The Analytical School of Mulla Sadra

Comparative philosophy can be quite a task, a challenge for the reader who is likely to be more familiar with one of the elements of comparison rather than the other, and a challenge for the author to communicate what is philosophically commensurate between the traditions. Christian Kanzian and Muhammad Legenhausen’s collection addressing the nature of substance in the European and Iranian philosophical traditions is a step towards a serious analytic engagement with comparative philosophy, discursive, analytical and exegetical.

The significance of this volume lies not in the challenging, exciting and innovative nature of its contents but in the very act of dialogue between ‘Islamic and Western philosophy’ proposed. As an output of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, and as a result of a collaboration between the University of Innsbruck and the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qum, the volume attempts to articulate positions and approaches to philosophical problems that may facilitate a real dialogue between traditions of philosophy that have common roots but rather different historical trajectories over the past few hundred years. The editors have deliberately chosen a topic that historically has been of interest both in Islamic philosophical circles and in the European tradition, namely the central feature of Aristotelian categoriology on the nature of substances and accidents (or rather attributes in more contemporary language). As an endeavour, one can see this as one of the attempts by Iranian intellectuals to seek cultural and intellectual exchange, a process that has been ongoing for a decade at least, especially signalled by former President Mohammed Khatami's call for a 'dialogue between civilizations' which reached fruition in a number of philosophical conferences not least the massive World Congress on Mulla Sadra in Tehran in May 1999 at which around 700 academics from Europe and North America participated along with their Iranian counterparts (although one ought to point out that it is not a result of Khatami’s process). Mulla Sadra, the seventeenth century thinker well known to students of Islamic intellectual history, along with the more recent Qum-based philosopher ʿAllāmeh Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), are precisely the thinkers with whom the editors think the European traditions should be better acquainted. As a proper dialogue, some of the European contributors tackle the thought of Islamic philosophers and some of the Iranians examine elements of Aristotle and Aquinas.

However, because of the task that the editors have set, most of the contributions are rather exegetical. There is little here that either breaks new ground in analysis of aspects of the Aristotelian traditions or its Christian and Muslim modifications and expositions in later history. In its approach to Islamic philosophy, it also betrays, on the whole, an old fashioned approach to the subject demonstrated, for example, in the special issue of The Philosophical Forum in 1972, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly in 1999 and Topoi in 2002, namely a concern with topics and philosophical issues that were broadly of interest in the mediaeval European tradition and which, apart from some Catholic departments, remain beyond the concern of most departments of philosophy. Furthermore, the volume really represents a dialogue between analytical Thomism and the analyticizing school of Mullā Ṣadrā that has achieved an ascendency in Iran and is exemplified by the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute. There is particularly no attempt to consider other Islamic philosophical traditions, or even to recognise that there is a strong plurality within the world of Islam in terms of philosophical concerns and tastes. The volume also seems oblivious of the developments in the European tradition at least since the nineteenth century, in particular with the impact of Frege and the subsequent development of the Anglo-American analytical and post-analytical traditions and the parallel trajectories on the continent. A further criticism is that the concern with substance means that a number of the contributions are taken up with the question of whether God is a substance. Theologians and philosophers of religion will probably find much of interest in these chapters in particular. It would have been useful if the editors had indicated clearly what they understood by the term philosophy and the nature of the philosophical traditions that are exemplified and examined in the book.

The volume comprises fifteen chapters. Hans Burkhardt considers the structural features of substance in the thought of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz as reflections upon Aristotle’s theory of categories and the ‘ontological square’, and as attempts to further the analysis beyond the scholastic discussion of categories before Descartes. Mohammad Fanaei Eshkivari explains one of the central features of the metaphysics of Mullā Ṣadrā, the theory of motion in substance that violates the basic Aristotelian vision of substance. As such, the theory is an explicit rejection of Aristotelian and Avicennan category theory and potentially of great interest to those in process metaphysics because it signals a shift from substance to process as the primary ontological unit. Unfortunately, Eshkivari does not indicate this. Narjes Soumeahsaraei’s piece is rather different from the others as it is more straightforward and informative. It sketches the interest in the issue of substance and accident among graduate students in Qum. As such, it reveals the extent of the dominance of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā and the lack of interest in dissident approaches to philosophy such as the school of epistemological separation between the sciences known as ‘maktab-e tafkīk’. Boris Hennig engages with the critique of Aristotelianism posited by Ghazālī (d. 1111) and argues that he proposes a distinction between two types of substance that is akin to Descartes' extended and thinking (immaterial) substances. There is already an existing literature on Islamic philosophers prefiguring a number of basic Cartesian positions and one could place this chapter in that category. Mohsen Javadi compares Aristotle’s definition of substance with al-Fārābī, the first major philosopher of the Islamic tradition who was called the second teacher (Aristotle being the first). At issue in this chapter are the main task of metaphysics (a universal science concerned with particulars) and the mediaeval problem of universals.

