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THE EXTENSION OF REALITY
THE EMERGENCE OF MIND-INDEPENDENT REALITY IN POSTCLASSICAL ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
By Bilal Ibrahim, Providence College
Avicenna’s distinction between external existence and mental existence is seminal to logic and philosophy in the Islamic tradition. This article examines philosophers who depart from Avicenna’s external-mental existence framework. They view the former as failing to support a general analysis of reality and truth, as mental existence is neither necessary nor sufficient for analyzing propositional truths, i.e., true propositions are true irrespective of “the very existence of minds” and “the perceptual acts of perceivers.” They propose that Avicenna’s semantics for categorical propositions needs revision, as there are true metathetic and hypothetical propositions, i.e., subject terms need not exist – in external reality or in a mind – for such propositions to be true. This counter-Avicennan current of thought articulates a third distinction in the analysis of reality, which focuses on the mind-independent nature of propositional content – particularly propositions with empty, hypothetical, or impossible subject terms – as a way to think generally about reality, in contrast to the Avicennan emphasis on the existential status of terms and essences. Notably, the analysis of mind-independent reality is supported by a novel semantics of “real” (ḥaqīqī) categorical propositions, which avoids external and mental existence conditions.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423924000134
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Tags: #Avicenna #Islam #Metaphysics #Epistemology #Truth
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MAD MAN, SLEEPER, AND FIRE AVICENNA ON THE PERCEPTION OF THE EXTERNAL
By Zhenyu Cai, Peking University
Avicenna is well-known for rejecting Aristotle’s dichotomy between perception and the intellect by introducing the so-called estimative power, which connects perception and the intellect. The estimative power is similar to sensory cognition because what is estimated is always mixed with the sensibles. Additionally, the proper object of estimation is the individualised macnā, which seems similar to the object of the intellect as the intelligible macnā. Given the special role of estimation, scholars have recently begun debating whether Avicenna has a conceptualist theory of perception. This article contributes to that debate by focusing on Avicenna’s discussions about the perception of externals in Al-taclīqāt. I argue for a reading that steers between Mohammad Azadpur’s conceptualist reading and Luis Farjeat’s anti-conceptualist reading. For Avicenna, the presence of the sensible form in a sensory power is non-conceptual, but the perceptual judgement exhibits a weak epistemic conceptualism.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423924000110
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Tags: #Avicenna #Islam #Metaphysics #Epistemology
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Is It Rational to Reject God?
By Pao-Shen Ho, Soochow University
According to the free will theodicy of hell, the damned agent freely chooses to suffer in hell, or equivalently, to reject God. Against this view, Thomas Talbott argues that it is impossible for the agent to freely reject God because doing so is not rational. The aim of this essay is to critically respond to Talbott’s argument that it is not rational to reject God, rather than offering a full defense of the free will theodicy of hell itself. Drawing on recent work on rationality, I argue that not only does Talbott’s argument commit the fallacy of equivocation, but its two premises are also indefensible. I also explain what the reasons are for rejecting God: when the agent’s happiness consists of an incoherent combination of attitudes, it is both structurally and substantively rational for her to reject God.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030270
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Tags: #God #Hell #Atheism
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Iranian Madrasa Historiographies on the Fate of Falsafa after Averroes: The Structure, Scope, and History of ‘Islamic Philosophy’ from Mīr Dāmād to ṬabāṬabāʾī and Āshtiyānī
By Hanif Amin Beidokhti, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Iranian philosophers train in a living tradition of falsafa that gives them a different perspective from that of modern European scholars. They call their profession philosophy, and philosophy for them is not a historical phenomenon, though it has a past. Contemporary falsafa has a narrative of its past, which I outline in this article, calling it the madrasa narrative. It is presented in the form of historiographies of falsafa, which, though less than a century old, form an extensive body of texts. After introducing this narrative, I focus on Mīr Dāmād’s (d. 1631) conception of the course of falsafa and his relation to his predecessors. I argue that he should be credited as the initiator of ‘Islamic philosophy’, both conceptually and terminologically. I emphasize the continuous line he draws linking himself to Fārābī (d. ca. 950-1) through Avicenna (d. 1037). Thereafter, I outline the formative contributions of Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (1904–81) in the contemporary practice of falsafa, and in historiography of Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī (1925–2005) who, together with Henry Corbin (1903–78), shaped the modern madrasa narrative. I show that Āshtiyānī’s historiographical effort was a reaction to what he considered Europeans’ unawareness of the continuity and vitality of falsafa in the Islamic East. I conclude with some observations on the scope, structure, and historiography of contemporary falsafa in Iran.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etaf002
