A Common Avicennism

A Review of: Zarepour, M.S. Necessary Existence and Monotheism. An Avicennian Account of the Islamic Conception of Divine Unity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 70 pp.

Abstract

The review considers in detail Mohammed Saleh Zarepour’s book “Necessary Existence and Monotheism. An Avicennian Account of the Islamic Conception of Divine Unity”. The author characterizes his project as “analytical Avicennism”. The book examines Ibn Sīnā’s metaphysics: in particular, the doctrine of the necessary being and the identity of its existence and essence; the thesis of the a priori existence; Avicennian essentialism (his distinction between essence and existence) and Avicennian causal theory. Ibn Sīnā’s modal theory, which subdivides things into being necessary through itself, being possible through itself and being impossible through itself is discussed in detail; on its basis the thinker derives necessity of the modal distinction between necessary-existent-through-itself and necessary-existent-through-other. Returning to this metaphysics, Zarepour’s book attempts to reconstruct by the methods of analytic philosophy the so-called “proof of the righteous” and the arguments that precede it. Zarepour’s treatise contains two arguments in Plantingian style (the argument from necessary determination, the argument from necessary being), the argument from the impossibility of infinite causal chains, and the final “proof of the righteous”. All these arguments lead us to the recognition of God’s oneness. I believe that the model of Avicennism presented in this book suffers from serious incompleteness: for example, it omits the original Neoplatonic and cosmological components and presents Ibn Sīnā’s complicated and multidimensional causal theory (including, in addition to the Aristotelian four causes, the distinction of causes into primary and secondary ones) in a simplified and unexplained manner. Along with an excursion into Avicenna’s metaphysics, I present parallels to Thomism and its analytic version, and devote considerable attention to a critique of the two basic components of Avicennaism: the a priori existence and causation based on the principle of coexistence of cause and effect, in addition to a specific understanding of acting causes. In my opinion, the a priori existence thesis (at least in its epistemological context) is questionable, and Avicenna’s causal theory, combined with the usual temporal causal chains, leads to a contradiction.