Tomasz Kakol’s piece on Aquinas’ proof for the uniqueness of God is a classic example of the analytical Thomistic tradition in its endeavour to formalise (using the tools of symbolic logic) Thomistic arguments through careful textual analysis. Hans Kraml discusses one of the few dissidents from the Aristotelian (or Aristotelianising) tradition in the volume, namely William of Ockham. Kraml sees parallels between Ockham’s critique of essentialism and advocacy of the univocity of being and Mullā Ṣadrā’s espousal of the ontological priority of being and the mystical notion of waḥdat al-wujūd. This is quite a safe conjecture (despite his feeling that wujūd in Arabic renders existence and not being, a rather odd insistence which betrays a lack of familiarity with philosophical discussions on the nature of wujūd). At least one recent Iranian philosopher, Mahdi Haeri Yazdi (d. 1999), an analytical thinker of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto, argued in his work that waḥdat al-wujūd and even Mullā Ṣadrā’s particular definition of wujud should be described as the univocity of being. One of the editors, Muhammad Legenhausen, examines Avicenna’s arguments against the proposition that God is a substance. This is one of the strongest pieces in the volume. It argues that unlike Aristotle's insistence upon ousia as the primary reference of being qua being, Avicenna demonstrates a greater taste for the abstract. Legenhausen also engages with aspects of the debate on Avicenna’s ‘essentialism’ and, informed by the later Iranian tradition, argues that Avicenna proposes that essences (or whatnesses as he prefers) are somehow unreal and only mentally posited. Mental existence is one of the more creative aspects of metaphysics in Islamic traditions and would be a worthy topic for a future volume of ‘dialogue’.

Michael Loux, the only contributor who is based in the United States, analyses Aristotle’s constituent ontology and its relationship to hylomorphism. Shahram Pazouki provides a short and useful exegesis of the development of the concept of substance from Aristotle to Avicenna (and overlaps with aspects of Legenhausen’s and Javadi’s contributions). Pedro Schmechtig’s discussion of substance, causality and freedom is the only piece that is not exegetical. It represents a revision of agent causation theory. Ali Abidi Shahrudi’s chapter takes up the theory of motion in substance from the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā and compares it to the Sufi notion of perpetual creation. Like Eshkivari, he does not deal adequately with the basic objection to the theory: how is identity preserved through substantial change? Mohammad Ali Shomali continues the engagement with mysticism by examining the notion of psychic substance in Mullā Ṣadrā. The inclusion of these two chapters is important because the philosophy of mysticism and mystical epistemology and psychology remain central concerns among philosophers in Iran even if they may be rather neglected in European and American traditions. Erwin Tegtmeier shifts back to Avicenna on substances and accidents; but the real subject of the chapter is individuation. The final chapter by Daniel von Wachter argues that theism is compatible with ‘stuff ontology’, that one can hold that God is a substance without defending substance ontology. This, however, is not a serious shift to a process theology. While the affirmation that God is a substance was critical to Trinitarian theology, it is a position explicitly rejected by the Islamic philosophical traditions which remained suspicious of attempts at reifying and substantialising the transcendent.

