western thought and is accelerated by certain key historical events between the 19th and 20th centuries. This modernization, in the last decades of the 19th century, led to the emergence of a cultural Arab renaissance, known as naḥḍa, and a religious reform, iṣlāḥ; both are strongly influenced by modern Western thought. At the opposite end of this current of thought is the perspective of Sīdī Salāma al-Rāḍī, who denounced the damage that the scientistic view of Western origin was doing to Egyptian culture. His most important work, from this point of view, is an untranslated book entitled al-Insāniyya (“Humanity”), in which the author criticizes, from a traditional perspective, the biochemical, medical, evolutionary, and spiritualist conceptions of the physical, psychic, and spiritual constitution of the human being. The general tenor of this work is highly critical of modern Western civilization and represents an attempt to propose a traditional Islamic viewpoint, which is of extreme interest due to its uniqueness. Al-Insāniyya highlights a topic rarely addressed in academic literature on early twentieth-century Sufism: the involvement of a Sufi master in the dialogue between Western modernity and the Sufi Islamic tradition. This reveals a historical framework in which the Sufis of Cairo’s cosmopolitan environment, while mastering scientistic themes, reject modernity in favor of a classical Sufi vision of evolution understood as an initiatory path of spiritual perfection.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020192
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Tags: #Islam #Sufism #Modernism
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The contradictory god thesis and non-dialetheic mystical contradictory theism
By Ricardo Sousa Silvestre, Federal University of Campina Grande
When faced with the charge that a given concept of God is contradictory, the standard move among philosophers and theologians has been to try to explain away the contradiction and show that the concept of God in question is consistent. This has to do, of course, with the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Another option, which has recently generated interest among logicians and analytic philosophers of religion, is to reject such a move as unnecessary and defend what might be called the contradictory God thesis. To be sure, something close to that can be found in philosophers such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas and Nicolaus de Cusa. However, it is only recently that this approach has gained momentum, certainly driven by the contemporary advance of dialetheism and glut theoretic approaches in general, and paraconsistent logic. Needless to say, a standard move among defenders of the contradictory God thesis is to challenge the LNC. The argumentation, however, is seldomly framed in conceptual terms. Instead, it is mostly framed in ontological terms, as God being a contradictory entity. From this perspective, the contradictory God thesis is the thesis that God is a contradictory object. My goal in this paper is to provide a conceptual assessment of the discussion surrounding the contradictory God thesis. To achieve this, I make use of a general and hopefully non-controversial meta-theory of concepts and adopt a semantic approach rather than a metaphysical one. Within this framework, I address the following questions: What are the different ways we can understand the contradictory God thesis? What grounds are there for rejecting a contradictory concept of God? What standard moves are available to defend oneself from such criticisms and how do they relate to the LNC? What challenges do they present? As a secondary goal, the paper introduces a novel defense of the contradictory God thesis, drawing on a specific interpretation of the theology of the 16th-century Indian thinker Jīva Gosvāmī, which avoids the need to challenge the LNC. I term this approach ‘non-dialetheic mystical contradictory theism.’
Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09945-x
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Tags: #God #AnalyticalPhilosphy #Theism
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What the New Atheists (and, for That Matter, Creationists Too) Got Right
By Cristobal Bellolio, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
The reception of the so-called New Atheism in the 2000s in the intellectual community was harsh. Its main figures were accused of elaborating on a subject of which they were mostly ignorant. Criticism focused on the narrow way they described religion as a set of factual beliefs that compete with—and pale in the face of—modern science, instead of a life experience, an ethical orientation, an existential commitment, or a set of communal practices. In the spirit of S.J. Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria thesis, these critics contended that religion has little to do with factual assertions. This paper challenges this strict separation, arguing that many theistic traditions, such as Christianity, inherently make factual claims about the universe and history, intertwining their beliefs with cosmic realities. Following Ronald Dworkin’s posthumous distinction between the “science part” and the “value part” of religion, the paper underscores the philosophical legitimacy of religious factual claims, thus acknowledging the potential overlap between science and religion. In this sense, it argues that the New Atheists may have got wrong the meaning of religion in many people’s lives, but they got the “science part” right enough. In the same vein, it concludes that while creationists are most likely wrong in their account of the origin of life and biodiversity, their contestation in the factual domain cannot be discarded as a disfigurement of religion.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020159
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Tags: #Religion #Atheism #Science #Creationism
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When the Rūḥ Meets Its Creator: The Qurʾān, Gender, and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iranian Female Sufism
By Yunus Valerian Hentschel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This article delves into two Iranian Sufi women’s approaches to the Qurʾān, gender, and visual culture: (1) Parvāneh Hadāvand, a Sufi leader in Tehran, uses visual means to enhance the spiritual–aesthetic–emotional experiences of her students. She challenges gender norms within male-dominated spaces by reinterpreting visual-material objects and asserting her authority as a woman Sufi guide. (2) Mītrā Asadī, a Sufi teacher in Shiraz, problematizes the overall visual culture of gender roles by arguing that, through the spiritual transformation of the human being’s genderless essence (Arabic rūḥ; Persian jān), categories of gender become ephemeral and irrelevant. These two case studies are examined in terms of how these Sufi women utilize aesthetic experience, visual aspects, and visual-material culture in their Sufi practices and teachings. Further, it is investigated how these practices shape Hadāvand’s and Asadī’s gender performativities.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020132
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Tags: #Religion #Islam #Sufism #Gender #Feminism
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Finitude and the Good Will
By Alex Englander, University of Bonn
According to Kant, both finite (human) and non-finite (divine) wills are subject to the moral law, though the manner of their subjection differs. The fact that the law expresses an ‘ought’ for the human will is a function of our imperfection. On this picture, a non-finite will thus enjoys a certain explanatory priority vis-à-vis its finite counterpart: we can understand the practical constraint that binds the latter by seeing how contingent limitations differentiate it from the former. However, a reading of Kant's principle of autonomy that inextricably ties the achievement of willing to the adoption of a practical standpoint, gives us reasons for doubting this order of explanation. It suggests instead that we might best understand the practical ‘ought’ by taking the human will as explanatorily primitive. And if we do so, we can question the coherence of taking a will for which the law is not normative to furnish a paradigmatic exemplification of the relation that lies at the heart of Kant's notion of autonomy: namely, the relation between free volition and moral necessity.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13043
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Tags: #Religion #God #Metaphysics #Kant
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Diversity, Science, and Religion
By Yiftach Fehige, University of Toronto
In this paper, I argue against the prevalent tendency in theological discourse to frame the relationship between science and religion in monist terms. I define this approach and present evidence supporting a pluralist perspective, which emerges as a serious alternative. Importantly, a pluralist framing offers a robust rebuttal to critics of religion who leverage the remarkable progress made in the natural sciences to depict theology as stagnant.
Link: https://doi.org/10.69574/aejpr.v1i4.22903
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Tags: #Religion #Science #ConflictThesis
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Leibniz and the Proof of God’s Existence from Eternal Truths
By Paul Rateau, Panthéon-Sorbonne University
The aim of this article is to show how and in what stages G. W. Leibniz came to develop his proof of God’s existence from eternal truths. It begins by tracing the main stages in the history of this proof, initially forged by Augustine of Hippo, and discusses the reasons for its renewal in the last quarter of the 17th century in the post-Cartesian context. The article then shows why, despite skepticism towards this proof in his youth, Leibniz finally produced a version of it that he presents in the Monadology even before the ontological proof. My hypothesis is that the development of the proof from eternal truths is directly linked to Leibniz’s reflection on the nature of the possible, a reflection that is itself to be placed in the context of the polemic between Nicolas Malebranche and Simon Foucher after the publication of the Search after Truth. The Leibnizian proof is original in that it rests on the consideration of the reality of possibles, insofar as God is the reason for them, and on the claimed subordination of logic to ontology.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020123
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Tags: #God #Leibniz #Truth
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Freedom, Omniscience and the Contingent A Priori
By Fabio Lampert, University of Vienna
One of the major challenges in the philosophy of religion is theological fatalism — roughly, the claim that divine omniscience is incompatible with free will. In this article, I present new reasons to be sceptical of what I consider to be the strongest argument for theological fatalism. First, I argue that divine foreknowledge is not necessary for an argument against free will if we take into account divine knowledge of contingent a priori truths. Second, I show that this argument can be generalized so that ordinary human knowledge of contingent a priori truths also leads to an argument against free will. This, I believe, results in an absurd conclusion that is unacceptable to both theists and non-theists. But if there is something wrong with this argument, there is something wrong, too, with the argument for theological fatalism. Although there is a range of possible responses, I suggest that the core issue in all cases is a closure principle — specifically, the principle that ‘no choice about’ is closed under entailment (or strict implication).
