Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation最新文献

{"title":"Reason Reconstituted: The Divine Attributes and the Question of Contradiction between Reason and Revelation","authors":"Carl Sharif El-Tobgui","doi":"10.1163/9789004412866_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412866_009","url":null,"abstract":"In chapter 5, we discussed Ibn Taymiyya’s charge against the philosophers that their reasoning about the world and metaphysical realities rests upon a fundamentally unsound ontology that confuses, on numerous levels, the realm of external ontological existence with the realm of notional or logical existence in the mind. Specifically, we have seen that the philosophers adopt a realist conception of universals on the basis of which they accord objective ontological status to notional realities (such as universals) that, Ibn Taymiyya insists, enjoy no more than intramental existence. As such intellectual realities are, by definition, unseen (ghayrmashhūd) and imperceptible (ghayrmaḥsūs), the philosophers identify them with the ghayb spoken of in revelation, in contrast to the shāhid realm of our ambient empirical reality. The result is a philosophical ontology that confines the perceptible (maḥsūs) to the empirical (shahāda) while reducing the unseen (ghayb) to themental or intellectual (maʿqūl). Such a scheme entails—incoherently, for Ibn Taymiyya—the affirmation of externally existent realities that are entirely notional and unperceivable (such as universals). Worse, insofar as the ghayb is reduced to the maʿqūl, the philosophers’ schemaat the same timenecessarily precludes the existence of any independent, self-standing entities (aʿyān qāʾima bi-anfusihā) in the ghayb, entities that are inherently perceptible (though veiled to our senses at the current time) and that exist independently of human reason and human minds. It is on the basis of this ontology that the philosophers end up “intellectualizing” the various unseen (ghāʾib) realities affirmed in revelation, as in their identification of angels with the “intellects” of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions or the broader philosophical view that the events of the afterlife, including the pleasures of paradise and the pains of hell, are merely graphic metaphors for what will essentially be experienced in intellectual, rather than sensory, terms in the hereafter. This confusion in ontology, according to Ibn Taymiyya, has led to a parallel confusion in the rational inferences the philosophers draw about the world.","PeriodicalId":420256,"journal":{"name":"Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation","volume":"261 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121417025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ṣaḥīḥ al-Manqūl, or What Is Revelation?","authors":"Carl Sharif El-Tobgui","doi":"10.1163/9789004412866_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412866_007","url":null,"abstract":"Wehave spoken in previous chapters of an alleged conflict between reason and revelation. Yet the notion that “reason”might contradict “revelation”means little until we define each of these two entities and determine exactly how it is that each one allegedly contradicts the other.When philosophers, theologians, and others assert a contradiction between reason and revelation, this typically means that what are taken to be the unimpeachable conclusions of reason are found to be incongruent with the “literal” (ḥaqīqa) or obvious (ẓāhir) sense of the revealed texts1 (and, most important for Ibn Taymiyya, what those texts assert about thenature and attributes of God). According to IbnTaymiyya, such thinkers essentially take the rational faculty and its deliverances as primary and require that the language of the revealed texts be (re)interpreted in congruence with reason. In other words, for the philosophers and the rationalistic mutakallimūn, the meaning of revelation is ultimately determined not by anything inherent in the texts but on the basis of (allegedly) certain and universal rational conclusions that are reached independently of the texts. Such conclusions can—and, in fact, often do (to a greater or lesser extent depending on the school in question)—contradict the plain sense of revelation, which is then","PeriodicalId":420256,"journal":{"name":"Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121091083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mise en Scène","authors":"Carl Sharif El-Tobgui","doi":"10.1163/9789004412866_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412866_002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":420256,"journal":{"name":"Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126488415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ibn Taymiyya: Life, Times, and Intellectual Profile","authors":"Carl Sharif El-Tobgui","doi":"10.1163/9789004412866_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412866_005","url":null,"abstract":"The previous chapter provided an overview of the development of the Islamic intellectual tradition over the course of the seven centuries preceding Ibn Taymiyya, with special emphasis on those aspects most relevant to our main concern—the relationship between reason and revelation—as we can piece them together from various Muslim theological, historical, and heresiographical works, as well as the secondary source materials that are based on and that analyze these works. The current section complements this background with a brief overview of the political and social circumstances of Ibn Taymiyya’s tumultuous life, followed by his biography, intellectual profile, reception by his contemporaries, and an overview of his major works that bear relevance to the Darʾ taʿāruḍ. The chaotic intellectual climate into which Ibn Taymiyya was born was matched by the political uncertainty and fragmentation of his times.1 Born in the city of Harran (located in current-day southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border) in the year 661/1263,2 IbnTaymiyya’s family fled southwest toDamascus","PeriodicalId":420256,"journal":{"name":"Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation","volume":"258 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121300919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}