Overall, I find the volume to be a bit disappointing. It does not adequately signal new trends in philosophy in Iran and it does not systematically demonstrate the revision and rejection of Aristotelian and Avicennan ousiology in the later Iranian tradition with its concomitant shift from substance to process metaphysics. The subversion of category theory and the very notion of ousia is perhaps one of the great achievements of the later Iranian tradition. It is also worth noting that the act of dialogue is certainly to be commended -- but the volume should also nod, for example, towards parallels in the engagement of Islamic philosophy and phenomenology which is emerging with at least one academic series published by Kluwer among others. The choice of the notion of substance as the focus of the volume is thus also a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, if the volume encourages more engagement with Islamic philosophy and excites some interest, then that will be an excellent outcome that may enrich our understanding of philosophy, its histories and traditions. In an age of multiple philosophies, it would be a positive step for more philosophy departments to embrace and engage with Islamic philosophy and its traditions which are far more cognate and familiar than other eastern philosophies. There are greater possibilities for this with the growing academic literature on Islamic philosophy and the appearance of fluent and quite excellent translations of key texts (a number of which are cited in this volume). Finally, we are witnessing the emergence of a generation of philosophers in the Islamic tradition such as Legenhausen, who are well placed to facilitate this embrace and to act as astute interlocutors capable of engaging with the mainstream traditions of philosophy in European and Anglo-American academia.

Addendum: Muhammad Legenhausen responded to some of my points in a private e-mail:

1) He disputes the point that the collection is outdated and exegetical and insists that the analytic tradition is returning to the question of substance. Of course, whether they are reviving in interest in the Aristotelian and mediaeval conceptions of substance is a different matter.

2) He is not convinced by the neglect of a process metaphysical (and theological) need to address features of Mulla Sadra's thought as he thinks the similarities with Whitehead are superficial.

3) He also disputes my point that most of the papers are primarily exegetical.

Princeton MSS

The Arabic and Persian (and generally the Islamic) mansucripts constitute arguably the best collection in North America, acquired over time and divided into the Yahuda, Garrett, New Series and other collections. You can access the catalogues here. It is particularly rich in philosophical and Shii theological material. In the past, I've consulted some of the material of Fakhr al-Dīn Sammākī, who was Mīr Dāmād’s main teacher in philosophy, and Sayyid Niẓām al-Dīn Dashtakī (whose majmūʿa of treatises are rich and often confused with better known philosophers – about a decade ago his Risālat al-wujūd was published under the mistaken attribution to Mullā Ṣadrā by Ḥāmid Nājī Iṣfahānī in the Majmūʿa-ye rasāʾil-e Ṣadr al-mutaʾallihīn).

On this brief trip, I’m consulting a couple of mss of Mullā Shamsā Gīlānī (d. c. 1088H), a student of Mīr Dāmād. MS New Series Arabic 62 is his valuable set of glosses on the later commentary (sharḥ jadīd) upon Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād of ʿAlī al-Qūshjī as well as upon the glosses (taʿlīqāt) of Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. c. 1550), the Shirazi philosopher upon the text. It focused on maqṣad III on the proof of the existence of God, one of the most popular sections of the Tajrīd which were glossed. The other is a majmūʿa of Mullā Shamsā’s work on the question of creation (ḥudūth al-ʿālam) – MS New Series Arabic 994. This includes a short and valuable discussion of the nature of divine knowledge, a discussion that was also central to Khafrī’s comments on maqṣad III of the Tajrīd. I really need to return to my proposed book on Time and Creation and hence this is a gesture towards that.

Philosophy and Theology in the Mediaeval Imāmī Shiʿi Tradition

Those who understand the intellectual history of the world of Islam after Ghazālī (d. 1111) tend to recognise that philosophical inquiry coupled with systematic theology and a mystic’s desire to attain non-propositional and immediate knowledge of the divine remained a central concern of Imāmī learned culture.
The central figure in the mediaeval period who promoted the rational and metaphysical turn, influenced by the outstanding philosopher Avicenna (d. 1037), the prominent Muʿtazili thinker Abū-l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī (d. 1085) and the prominent Imāmī philosopher-scientist Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274), was al-Ḥasan b. Yūsuf Ibn Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī usually known as al-ʿAllāma (1250–1325, q.v. Ḥellī at www.iranica.com). While there is a large literature on him in Arabic and Persian, much of which is rather hagiographical, one useful introduction to his thought and his intellectual contribution is Sabine Schmidtke’s published Oxford D.Phil dissertation. Much of her work was based on manuscript research. However, now that practically all of his texts are available in editions (some more critical and reliable than others), it would be useful for someone to take up a more thorough study of his thought and locate it within the intellectual history of philosophical and theological inquiry in Imāmī Shiʿism. To facilitate this, I want to indicate some of his works in falsafa and kalām that may be worth studying (I set aside for the moment his polemical kalām works such as Minhāj al-karām fī-l-imāma, Nahj al-ḥaqq wa-kashf al-ṣidq and Alfayn even though they do engage in a rational critique of Ashʿarī thought):

