Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Ibn Taymiyya’s Critique of the Syllogism              Before we discuss Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of syllogisms, the background knowledge of Ibn Sina and Aristotelian epistemology needs to be established. Like the Thomists, Ibn Sina was a foundationalist. Foundationalism builds new knowledge on a base of primary knowledge. Without this base, reasoning would lead to an infinite regress (constantly needing to justify each step with another, prior step). Furthermore, Ibn Sina divided knowledge into conceptualization and assent with the former being concepts of the mind such as primary and acquired concepts. Primary concepts are known immediately without the need for reasoning. Examples include fundamental notions like “thing” and “existent”. Acquired concepts, on the other hand, are obtained by forming real definitions. These definitions specify the essence of a species by indicating its genus and specific difference. For example, the conce...

Ibn Taymiyya on Ethics Utilitarianism as propagated by Jeremy Bentham states that an act is good when it produces the maximum happiness and benefit for the greatest number. Then religious utilitarianism would be maximizing happiness and benefit for this world and for the hereafter. For Ibn Taymiyya, worship of God alone is the ultimate purpose of humanity and leads to the ultimate happiness and benefit of humans. Therefore, Ibn Taymiyya thought in terms of religious utilitarianism. He applied this framework to understand God’s actions as well. Furthermore, in his ethics, “The Book and justice are inseparable. The Book explicates the law. The law is justice, and justice is the law. Anyone who judges with justice judges with the law… The entire revealed law is justice’ (MF 35:366). Law and human benefit are equivalent such that there is no benefit outside of the law as benefit is the law and law is benefit. “The principle overall is that the law never neglects a benefit. Indeed, God – Ex...

Ibn Taymiyyah on God’s Perpetual Creation            This blog post explores Ibn Taymiyyah’s philosophical perspectives on God as it relates to creation and time. Drawing from Jon Hoover’s work, “The Muslim Theologian Ibn Taymiyyah on God, Creation, and Time,” we uncover Ibn Taymiyyah’s doctrine of perpetual creation.          Ibn Taymiyyah’s sophisticated philosophy agrees with al-Ghazali and the Kalam scholars that created objects are not eternal and that they come into existence after a period of non-existence. Only God is eternal and uncreated which led to Ibn Taymiyyah to reject Avicenna’s Neoplatonic concept of eternal emanation. There is no sequence of eternal intellects and souls flowing from God to the realm of generation and decay beneath the moon. Everything apart from God comes into existence after it did not exist.          However, Ibn Taymiyya...

The Essence-Existence Distinction Under Thomas Aquinas One of my previous blogs discussed the doctrine of Divine Processions and specifically the procession of the Son by way of knowing was explained. In that blog I wrote,  “However, God knows himself perfectly and he is the only thing that can possibly understand his own essence. In his act of understanding himself it will be a perfect image with the same essence as it will be identical as it will be a reflection of his essence. Therefore, the Son proceeds by way of knowing. Knowledge is a procession. The reason why it becomes a person is because it is the perfect image of the divine essence.” This made me ask why this is the case? Could God imagine anything such as a unicorn and “by way of knowing” it exists? But then I continued to think and it hit me! Perhaps the difference between the Logos and a unicorn is that the former procession presupposes that existence is part of essence. God could imagine a perfect unicorn but that al...

Islam and Divine Simplicity *This was originally from my blog post, Notes on the Basics of Islam, but I decided to edit it out and make it its own separate post.* *Perhaps it is best to refer to my post, Overview of Athari Metaphysics, as a more in-depth part 2 of this post*      In terms of theology, does Islam affirm divine simplicity like the Christians (Catholics and most Protestants) do? Divine simplicity is the idea that God's attributes are identical to each other in His reality. Attributes, for example, are love, wrath, knowledge, and power. Any attribute that is predicated to God is identical to one another. For two things to be identical to one another they must be the same thing just as Superman is identical to Clark Kent, they are two names that are referring to the same being. Augustine, a major Christian theologian, in his book, On the Trinity , claims,  “But God is truly called in manifold ways, great, good, wise, blessed, true, and whatsoever other th...