
Avicenna: The Leading Sage - diodorus
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/avicenna-leading-sage-footnotes-plato/
======
ignoramous
The Islamic Golden Age saw scholars from Syria, Iraq, Anadlus, and Iran rise
to the fore. Many tried to consolidate the Greek-Hellenistic, Neo-Platonic,
Aristotlist, Hindu, Nesotarian, Judeo-Christian philosophies as if they were
searching for _singularity_. The foremost book in that regard is authored by
an anonymous group from Basra (Iraq) called the Ikhwan-al-Safa [0].

Meta-physics (and philosophy) was considered the highest form of _knowledge_.
And the tradition of pioneering various sciences and philosophy was started in
Medina (present-day Saudi Arabia) by a certain Mohammed Baqir and his son
Ja'far Sadiq, who at peak is believed to have taught 25,000 people [1]. Jabir
Hayyan (Geber, father of Chemistry) was Ja'far's student. Avicenna's ancestors
were Ja'far's followers, too.

At the peak of rivalry between the Abbasids of Iraq and Fatimids of Egypt (who
later invented _the Pen_ ), the _schools of wisdom_ and _schools of sciences_
were established by both as a means to compete with each other, politically
and religiously, and take over the tradition started by Mohammed Baqir. The
Nizaris would later scede from the Fatimids and settle at the Alamut Castle in
Iran under the leadership of Hasan Sabah, a student of the Egyptian school of
wisdom and the founder of the feared Hash-hasins (Assassins).

[0] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-
safa/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ikhwan-al-safa/)

[1] [https://www.al-islam.org/life-imam-jafar-al-sadiq-baqir-
shar...](https://www.al-islam.org/life-imam-jafar-al-sadiq-baqir-shareef-al-
qurashi/his-scientific-university)

------
BasilAwad
In terms of Avicenna's mentioned contingency argument for proof God, one way I
think of it is a football analogy. You can’t have a series of backward passes
into infinite, which is impossible. There has to be a first cause that doesn’t
have a cause.

Also good is one of Avicenna’s biggest critics, Al-Ghazali. His view on
occasionalism makes it easy to believe in miracles and is sunni orthodoxy in
creed. Basically if you believe that God is the creator of causes, effects,
and their relationship which is being upheld in every instance, then a
suspense of such a relationship is possible. Al-Ghazali, unlike Avicenna, is
also considered a heavy weight in sufism. For example, one critique I heard a
while back from Neil deGrasse Tyson on Al-Ghazali was that his writings is
basically what caused the end of the Islamic Golden age, because the focus
became on more on spirituality than intellectual pursuits afterwards. There
could be some truth in that. I got my first B in university when I started
reading Rumi. This was probably just laziness and not some spiritual opening.

Also popular is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. He said something a long the lines that
if you hid behind a wall and threw a pebble in front of a baby, even a baby
will turn around and see where the pebble came from. There’s a popular story
that he was walking on the streets with a large entourage and some old lady
asked “who is that guy?” and someone responded “Don’t you know! This is Fakhr
al-Din al-Razi! He has 70 proofs of God’s existence!” To which the old lady
laughed and responded “If he did not have seventy doubts for the existence of
God he would not need seventy proofs!” Upon hearing this al-Razi said everyone
should be like the old lady.