Kalām:
1) Manāhij al-yaqīn fī uṣūl al-dīn – early but comprehensive completed in 1281 and bears the influence of Baṣrī; it was published in Qum in 1995 by Muḥammad Riḍā Anṣārī-ye Qummī;
2) Nuẓum al-barāhīn and his commentary on it Maʿārij al-fahm fī sharḥ al-nuẓum which was completed in 1280; this was recently edited in Qum and published in 2006;

3) Anwār al-malakūt fī sharḥ al-yāqūt, completed in 1285 commenting upon a short and relatively unknown work of a Nawbakhtī entitled al-Yāqūt, published by Intishārāt-i Bīdār in Qum in 1984, later his student al-Aʿrajī wrote a critical supercommentary which was published by Mīrās-i maktūb in Tehran in 1996;

4) His most famous work Kashf al-murād fī sharḥ tajrīd al-iʿtiqād, a commentary on the pithy Tajrīd of his teacher Ṭūsī was completed around 1297 and remains a seminary textbook; there are many printings of the book, one of the best is the Qum edition of 1988 with the glosses of the contemporary philosopher Ḥasanzāda Āmulī;

5) Taslīk al-nafs ilā ḥaẓīrat al-quds, a shortish work completed in 1304 which potentially could be used as a school-text; it was edited by Fāṭima Ramaḍānī and published in Qum in 2005 by Shaykh Jaʿfar Subḥānī’s Muʾassasat al-Imām al-Ṣādiq;

6) Nihāyat al-marām fī ʿilm al-kalām, incomplete and what he have was completed in 1320; the mature expression of his theology and published by Subḥānī, edited by Fāḍil ʿIrfān in 1999 in 3 volumes;

7) and al-Bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar, perhaps his last work completed in 1323 and for many years the elementary of the Shiʿi seminary; this text is usually printed with the commentary of al-Miqdād al-Siyūrī and edited by Mehdi Mohaghegh and has been printed in Tehran since the late 1980s repeatedly.

Philosophy (excluding logic – there is an interesting commentary on the Topics of which there is a unicum in Tehran University Central Library and has been edited by Ahmed al-Rahim as part of his Yale Ph.D.):

1) al-Asrār al-khafiyya fī –l-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya, completed in 1280 and his most significant work in this area; published Qum in 2000 by the Daftar-i tablīghāt-i Islāmī;

2) Īḍāḥ al-maqāṣid fī sharḥ ḥikmat al-ʿayn, completed in 1295 on the school-text of Dabīrān Kātibī Qazwīnī (d. 1267); published in Tehran in 1958;

3) Kashf al-khifāʾmin kitāb al-shifāʾ, incomplete commentary on the metaphysics of the famous Avicennan text of which only a section of the commentary on the categories remains (MS Chester Beatty, Dublin 5151).

Editions of Philosophical Texts

The production belt churning out critical editions of important intellectual texts in Arabic and Persian in Iran is quite prolific. It has become quite an industry. I will attempt to give some impressions of some recent texts that have been produced beginning with the new editions of the works of Mulla Sadra produced by the Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute soon. Watch this space...

Philosophy in the World of Islam

For those of use engaged in teaching Islamic philosophy, a key problem has been the lack of sources available in translation. To an extent, this situation is improving with the publication of a Classical Arabic Philosophy reader produced by David Reisman and Jon McGinnis for Hackett and with this new volume edited and translated by Khalidi and published by Cambridge University Press of a selection of mediaeval texts.