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae058
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Tags: #God #Metaphysics #Omniscience #Fatalism
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Rationalism vs. textualism: a comparative analysis of Islamic pedagogical approaches in Iran and Saudi Arabia
By Amir Hassan Sinaee, Graduate of Wilfrid Laurier University
Cultivating rational thinking, rather than solely adhering to the text of Islam, can be a different crucial approach to Islamic pedagogy. We can find some of these differences in the post-Prophetic period when influential figures shaped differing interpretations of Islamic thought. This paper examines two major Islamic theological perspectives regarding the role of rational, logic, and interpretation in understanding sacred texts. The Ahl al-Hadith and Ash’ari school emphasises strict adherence to textual sources, often rejecting interpretative approaches, in contrast to the Ahl al-Ra’y and Mu’tazila schools, which give precedence to reason and interpretation. These divergent views have significantly influenced contemporary Islamic education, leading to notable differences in the method of curricula of Islamic studies. This paper explores how these perspectives shape the content of Grades 1 to 6 of Islamic studies textbooks in Iran and Saudi Arabia, focusing on their impact on developing logic, reasoning, and interpretive skills among students at this crucial stage of intellectual growth.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2025.2451044
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Tags: #Islam #Asharism #IslamicStudies
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A Qualitative Study of Digital Religious Influence: Perspectives from Christian, Hindu, and Muslim Gen Y and Gen Z in Mumbai, India
By Clyde Anieldath Missier, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
This study addresses how religious affective content in digital media influences epistemic authority, social imaginaries, and religious beliefs. It draws on data from 64 in-depth interviews with Generation Y and Generation Z individuals with a higher-education background who identified as Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, conducted in Mumbai, India. While influencers are increasingly playing a significant role in the daily lives of the respondents, the impact of family on religious behavior appears to be more substantial than the epistemic sources on social media. In this context, accrued social capital can help individuals develop resilience or resistance to online disinformation, hate speech, and radicalization. Furthermore, while individuals exhibited animosity toward politicians and journalists, they also expressed nationalist attitudes, e.g., a shared Indian identity and common cultural capital, which may serve as ‘superglue’ for living peacefully in the current climate shaped by religious fundamentalist movements. In general, this field study contributes to the ongoing scholarly growth of the interdisciplinary focus of digital religion studies, and particularly on the impact of the social media domain on fundamentalist beliefs.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010073
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Tags: #Religion #Religiosity #Sociology
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In Defense of a Theistic Essentialist Account of Modality
By Tien-Chun Lo, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
In this paper, I will defend a theory of modality on which all (metaphysically) modal truths are explained in terms of God’s essence. Roughly speaking, it says that for every modal truth P, P is true because of or in virtue of God’s essence. After presenting the idea of this account, I will examine the following four objections: (i) the problem of negative grounds, (ii) the problem of dependence, (iii) the problem of iterated modalities, and (iv) the problem of modally loaded essences. I will argue that none of these problems succeed in refuting this theistic essentialist account of modality.