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Tags: #Islam #History #Philosophy
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Reduction, Emergence and the Metaphysics in Science
By Carl Gillett, Northern Illinois University
Over the last century, working scientists have twice been gripped by reduction–emergence debates that they took to have a direct, and significant, impact on their research. These scientific discussions have revolved around apparently metaphysical issues about the structure of nature such as the extent of compositional relations and models/explanations, the existence of downward whole-to-part determination, and the character of the fundamental laws, among others. The centrality of compositional models/explanations to these debates, for example, is seen in the famous slogans of the rival views in these discussions. Various kinds of reductionists in the sciences have famously claimed “Wholes are nothing but their parts,” though they often mean very different things by this in distinct periods, while emergentists have contended that “Wholes are more than the sum of their parts” and, more recently, that “Parts behave differently in wholes.”
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009083423
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Tags: #Metaphysics #Science #Reductionism
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Monotheistic Hindus, Idolatrous Muslims: Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī, Dayānanda Sarasvatī, and the Theological Roots of Hindu–Muslim Conflict in South Asia
By Fuad S. Naeem, University of St. Thomas
Contrary to popular notions of a perpetual antagonism between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’, played out on Indian soil over the centuries, this article examines the relatively recent origins of a Hindu–Muslim conflict in South Asia, situating it in the reconfigurations of ‘religion’ and religious identity that occurred under British colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The multivalent and somewhat fluid categories of religious identification found in pre-modern India gave way to much more rigid and oppositional modern and colonial epistemic categories. While much has been written on how colonial policies and incipient Hindu and Muslim nationalisms shaped the contours of modern Hindu–Muslim conflict, little work has been done on the important role religious actors like Muslim and Hindu scholars and reformers played in shaping the discourse around what constituted Hinduism and Islam, and the relationship between the two, in the modern period. This study examines the first-known public theological debates between a Hindu scholar and a Muslim scholar, respectively, Swami Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824–1883), founder of the reformist Arya Samaj and first exponent of a Hindu polemic against other religions, and Mawlānā Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī (1832–1880), co-founder of the seminary at Deoband and an important exponent of Islamic theological apologetics in modern South Asia, and how they helped shape oppositional modern Hindu and Muslim religious theologies. A key argument that Nānautvī contended with was Dayānanda’s claim that Islam is idolatrous, based on the contention that Muslims worship the Ka’ba, and thus, it is not a monotheistic religion, Hinduism alone being so. The terms of this debate show how polemics around subjects like monotheism and idolatry introduced by Christian missionaries under colonial rule were internalized, as were broader colonial epistemic categories, and developed a life of their own amongst Indians themselves, thus resulting in new oppositional religious identities, replacing more complex and nuanced interactions between Muslims and followers of Indian religions in the pre-modern period.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020256
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Tags: #Monotheism #Religion #Islam #Orientalism
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Monotheism and Miracle
By Eric Eve, Harris Manchester College
Monotheism implies a God who is active in creation. An author writing a novel provides a better analogy for God's creative activity than an artificer constructing a mechanism. A miracle is then not an interruption of the ordinary course of nature so much as a divine decision to do something out of the ordinary, and miracle is primarily a narrative category. We perceive as miracles events that are extraordinary while also fitting our understanding of divine purpose. Many miracle accounts may remain problematic, however, since recognizing that a given story purports to narrate a miracle does not determine whether the miracle occurred. This Elementweighs competing narratives. In doing so the understanding of the normal workings of nature will carry considerable weight. Nevertheless, there can be instances where believers may, from their own faith perspective, be justified in concluding that a miracle has occurred.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009386500
