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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: ibn Sīnā

The world before and after us

18 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by Amod Lele in French Tradition, God, Metaphysics, Natural Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

George Berkeley, H.P. Lovecraft, ibn Sīnā, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Quentin Meillassoux, Speculative Realism

Over the past several years I have moved steadily away from any views that see value at the heart of reality, especially natural reality – views that often lead one to some sort of God as the author of these values. I haven’t yet mentioned a recent book that helped crystallize these atheist-ish thoughts for me. That is After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux (may-ah-SOO) – a book that basically kickstarted the Speculative Realist movement.

Continue reading →

Are there non-omnipotent gods?

30 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Faith, God, Islam, Metaphysics, Natural Science, Prayer, Supernatural

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Anselm, Elisa Freschi, ibn Sīnā, Mañjuśrī, Superman, Ted (commenter), theodicy

Several commenters had concerns about my post on not believing in God. This is understandable, since there I take a concept that a large chunk of the world’s population has oriented their lives around for over a thousand years, dismiss it in a couple short paragraphs and spend more than half the post instead discussing why I avoid calling myself an atheist.

That is to say that the topic of disbelief in God deserves more attention than I gave it there. And as most commenters pointed out, it does depend heavily on how you define God. Continue reading →

Incompleteness in knowledge and existence

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, God, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, existentialism, ibn Sīnā, Madhyamaka, Śāntideva

Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

A friend read the previous post on ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva and asked (on Google+) what exactly I meant by “incompleteness”. It was a great question and made me realize there was a bit of confusion in my own thinking.

The point of connection I saw between the two different thinkers was above all at the level of understanding the world. Continue reading →

ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva on the incompleteness of the world

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, God, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, Aśvaghoṣa, ibn Sīnā, Madhyamaka, Nāgārjuna, Śāntideva

Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

I’ve been thinking lately about MacIntyre’s explanation of the Muslim philosopher ibn Sīnā and the ways in which ibn Sīnā’s concept of God requires us to rethink the entire world around us if we accept it:

From [atheists’] standpoint a theist is someone who believes in just one more being than they do and who therefore has the responsibility for justifying her or his belief in this extra entity. But from the standpoint of the theist this is already to have misconceived both God and theistic belief in God. To believe in God is not to believe that in addition to nature, about which atheists and theists can agree, there is something else, about which they disagree. It is rather that theists and atheists disagree about nature as well as about God. For theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible, and so their disagreement with atheists involves everything. (God, Philosophy, Universities p. 47)

What’s drawing my attention is that you could write a very similar passage to characterize Buddhism. Continue reading →

Is God an intellect or a will?

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, God, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

al-Ghazālī, Aristotle, ibn Sīnā, theodicy, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham

Medieval Christian philosophy (or theology), often referred to as “scholasticism”, is often characterized as being about abstract questions with no relevance to anybody outside the scholastics’ own tradition. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is often taken as an example of their sort of irrelevant question, though as far as I know no medieval philosopher ever actually asked that question. People who characterize medieval Christian thought this way would likely also need to say the same about medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophy if they knew anything about it (which, typically, they don’t).

You will probably have guessed that I do not share this assessment of medieval thought. True, some of their questions presuppose so much that it is hard to imagine it relevant to those outside their tradition – such as the question of whether angels can occupy the same physical space, which they actually did ask. But every tradition depends on assumptions that others may not necessarily share – certainly including analytic philosophy, where so much ethical reflection depends on taken-for-granted “intuitions”. For these reasons I often refer to analytic philosophy as the scholasticism of the liberal tradition.

Yet analytic philosophy does ask questions that are relevant to those who do not share its assumptions, and the same is true of medieval thought – even on questions that might appear irrelevant at first glance. I note this point with reference to one medieval question in particular: Continue reading →

Intermediate ascents

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Amod Lele in God, Jainism, Monasticism

≈ Comments Off on Intermediate ascents

Tags

Alasdair MacIntyre, ascent/descent, chastened intellectualism, Gnosticism, ibn Sīnā, intimacy/integrity, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas P. Kasulis, Yoga Sūtras

It seems to me that the concepts of ascent and descent allow relatively easily for intermediate positions between them, compromises that attempt at a synthesis. I suspect that in this respect they are different from the related binary of intimacy and integrity. Thomas Kasulis tries to argue that intimacy and integrity are incommensurable – one may experience elements of each at once, but it is difficult to take a moderate position between them, let alone to establish a synthesis. I am not convinced that Kasulis is right about this, but I do think that at least middle grounds on intimacy and integrity are harder to establish than on ascent and descent.

For relatively few seek the pure transcendence of the Yoga Sūtras, abiding in a pure universality outside the changing world. It is an uncompromising and drastic ascent that demands we act and be with a higher universal, leaving the particulars of the world behind us. Jain monks, following a similar path, deliberately renounce dependence to all particulars up to and including food – they often end their lives through sallekhanā or santhara, intentional slow starvation. Continue reading →

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