Link: https://doi.org/10.37977/faithphil.2023.40.3.2
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Tags: #God #Theology #Metaphysics
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Revisiting Premodern Islamic Science and Experience
By Hannah C. Erlwein and Katja Krause, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
This open access book takes a fresh look at the nature and place of experience in premodern Islamic science. It seeks to answer two questions: What kind of experience constituted premodern Islamic science? And in what ways did that experience constitute science? Answering these questions, the authors critique the trajectory of most existing histories of the period, which tend to reduce “experience” to empirical method or practice. This view reflects the emphasis that histories of modern science, especially of the Scientific Revolution, have placed on empiricism—the standard against which Islamic actors were then measured. This book offers a new historiography, arguing that experience had a far wider scope in the world of Islamic science. Combining an innovative theoretical framework with three case studies and a reflective epilogue by renowned experts in the field, this work offers the history of science a solid foundation on which to build its analyses of premodern science and the modality, scope, and role of experience therein. As a result, it speaks to specialists in the history of premodern Islamic science and historians of science in general to reconsider their historiographical assumptions.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-76085-3
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Tags: #Islam #History #IslamicStudies
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God-Perfecting Man: Theurgical Elements in the Mysticism of Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240) and Their Historical Significance
By Michael Ebstein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The following article aims at highlighting the theurgical tendencies in the teachings of the great Andalusī Muslim mystic Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240). By “theurgy” is meant the influence of man on Divinity in its manifest external dimension, that is to say, the dimension of God that creates beings and is involved with their lives and fortunes, as opposed to His hidden essence. The category “theurgy/theurgical” is adopted from the modern academic study of Kabbalah, and is ultimately derived from Late Antique Neoplatonism. The bulk of this article is dedicated to analyzing relevant texts from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre and elucidating the theurgical elements reflected in them, while the last two sections (5–6) present preliminary observations on the relevant links between Ibn al-ʿArabī, Kabbalah, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. It is argued that these three traditions should be studied together, as they shed light on one another.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020234
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Tags: #Religion #Islam #Mysticism #IbnArabi
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Does God know our future sins?
By Ameni Mehrez, Harvard Kennedy School and Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh
In this article, we examine the extent to which Christians and Muslims endorse divine foreknowledge for neutral, good, and bad actions. If they do, the problem of theological fatalism is not a mere (albeit important) philosophical difficulty, but a problem rooted in lay believers’ intuitive understanding of God.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000071
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Tags: #God #Theology #Fatalism
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Morality as a cause, not only an effect, of evolution: Thomistic reflections on gene-culture coevolutionary theory
By Dr Nathan Lyons, University of Notre Dame
Some recent philosophical analyses of gene-culture coevolutionary theory propose that morality is a contributing cause in (and not only an outcome of) human evolution. This paper considers implications of this idea for Thomistic moral theory. According to the coevolutionary account, the social practices of early human communities create selection pressures in favour of pro-moral adaptations, making the evolution of morality a ‘biocultural’ process in which culture in some respects drives biology. This position chimes with, and indeed advances, some core themes of Thomistic ethics, including: the abiding significance of moral passions; the centrality of practical reason; the social character of practical reason; moral realism; the naturalness of morality; the link between nature and normativity. Biocultural evolutionary theory can thus offer Thomistic ethicists some new ways to understand their old ideas. If it is true that morality is a cause and not only an effect of human evolution, then Thomists are invited to see morality as an even more natural phenomenon than they previously thought.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.14397
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Tags: #Evolution #Thomism #Morality
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Toward a Holistic Study of Mosques in the US: A Critical Integrative Literature Review and Framework
By Hassnaa Mohammed, Indiana University
US mosques have gained considerable scholarly attention, focusing on the contested grounds on which they stand. Although literature on US mosques has been published in different fields, there is no work assessing the current state of research. Given that the number of Muslims is exponentially increasing in the US and the number of mosques increased by 31 percent between 2010 and 2020, synthesizing existing publications may lead to a renewed perspective on ways to study these complex institutions. This study sets forth a systematic critical integrative review of literature published on US mosques in peer-reviewed journals. The study presents overarching trends in publications related to mosques before December of 2022, identifies seven main themes in existing literature, proposes an integrative framework for studying mosques by highlighting global, regional, local, and internal factors that impact mosques’ development, and identifies unanswered questions in the body of literature.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfaf003
