“All knowledge is either conception or assent”. On the history and significance of a fundamental distinction in Islamic philosophy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21597909 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dustin D Klinger (0000-0002-3850-1375, University of Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1409-1429 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-02 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal for the History of Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0960-8788 • E-ISSN: 1469-3526 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09608788.2024.2400475 |
| OpenAlex | W4404022232 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
Following Aristotle, classical Islamic philosophers distinguished between two types of knowledge: conception and assent. This paper argues that the discussions elicited by this distinction are an essential feature of postclassical Islamic philosophy (ca. 1200–1800). The early postclassical philosophers made the distinction central to logic and thereby to epistemology and scientific inquiry at large. As the distinction came to be perceived as problematic, it sparked philosophical arguments about a range of issues in logic and epistemology. One particularly pertinent problem was the nature of the distinction itself: it was understood as an exclusive disjunction, but it seemed impossible to define one notion without recourse to the other. In the fourteenth century this led to the emergence of a new genre of philosophical writings exclusively dedicated to discussing the precise nature of the distinction. This paper discusses some of the central arguments of these writings, showing how philosophers grappling with that problem devised new theories of judgement and new forms of the proposition as they were continuously developing their theory of knowledge
Epistemology · Islam · Theology · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy
The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam
Thinking with Rosa
Forms of Carroll’s Paradox in Post-Classical Arabic Logic
Post-Avicennan Logicians on the Subject Matter of Logic
Meno’s Paradox and First Principles in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī
Does a Proposition Have Three Parts or Four? A Debate in Later Arabic Logic
غیر المعلوم یمتنع الحکم علیه (Ghayr al-maʿlūm yamtaniʿ al-ḥukm ʿalayhi)
The Terms Tasa Wwur and Tasdtq in Arabic Philosophy and Their Greek, Latin and Hebrew Equivalents
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |