Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India

The Banaras Region

Bibliographic Data

ID3969299
AuthorsBernard S Cohn, Bernard Cohn (corresponding author)
Year1962
Volume82
Issue3
Pages312
Publication date1962-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Oriental Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0279 • E-ISSN: 2169-2289
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/597642
OpenAlexW2313215614
LanguageEN
Citations received24

as one of its aspects. But there is the danger that overemphasis on this aspect might make us neglect the epistemological discussion. For this is the true key, and ultimately the only key, to our understanding of it. Avicenna was primarily a philosopher engrossed in solving and formulating problems in logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. Attempts at reconciling the scriptural with the philosophical were part of the metaphysical endeavor. But in these attempts, as with most of the Islamic philosophers, it is scripture that has to accommodate itself to philosophy and the other way round. The real implications of the theory, however, could escape the theologians in the Ashearite tradition. The theory itself was the consequence of a concept of God diametrically opposed to the theologians' view. It denied that the divine attributes were additional to essence. It identified such attributes as knowledge and will with divine essence which, for the theologian, meant the denial of these attributes altogether. By insisting that God's knowledge was conceptual, it did away with the two attributes of hearing and seeing. Individual men and their acts were shielded from God's scrutiny by a mediated conceptual knowledge that stopped at the species and could penetrate to the individual in the world of generation and corruption. For, if we have read Avicenna correctly, then our analysis vindicates that aspect of the interpretations of such critics as al-GhazAl!, al-Shahrastani and Fakhr al-Din al-Riz! who explicitly state or imply that Avicenna's God neither knows individual men nor their individual acts. The Muslim defenders of Avicenna have interpreted him as maintaining that God, by an eternal conceptual knowledge, knows each and every particular. For knowledge of a particular's universal qualities can specify the individual they belong to. But this interpretation cannot be correct since it is contradicted by Avicenna's discussion of definition where he explicitly denies that the universal qualities alone will specify the individual. Not that their interpretation of Avicenna, inaccurate as it is, would satisfy the theologian. For what is at issue is simply whether God knows all particulars individually. It is the quality of such knowledge which is also at stake. For conceptual knowledge of an individual means two things: apprehension of its abstract qualities and knowledge of the fact that these qualities belong to the individual in question. This is too abstract. The theologian in his opposition to the theory is defending his concept of an omnipotent God, personally and intimately acquainted with our innermost thoughts and acts. For the theologian, it is in this sense that not even the weight of an atom escapes His knowledge

Ancient history · Political science · Politics · Education and Islamic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Medieval and Classical Philosophy