Orientalists have often assumed that philosophy played a rather marginal role in Islamic civilisation. They regarded the ‘free inquiry’ of the philosophical enterprise in Islam as antithetical to the dogmas of the faith and as mere Hellenism in an Arabic garb. However, for some time now interest in Islamic philosophical traditions has been growing prompted no doubt by a realisation that philosophical discourses impinge upon a variety of intellectual, artistic and cultural endeavours in the world of Islam. I would suggest three small reasons for stressing the significance of philosophy in classical Islam (I leave it to the readers to gauge what its significance may be in the present troubled world in which we live). First, the value ascribed to the impetus to philosophical inquiry is clear in the many stories recorded concerning the value ascribed both to translators of Greek philosophical texts and the actual translations in ʿAbbasid Baghdad. Would patrons and scholars pay so much for those precious volumes if they considered their contents to be worthless or inimical to their culture? Second, the development of the madrasa sciences in particular the ‘master-science’ of jurisprudence is almost unthinkable without the influence of philosophy, especially the logic of the syllogistic. Third, whilst many are familiar with al-Ghazali’s condemnation of key heretical doctrines espoused by philosophers, one cannot fail to notice the profound influence of philosophical doctrines and modes of argumentation upon him. Avicenna’s previous ‘discovery’ of a truly Islamic philosophy, a system of metaphysics, epistemology and psychology that naturalised neoplatonising Aristotelianism without the framework of the worldview of Islam had a decisive and lasting influence that could not be negated by al-Ghazali. Philosophy dominated intellectual inquiry. So far so good. However, the real intellectual tragedy of the Muslim world in the modern period has been precisely the forgoing of their intellectual traditions, especially philosophy, and the forsaking of a critical engagement with modes of thinking from within their traditions. The work under review is not going to signal a revival of philosophical inquiry in the wider Muslim world. But it is an important contribution within an academic wave of interest in Arabo-Islamic philosophy. Cambridge University Press seems to have recognised this with its publication of a pioneering and cutting-edge Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and with this volume translated and arranged by Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a philosophy don at the American University of Beirut.

A welcome aspect of the renewed interest in Islamic philosophy is that researchers have taken the subject away from Islamic studies specialists (who were often suspicious of its significance and rather incapable of understanding its discourses) and have located the study of Islamic philosophy within philosophy. Philology is only a tool in the study of key texts and traditions, and Khalidi is keen to stress that his choice of these medieval texts is with a contextualising eye upon contemporary philosophical concerns. That is one of the ways in which he understands the difference between the history of philosophy and intellectual history. The latter for him is more of an inquiry that seeks to contextualise and locate ideas within their intellectual and cultural milieux. History of philosophy on the other hand is a philosophical inquiry that seeks to understand where we are and how we got there intellectually. The Cambridge series on the History of Philosophy has the laudable aim to ‘expand the range variety and quality of texts in the history of philosophy’. It seeks to provide full texts for students that have applications beyond philosophy in theology and the history of ideas as well. The question that arises is whether this present volume really fulfils that aim in its choice and vision. From a more ambitious perspective, it is disappointing to see CUP allocating a mere volume to Islamic philosophy, and at that limiting it to medieval texts. Even within the remit of medieval philosophy, CUP has a multi-volume publication on medieval philosophy divided into the sub-disciplines of logic, ontology, epistemology and so forth. Other texts that deal with philosophical theology from the early modern and enlightenment periods abound as well. Given the fecundity of the Islamic traditions, it is thus a bit of a shame that more volumes have not been considered to take their place alongside these publications. Khalidi’s selection also reveals a particular vision of ‘Western’ philosophy that considers some key Islamic thinkers to be part of their canon through their translations into Latin that influenced scholastic thinkers. Thus the familiar retinue of al-Farabi to Averroes are brought out once again. However, Khalidi could have extended this scope by including other thinkers who are not part of the whiggish story of Western philosophy and who were never translated into Latin. To take one key example, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (d. 1191), the founder of the illuminationist philosophy tradition was never translated into Latin but is undoubtedly one of the great figures of an Islamic canon.