If you’re interested in islamic theology, Dr. Umar Faruq And-Allah is good.
You can find lecture series for his courses on YouTube. This is also a good
series by him ([http://qadriyya.org/lessons/aqeedah/dr-umar-faruq-abd-
allah-...](http://qadriyya.org/lessons/aqeedah/dr-umar-faruq-abd-allah-
video)). It’s a bit advanced as he’s giving the class to a muslim audience.
Also good is TJ Winters/Abdal Hakim Murad at Cambridge. I found them both to
be honest to the tradition and intellectually honest. For Quran translations,
I was told Abdel-Haleem’s is the clearest.

~~~
throw0101a
> _For example, one critique I heard a while back from Neil deGrasse Tyson on
> Al-Ghazali was that his writings is basically what caused the end of the
> Islamic Golden age, because the focus became on more on spirituality than
> intellectual pursuits afterwards._

In my layman's understanding of things, I would say that Al-Ghazli was not so
much the "cause" as the final nail in the coffin. "Islamic science" had been
twiddling over time for centuries, and _Incoherence of the Philosophers_ was
simply what put it to bed.

Toby Huff [1] puts forward the thesis that Islam was not really interested in
science, and it was simply tolerated by certain rulers. There were no
'universities' as we understand them now, as the madrasas were primarily
religious schools (per Huff) and it was all about memorizing and interpreting
the Quran. So as time went on (the argument goes), after Islam became the
dominant culture in a region, non-religious education institutions tended to
dwindle. [2] And this wasn't unique to Islam: Imperial China was also fairly
'non-curious' according to Huff. In ~1600 China was probably more advanced
than most/all of Europe, but the Jesuits could not get the Chinese interest in
(e.g.) the telescope, and after that point scientific endeavours basically did
not occur in China, and neither did technological ones—and so the Europeans
were able to walk in a few centuries later. [3] See also Mughal Empire.

As one commentator I ran across put it: Islam never had the equivalent of an
Aquinas that could reconcile Aristotle with the faith. A merging of Athens and
Jerusalem (or Mecca) as some put it. Christianity was able to trudge on
because there was no metaphysical conflict (especially when it came to
Occasionalism and secondary causation; Aquinas and even Augustine before him
rejected Occasionalism [4]), and so Natural Philosophy (aka, Science) was able
to develop.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff)

[2] See Huff's _The Rise of Early Modern Science_.

[3] See Huff's _Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution_.

[4] [https://www.iep.utm.edu/occasion/](https://www.iep.utm.edu/occasion/)

~~~
BasilAwad
Sorry for my late response. Not sure if you will ever see this.

Not sure if it’s intellectual conflict [1]. I think it’s more of motivation.
Do you care to keep exploring horizontal causes if you see causation
vertically to the fullest (all causes, effects, and relationships between
causes and effects are being upheld by God).

Also, we can’t evaluate occasionalism as a philosophy on its own.
Occasionalism is a point of creed only after certainty of God’s existence.
It’s irrelevant if you don’t believe in God.

One can still do science. Assume life is simply Conway’s Game of Life. This is
an extreme example of secondary causation where “god” wrote the code - then
evolution/causation is determined from an initial state without any further
input. In addition to doing the science of discovering the patterns of
scientific laws (in this example, patterns like oscillators, spaceships), a
person that believes in traditional sunni creed may also raise the following
questions: (1) Who is sustaining this cellar automation in every moment? In
other words, there is constant “power” running the computer. (2) We can’t take
stop at the simplest of observations as givens with their own creative agency.
In this example, everything we observe was initially defined. Extending this
example, things as simple as death can be perceived as a variable that was
defined. Death exists because of God created it. It’s not a truth that exists
independent of a Creator. (3) There is still creative precision in chaos. In
this example, no matter how chaotic the patterns in the game become, the code
that is constantly being executed is precise without a single character error.

Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error [2], an easy read, may also be of
interest.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-
causation/...](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-
causation/#AlGhaNoNecConArg) [2]
[https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/CVSP/Documents/Al-
ghazaliMcCarthy...](https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/CVSP/Documents/Al-
ghazaliMcCarthytr.pdf)

------
pmoriarty
Does anyone have a link to a version of this article that doesn't require
javascript to read?

~~~
g82918
Not really, but the article is mostly a very quick summary of a philosopher, >
"What this shows, for him, is that the body has nothing to do with what is
essential to human beings. If it did, it would be impossible for the flying
man to grasp himself, just as it is impossible to grasp the nature of humanity
without grasping that humans are essentially living things." is one major
quote about his philosophy from the article. Avicenna was much more popular in
Arabic countries, and displaced Aristotle there. The article is mostly that
this dude should be studied and featured more, but there wasn't much I took
away.

------
gerash
Slightly off topic but it seems the "Islamic world" reference to the middle
east is overmuch. No one calls the medieval west the "Christian world" as
much.

~~~
eschutte2
They do (Christendom).