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Tags: #Islam #Society #Muslims
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On Believing and Being Convinced
By Paul Silva Jr., University of Cologne
Our doxastic states are our belief-like states, and these include outright doxastic states and degreed doxastic states. The former include believing that p, having the opinion that p, thinking that p, being sure that p, being certain that p, and doubting that p. The latter include degrees of confidence, credences, and perhaps some phenomenal states. But we also have conviction (being convinced simpliciter that p) and degrees of conviction (being more or less convinced that p). This Element shows: how and why all of the outright doxastic states mentioned above can be reduced to conviction thresholds; what degrees of conviction fundamentally are (degreed reliance-dispositions); why degrees of conviction are not credences; when suspending a belief is compatible with continuing to believe; and the surprising extent to which Kant endorsed the theory of conviction that emerges in this Element.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009524117
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Tags: #Belief #AnalyticalPhilosphy #Philosophy
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A Grammatical Investigation of Miracles
By David Ellis, Leeds Trinity University
Wittgenstein claims that religious belief does not stand on evidence, that only those with a religious point of view can see an event as a miracle, and that experiencing a miracle can influence a person towards religious belief. This has the unusual outcome that a miracle can lead a person to God, but a miracle cannot be evidence of God. This also faces two challenges. First, if miracles can only be seen from a religious point of view, then suggesting that a miracle can influence a person towards religion implies that a person can see a miracle before having a religious point of view. Second, if religious belief is not based on evidence, then those who report believing because of evidence are confused about their beliefs in a way we would not expect. I argue that these are not challenges to Wittgenstein’s account but symptoms of our misunderstanding of grammar and his distinction between relative and absolute miracles.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020154
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Tags: #Religion #Miracles #Wittgenstein
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Promoting the Wasaṭī Doctrine to Balance between Conservatism and Pragmatism in Post-9/11 America: The Case of Yasir Qadhi
By Elad Ben David, Ben-Gurion University
Sheikh Dr Yasir Qadhi is one of America’s most famous intellectual senior clerics, and is a member of the generation of young American preachers that burst into Western public awareness during the post-9/11 era. During the 1990s, Qadhi was a hardcore Salafi, but the 9/11 attacks and his doctoral studies on Islamic theology at Yale University (2005–2013), influenced and reformed many of his world views, causing him to adapt a more moderate and pragmatic stance. This article’s main argument is that Qadhi represents a case study of the American Islamic reform mindset in the post-9/11 era, which attempted to reconcile the tension between conservative and pragmatic Islamic trends with contemporary American reality. These clerics try to pave the way for Islam’s essential principles to remain while bravely confronting contemporary issues with new consideration. The article explores Islam in America in the post-9/11 era and a variety of examples of his doctrine relevant to the American Muslim minority. Qadhi’s Islamic rulings manifest his affinity to wasaṭī scholars, such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, which shed light on one of Qadhi’s primary goals – preserving Islam in America and the West for future generations.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2024.2442865
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Tags: #Religion #Islam #Culture
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Trusting in Science and Religion
Parallels and Contrasts
By Rope Kojonen, University of Helsinki
Science relies on trust both in its public reception and in the collaborative collection of evidence, as it is impossible for anyone to verify everything independently. Might the presence of trust in scientific practice help show that trust in religious matters is also rational? Or might scientific practices rather undermine testimony as a source of religious knowledge? Parallels and contrasts between scientific and religious knowledge are common in the literature, despite the plurality of sciences and religions that exist making such comparisons difficult. In this article, I will analyse science-based arguments for and against the reliability of religious testimony. I begin with Mary Midgley’s argument against scientism, and use it to develop a parallel between religious and scientific trust. I then consider two arguments from science against religious trust: the argument from the superiority of science, and the argument from cultural evolution. I argue that utilization of work in social epistemology is helpful for understanding the parallels between scientific and religious trust in a nuanced manner, and that relating specific scientific and religious practices might be more useful than general-level critiques of religious rationality.
Link: https://doi.org/10.69574/aejpr.v1i4.23539
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Tags: #Religion #Science #ConflictThesis
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Perceptual transformation in Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophy: The night journey (isrā’) and ascension (mi‘rāj) of Prophet Muḥammad
By Ismail Lala, Gulf University for Science and Technology
The night journey (isrā’) and ascension (mi‘rāj) represent arguably the most significant and unique events in the life of Prophet Muḥammad. However, the influential Sufi thinker Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240) argues that the Prophet had thirty-four night journeys of which only one was physical. This physical night journey, and the ascension that took place with it, was the one in which he was given the five daily prayers. Ibn ‘Arabī thus employs the secondary night journeys and ascensions of Prophet Muḥammad to delineate a point of emulation between the Prophet’s spiritual experience and those of his nation. Muslims can also have their own ascensions, but their journeys cannot be physical, and, analogously, cannot have autonomous legislative authority. They can, nevertheless, cause a change in their perception that allows them to see the world as it truly is: a manifestation of the divine Names.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09552367.2024.2366044
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Tags: #God #Sufism #IbnArabi #Prophet
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Enacting Mysticism in the World: Practical Sufism in the Tariqa Karkariyya and Alawiyya
By John C. Thibdeau, Independent Researcher
In this article, I will touch on the ethical and moral possibilities of mysticism. On the one hand, I discuss the kinds of ethical work required to open and cultivate experiences of the divine. On the other hand, I look at how those experiences of the divine create new opportunities for kinds of ethical relationships to oneself, to others, and to the divine. In doing so, I connect the practices of asceticism—zuhd—with the types of experience characteristic of Sufi mysticism through the concept of tarbiya. Understanding taṣawwuf as an ongoing process in which experiences of the divine are a part, not an end, helps us grasp the intransitive nature of the term taṣawwuf itself. The goal in doing so is to think through what an ‘inner-worldly’ mysticism might look like—a category noticeably absent from Weber’s analysis. Part of its absence, I would suggest, is due to the fact that it does not map onto the passive–active distinction between mysticism and asceticism he tends to draw. But rather than merely critique Weber’s model, which, of course, is grounded in ideal types, and therefore nothing ever fits solely into one of his categories, my goal is to consider what an active inner-worldly mysticism might look like. In other words, what are the modes of ethical engagement and action made possible by those experiences which are considered to be direct experiences of the divine and how are those direct experiences in turn made possible by different kinds of ethical work? In this article, I will consider each of these in relation to two Sufi orders based on my fieldwork in Morocco—the Karkariyya and the Alawiyya. These are two closely related orders that are part of the Shadhiliyya, and they share several members within their spiritual lineages, with the split dating only to the 20th century. Through an analysis and comparison of the two groups, I investigate what an active mysticism could look like in the world today and hope to create new spaces for comparative mysticism that would see mystics as deeply concerned with changing their social worlds.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020111
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Tags: #Sufism #Islam #Religion #Mysticism
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Rethinking the Unio Mystica: From McGinn to Ibn ʿArabī
By Arjun Nair, niversity of Southern California
Research into the unio mystica has revealed what seems to be an area of “real discussion” between scholars of different traditions of mysticism, particularly those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although this research serves as a promising start to the dialogue among scholars, it has also raised many questions about a “shared moment” that is nevertheless expressed in “irreducibly diverse” and distinct ways in each tradition. What purpose, for instance, can generic cross-cultural categories serve when they mean little or nothing to scholars in each tradition? By contrast, tradition-specific vocabularies are profuse and often difficult to represent in interlinguistic contexts without significant explanation. The challenge of translating mystical texts, imagery, and ideas across cultures and linguistic traditions raises obvious concerns about the misrepresentation and distortion of traditions in an environment of post-colonial critique. Nevertheless, the continued promise of dialogue calls for specialists of these traditions—particularly non-western and non-Christian traditions—to approach, assess, re-formulate, and even challenge the categories of mysticism from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of the traditions that they research. The present study models such an approach to scholarship in mysticism. It offers a (re)formulation of the unio mystica from within the theoretical frame of the 12th/13th-century Muslim/Sufi mystic, Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and early members of his school of thought. By unpacking the primary terms involved in such an account—“God”, the “human being/self”, and “union”—from within the conceptual and theoretical horizons of that tradition, it problematizes the prevailing understanding of the unio mystica constructed from the writings of specialists in Christian mysticism. More importantly, it illustrates the payoff in terms of dialogue (incorporating the critique of existing theories) when each tradition operates confidently from its own milieu, developing its own theoretical resources for mysticism rather than prematurely embracing existing ideas or categories.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010094