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Tags: #Monotheism #Miracle #Religion
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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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AVICENNA AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUATION VALORIZING THE INDIVIDUALS
By Amir Hossein Pournamdar, McGill University
This study tries to shed further light on Avicenna’s (d. 1037) philosophical and linguistic innovations as suggested in his various accounts of the problem of individuation. To better contextualize his discussions, a background is given from both Porphyry’s (d. 305) Isagoge and Fārābī’s (d. 950) remarks in his Isāġūǧī. I have also enumerated all the candidates for the principle of individuation in Avicenna’s œuvre. It is argued in this paper that the pre-Avicennian Peripatetic tradition hardly engaged, both epistemologically and ontologically, with individual per se as having its own unique identity. Instead, individual was ontologically treated as instantiation of universals and epistemologically it was inquired about to the extent that it could be only told apart. Introducing the notion of individuation as tašaḫḫuṣ, instead of the traditional individuation as tamayyuz, Avicenna offers a new way of looking at intra-species differences for a more complex understanding of the individual per se. According to this view, individual with its unique šaḫṣiyya must be understood on its own through sense perception. This approach appears to propose that the individual should not be deemed as subordinate to Aristotelian universals whose assemblage, in Peripatetic thought, was vainly expected to lead to the knowledge and definition of the individual.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423924000122
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Tags: #Avicenna #Islam #Metaphysics #Epistemology
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READING BOOK II WITHIN ARITHMETICAL-ALGEBRAIC PRACTICES
THE CASE OF AL-KARAǦĪ, WITH A CONTINUATION IN AL-ZANǦĀNĪ
By Eleonora Sammarchi, University of Bern
In Arabic treatises on algebra, Book II of Euclid’s Elements quickly became a traditional work of reference, especially for justifying quadratic equations. However, in many of these treatises we find a representation of Euclid’s notions that deviates from the “original Euclid.” In this article, I focus on the way in which propositions of Book II were understood and reported by al-Karaǧī (11th c.) in two of his algebraic writings. Inspired by the variety of arithmetical practices of his time, al-Karaǧī transposed these Euclidean propositions from geometrical objects to numbers and applied them to an algebraic context. This allowed him to combine various argumentative strategies deriving from different fields. Building upon al-Karaǧī’s work, al-Zanǧānī (13th c.) no longer needed to mention Euclid and instead conceived of a justification of quadratic equations (the “cause” of the equation) which is completely internal to algebra. These case studies provide evidence for the use of the Elements as a toolbox for the development of algebra. More importantly, they shed further light upon a typical feature of medieval mathematics, namely the existence of a plurality intrinsic in the name “Euclid.”
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423924000092
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Tags: #Arabic #Mathematics #History
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On Responsibility: Islamic Ethical Thought Engages with Jewish Ethical Thought
By Ufuk Topkara, Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology
A remarkable amount of work on the study of Islamic ethical thought is published annually, covering an unprecedented variety of topics and themes. Yet despite the strides made, these debates have not addressed vital questions about how Islamic ethical thought can contribute to ongoing discourses that affect not only the Muslim community but society at large. In other words, how can we bring Islamic ethical thought into systematic engagement with modern philosophy? Specifically, how can Islamic ethical thought learn from contemporary philosophy, as it learned from Greek philosophy in the Middle Ages? And how might it be possible to develop Islamic ethical thought that can withstand both religious and rational scrutiny? In this programmatic overview, I respond to these questions by engaging with responsibility ethics within and beyond the Islamic tradition. As much as the debate about ethics has reached new heights in contemporary philosophical discourses, so too has the debate about responsibility re-emerged in theological discourses. In this paper, I bring into conversation the thought of Taha Abdurrahman on responsibility, which is nested within his larger paradigm of contemporary Islamic ethics, and Jewish thinker Hans Jonas’ concept of an ethics of responsibility. I argue that orchestrating this scholarly dialog between a 20th-century German Jewish thinker (Jonas) and a contemporary Muslim thinker (Abdurrahman) can lead to both a productive and constructive elaboration of Islamic ethical thought. Furthermore, I suggest that Habermas’ philosophy can serve as a bridge in this discussion, facilitating a comparative exploration of the ethical frameworks presented by both thinkers. By engaging with Habermas, we can highlight how Islamic thought can approach modernity, including philosophical debates, in a manner similar to that of 20th-century Jewish scholars like Jonas. This engagement not only enhances our understanding of responsibility within these traditions but also underscores the potential for interdisciplinary dialog in navigating contemporary ethical challenges.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030274