Khalidi has selected excerpts from five texts of which four already enjoy English translations (and in fact the fifth has translations in other European languages). He focuses on metaphysics and epistemology (bizarrely commenting that Muslim thinkers did not recognise such a branch of philosophy) and not the ‘practical’ disciplines of ethics and political philosophy. The neglect of the latter two may be due to the existence of studies and translations in particular by Muhsin Mahdi and his ‘school’. His choice is an attempt at engaging with these medieval Islamic thinkers and eschewing a condescending tendency to approach them as ‘historical oddities’. His introduction thus proceeds with brief propaedeutics and contextualisations of the texts. The first text is the Book of Letters (Kitab al-huruf) of al-Farabi and Khalidi selects the famous passages on the advent and nature of language, the relationship between religion and philosophy, and the means by which we translate philosophical concepts across different cultures. He does not mention the crucial relationship of the text with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, nor does he include two important monographs (among others) in his guide to further reading that deal precisely with these themes: Joep Lameer’s quite excellent Al-Farabi and Aristotelian Syllogistics, and Shukri Abed, Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in Alfarabi. The second text is the pivotal De Anima of Avicenna, selecting famous passages on the nature of the soul and its intellection. Avicenna’s doctrine of the soul as an individual and immortal substance that can enjoy personal salvation is a critical example of his ‘Islamic philosophy’. Khalidi claims that the need for his translation of this work is due to the ‘dated’ nature of Rahman’s language in his translation (and edition) from the 1950s. The third text is arguably one of the best known of medieval Islamic texts, the famous ‘apology’ of al-Ghazali al-Munqidh min al-dalal. Khalidi selects the section of the four paths to truth. Once again this text enjoys a number of good translations already including the classic one by Montgomery Watt. Furthermore, in recent years the main debate about al-Ghazali has been his relationship with philosophy; so why not select works that deal with his use of philosophy and which are unavailable to Anglophone students? The fourth text, the philosophical allegory of Hayy ibn Yaqzan of Ibn Tufayl as an example of the famous thought experiment of how a rational agent nurtured in an isolated location comes to knowledge and mystical insight. Once again there are numerous good translations of the text. The final selection is from another famous medieval Islamic philosophical text, the Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroes’ refutation of al-Ghazali’s condemnation of philosophy. Here Khalidi focuses on the famous arguments about the possibility of secondary causality. His attempt cannot possibly supplant the excellent translation and annotation of Simon van den Bergh. Compared with other volumes in this CUP series, there are very few footnotes, usually not of a discursive nature and the introduction is rather deficient in providing the wider context and the important questions about the reception and legacy of these works and upon the ideas that Khalidi focuses. What happened to these works and to the philosophical enterprise?

While Khalidi’s volume will find its way onto reading lists as an affordable paperback that collates key readings, it is a missed opportunity. It is rather old-fashioned in its approach and selection. Contrary to the aims of the series, it does not make hitherto unavailable texts known, nor does it expand one’s grasp of the history of philosophy, nor indeed does it improve the quality of existing texts. Khalidi should have opted for a fresh selection, one that would have been consistent with contemporary research and attuned to contemporary philosophical concerns. The introduction and guide to further reading should have been more substantial and the annotation to the translations more appropriate. But in his defence at least he has produced something that can be used. It is now up to the rest of us who love the philosophical traditions of Islam to produce usable translations that will expand the philosophical canon of metropolitan academia and seek to quench the intellectual thirst of students, Muslim or non-Muslim.

How not to seek beauty in Islam

Oliver Leaman has written yet another challenging and iconoclastic work. Perhaps the most surprising result of this intriguing (and it must be said infuriating) work is that he denies not only that there is such a thing as Islamic art but also that consequently there is no Islamic aesthetic. This might well be disturbing for a reader who has picked up a volume that purports to introduce the notion of Islamic aesthetics! In fact, this book does nothing of the sort; it deconstructs naïve concepts of Islamic art and its appreciation but does not offer an alternative aesthetics. Leaman’s key claim (which may seem laudable) is that one ought to move away from essentialising and objectifying disciplines in Islam. Just as philosophy is philosophy, art is art. The adjective ‘Islamic’ does not qualify anything but merely obscures, occludes and insists that one needs some special training to ‘appreciate’ it. In a sense this is worrying news for the Islamic art historian. But the real question to consider is whether it is true: is there such a thing as Islamic art? Is there a particular Islamic aesthetics? In order to answer this question, we need to reconsider Leaman’s argument and his actual aim in making it, which seems to me to be breaking the closed shop of Islamic art historians and snatching the aesthetic prism away from romantic visions of the ‘essential spirituality of Islamic art’.