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Tags: #Islam #IbnArabi #Mysticism #Christianity
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Medieval Finitism
By Mohammad Saleh Zarepour, The University of Manchester
Discussing various versions of two medieval arguments for the impossibility of infinity, this Element sheds light on early stages of the evolution of the notion of INFINITIES OF DIFFERENT SIZES. The first argument is called 'the Equality Argument' and relies on the premise that all infinities are equal. The second argument is called 'the Mapping Argument' and relies on the assumption that if one thing is mapped/ superposed upon another thing and neither exceeds the other, the two things are equal to each other. Although these arguments were initially proposed in the context of discussions against the possibility of infinities, they have played pivotal roles in the historical evolution of the notion of INFINITIES OF DIFFERENT SIZES.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009047623
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Tags: #AnalyticalPhilosophy #God #Metaphysics
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Divine Actions and the Challenge of Present Luck
By Andre Leo Rusavuk, University of Birmingham
Traditionally, theists have understood divine actions as satisfying libertarian conditions on free will. However, theists have not explored whether God’s actions are subject to present luck, i.e., luck present at or around the moment of action. Some critics of libertarian accounts of free will argue that if an action is indeterministically caused, then it’s a matter of luck whether the agent performs the action: this is the notorious luck objection to libertarianism. In this paper, I consider an argument that some divine actions occur as a matter of luck. Since what occurs as a matter of luck is at least partly beyond the agent’s control, God’s control over his actions is diminished. I reply to several objections to this reasoning and conclude that present luck poses an enthralling challenge to divine freedom as traditionally conceived and merits further exploration.
Link: https://doi.org/10.37977/faithphil.2023.40.3.1
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Tags: #God #Theology #Metaphysics
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DIVINE FORGETTING AND PERFECT BEING THEOLOGY
By Christopher Willard-Kyle, University of Glasgow
I sympathetically explore the thesis that God literally forgets sins. I articulate some altruistic God might have for forgetting certain sins. If so, then God may have altruistic reasons to relinquish a great-making trait: omniscience. But according to traditional Anselmian perfect being theology, God is necessarily perfect and so incapable of acting on these altruistic reasons. More broadly, a God who necessarily has all the perfections is a God who is incapable of making a certain kind of sacrifice: God can never make tradeoffs that diminish God’s overall greatness. I argue that such a God’s inability to make such tradeoffs is not a trivial cost for traditional perfect-being theologians who also believe that God is in loving relationships with creatures. Along the way, I explore the prospects for a less traditional form of perfect being theology, perfect being kenoticism, and different models for divine forgetting.
Link: https://doi.org/10.37977/faithphil.2023.40.3.5
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Tags: #God #Theology #Anselm #Metaphysics
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Genre Analysis and Religious Texts: A Methodological Model of Ḥadīth Commentary
By Nurullah Ardıç, Istanbul Technical University; Mustafa Macİt Karagözoğlu, Marmara University
This article proposes a methodological model of genre analysis to apply to Muslim exegesis on the compilations of Prophetic traditions, known as ḥadīth commentary. Inspired by John Swales’s approach to genre analysis, and drawing upon 23 Sunni ḥadīth commentary texts from the tenth century to the present, the model consists of a number of analytical strategies and research questions, as well as specific generic analyses, in four steps: identifying the main generic features of these commentary texts, including the characteristics of their expository and hortatory discourses; examining their internal structures as constructed by commentators; and applying the move analysis of rhetorical structures twice—to both their introduction and the body of the text. The proposed model offers a way to make ḥadīth commentary texts more accessible and manageable, and helps explore the structural commonalities and differences within the commentary tradition across generations and throughout the Muslim world.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etae068
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Tags: #Islam #Hadith #IslamicStudies