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Tags: #Islam #Judaism #Ethics #Modernism
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The Problem of God in Buddhism
By Signe Cohen, University of Missouri
Since Buddhism does not include a belief in a personal god instrumental to the creation of the world or to human salvation, it is often assumed that gods play no part in Buddhism at all. This Element complicates the simplistic assessment of Buddhism as an 'atheistic religion' and discusses the various roles deities play in Buddhist texts and practice. The Problem of God in Buddhism includes a comprehensive analysis of the Buddhist refutations of a creator God, the idea of salvation without divine intervention, the role of minor deities in Buddhism, the question of whether Buddhas and Bodhisattvas can function as gods in certain forms of Buddhism, and the notion of the sacred as apart from the divine in Buddhist traditions.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009269223
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Tags: #Buddhism #Atheism #God #Religion
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The Conceptualization of Jurisprudential Exegesis as the Intersection of Tafsir and Fiqh: A Critical Approach
By Bayram Demircigil, Sakarya University
This article comprehensively analyzes the conceptual and methodological differences between tafsīr and fiqh, two core disciplines in Islamic scholarship, emphasizing their respective relationships with the Qur’ān. The study employs a historical and comparative approach to explore key Islamic texts, highlighting the evolution of each discipline and their distinct approaches to Qur’ānic interpretation. The primary objective is to clarify the unique intellectual aims, methods, and outcomes of tafsīr and fiqh, despite both disciplines engaging with the Qur’ān as their foundational text. The research concludes that tafsīr, as an exegetical field, is dedicated to interpreting the Qur’ān’s verses by examining their original meaning within their historical, linguistic, and theological contexts. In contrast, fiqh focuses on deriving legal principles from the Qur’ān, addressing the pragmatic needs of the Muslim community through ijtihād. This foundational methodological divergence has led to the frequent merging of tafsīr and fiqh, especially in the formulation of fiqh-based tafsīr (tafsīr fiqhī), which the study contends distorts the independent scholarly character of tafsīr and obscures the distinct functions of both disciplines. This article contributes to the academic discourse by challenging contemporary interpretations of fiqh-based tafsīr, urging a more precise differentiation between tafsīr as an exegetical discipline and fiqh as a juridical field. The study advocates for a more thorough and methodical approach to Qur’ānic interpretation, stressing the importance of maintaining tafsīr’s independent role in understanding the Qur’ān in its original context, without the influence of the legal frameworks that often shape fiqh interpretations. Additionally, the article encourages further scholarly investigation into the historical progression of the Aḥkām al-Qur’ān literature, particularly about the influence of madhāhib (legal schools) on Qur’ānic exegesis. The study proposes that such future research would significantly enrich contemporary Islamic scholarship and offer a deeper understanding of tafsīr and fiqh’s roles in Qur’ānic interpretation.
Link: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020254
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Tags: #Quran #Shariah #Islam #Exegesis
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Monotheism and Peacebuilding
By John D Brewer, Queen's University
This Element addresses the opportunities and constraints operating on monotheistic peacebuilding, focusing on the three Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which share a common origin. These opportunities and constraints are approached through what the volume calls 'the paradox of monotheism'. Monotheism is defined by belief in one omnipotent, benign, and loving God, but this God does not or cannot prevent violence, war, and conflict. Moreover, monotheism can actually promote conflict between the Abrahamic faiths, and with other world religions, giving us the puzzle of holy wars fought in God's name. The first section of the Element outlines the paradox of monotheism and its implications for monotheistic peacebuilding; the second section addresses the peacebuilding efforts of three Abrahamic monotheistic religions and the constraints that operate as a result of the paradox of monotheism. This paradox tends to limit monotheistic peacebuilding to inter-faith dialogue, which often does not go far enough.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009342681
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Tags: #Monotheism #Religion #Politics #Culture
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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