Leaman begins with setting his sights upon Islamic art historians. He takes them to task for a number of misconceptions. First, by qualifying their objects of inquiry as Islamic they do not take those objects seriously as art. Second, they insist on a particular training in Islamic civilisation to understand what they call Islamic art. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they offer no serious aesthetic theory. These attacks will certainly come as a shock to a number of Islamic art historians who would certainly refuse to admit any of these points. Like Leaman’s earlier attack in the early 1980s on historians of Islamic philosophy, this present attack may apply to some practitioners but cannot really be applied to the majority. As before, Leaman’s iconoclastic zeal destroys far too much.

Leaman’s work is divided into nine chapters which all share a particular theme. The wrong-headed ways in which people approach Islamic art are merely symptomatic of their more general mistaken analyses of the Islamic faith, Islamic thought and Islamic civilisation. Chapter 1 begins with ‘eleven common mistakes about Islamic art’. Most of these relate to the sin of essentialism in which Islamic studies specialists are seen to be so heavily implicated. He rubbishes the idea that Islamic art is essentially a spiritual, Sufi meditation upon symbolism in Islam, in particular exemplified by the iconic centrality of the Kaʿba. Over-enthusiastic symbolic interpretation is an esoterist’s art; it does not explain, it merely mystifies. Calligraphy is the Islamic art par excellence; another mistake that renders other art-forms somewhat inauthentically ‘islamic’. Two of these mistakes are directly linked to Leaman’s earlier work on Islamic philosophy: al-Ghazālī is accused of having killed off painting, just as he did with philosophy, and Islamic art is seen as a marginal pursuit to the concerns of Islamic civilisation. However, none of these salient and laudable critiques amount to a proper denial of the possibility of Islamic art, let alone its actuality.

The second chapter moves on to a popular motif in the study of Islamic art and creativity, namely the postulation that in Islam only God can create and act. If that is the case, the idea that humans can create and fashion artefacts would seem to be a blasphemy. If God alone is al-khāliq and al-muṣawwir, then surely there can be no Islamic art? Leaman articulates this nonsensical contradiction to further his argument against essentialist approaches to Islamic art. Art cannot be reduced to the playful manipulation of existing symbols. Leaman invokes the related theological debate about secondary causality, that is, whether it is only God who acts in the cosmos or whether humans (among others) are real agents possessing ability, will and action. He suggests that much of the essentialist approach is predicated on the simple premiss that the essence of Islam and its theology is Ashʿarite, rejecting secondary causality, affirming an atomistic cosmos and denying true agency and creativity to humanity. Any student of Islamic intellectual history knows that this is a gross generalisation. But the nature of Leaman’s exaggerated argument is that it depends upon the construction of an oppositional position that is extremely flimsy and therefore easy to destroy.

The following chapters develop Leaman’s argument by considering particular art forms like literature (including a discussion of the miraculous literary quality of the Qurʾan), music, gardening, and architecture. Throughout one perceives the pernicious Ashʿarite thought lurking in the wings and one cannot help feeling that this present book owes much to Leaman’s earlier work on philosophy. The discussion on the nature of the Qurʾan is particularly salient because it encapsulates a particular aesthetic vision since the dogma of the scripture is so closely associated with an aesthetic judgement of its inimitability. Leaman concludes the book with two short chapters on the importance of philosophy and the desire to approach art as art and not as a mere cultural artefact or symbol. He is right to argue that philosophy does indeed determine the ways in which we see the cosmos, how we see it and what exactly it is that we see. This is where aesthetics begin to connect with epistemology. Each Islamic philosophical tradition has a specific doctrine of interpretation that define three categories of entities: things in themselves, the world in which they dwell and the words that we use to articulate them. Our very act of seeing is both a representation as well as an act of interpretation. Leaman raises an interesting question about whether there can be an Illuminationist, Peripatetic or Sufi aesthetics of representation. But would that in any case entail a consistent, timeless Islamic aesthetics? The very fact that art is respected (or was at least) in Islamic civilisation is a recognition of the importance of representation and interpretation. This is a situation quite unlike the disdain for art in a Platonic utopia. Plato famously criticised art for being a doubled inauthentic imitation: at the first level the thing in this world is already a pale imitation of the perfect form in the higher intelligible realm, and at the second level the artist produces an even paler imitation of the thing in his artistic representation. To invoke his allegory of the cave, it is as if the artist lives within a further cave and is hopelessly remote from reality. Islamic theologians and philosophers did not on the whole have such an austere disregard for things in this world or for the possibilities of beauty here. If anything, Islamic thought can (another gross generalisation yes) be considered to have an optimistic approach to the possibilities of knowing what exists and to recognise that this world and things that exist in this world possess reality as well. Two essentialist slogans (one aesthetic and the other theological albeit with a meaningful message within them) are worth bearing in mind: God is beautiful and loves beauty (as the famous aphorism/tradition has it), and this world is the ‘best of all possible worlds’. Can one possibly forsake art when the theologian insists that God does not forsake the world? Would we want to live in such a disenchanted and alienated world?

Leaman’s book does raise some interesting questions: is there such a thing as Islamic art? Can Muslims countenance a secular art? Whither the study of philosophy in Islamic culture? Can one produce an aesthetic theory that applies to Islamic civilisation? These are important intellectual matters that ought to exercise Muslim minds. Perhaps because of the nature of the present world situation, Muslims (especially Muslim thinkers) seem to be in such a state of siege that discourse beyond the practicable and the tangible seems to be anathema. But intellectual life sustains and nurtures. The intellectual and cultural products of a civilisation are indispensable aspects of its identity and its sustaining power. It is thus more crucial than ever that Muslims regain the significance of ideas and struggle in the global market of ideas and for this jihad a proper understanding of philosophy (including aesthetics), its historical development and its commitment are more important than ever before. This reviewer has no straightforward answers to offer; all that he can do is to indicate the questions that he thinks are worth pursuing. Such a pursuit of doing well (call it iḥsān or following the old Zoroastrian saying call it ‘thinking, speaking and acting well’) increasingly becomes one of the few resources left to our humanity.

Analysing Thomist Metaphysics

Anthony Kenny’s book Aquinas on Being is consistent with his analytical engagement with the Catholic tradition in which he was trained as a priest. His work on a thinker who has stayed with him all these years since his seminary days is at once an erudite and incisive, analytical critique as well as an infuriatingly unsympathetic analysis of the famous medieval thinker. Ever since his Past Masters’ volume on Aquinas, Kenny has exhibited a mixed reception of Aquinas, a reception that is entirely consistent with the tastes and concerns of the analytic tradition since the 1960s: an appreciation of the philosophy of the mind culminating in his Aquinas on Mind, and a whole scale rejection of the metaphysics expressed in this volume in which he charges Aquinas with thorough confusion in face of the problem of existence. It would be quite easy to fault and praise this volume under review solely on the basis of the contrasting methodology of the ‘two traditions’ of philosophy. There is little doubt that even without the neo-Thomism of Gilson et al, the study of Aquinas and medieval thinkers like him remains a mainstay of the ‘continental tradition’ of philosophy extending to Catholic philosophers in North America. For these thinkers, the metaphysical concerns and the holistic claims of Thomism are of great interest and consistent with the project of philosophy. Catholic philosophers such as the late Norman Kretzmann (d. 1998) have within the analytic tradition also articulated a staunch defence of Thomistic metaphysics, in particular in The Metaphysics of Theism and The Metaphysics of Creation. If, for Kenny, Aquinas’ thinking on being is so muddled, why bother writing a volume on it? Why study the history of philosophy merely to condemn past practitioners?

One virtue of Kenny’s work has been the attack on Thomism and much woolly thinking that sometimes goes under that name. However, serious inquiry on the thought of Aquinas has greatly expanded in the past decades and not just from confessional perspectives. Kenny outlines his project in the preface. He begins with an assumption, astonishing perhaps for an analytic philosopher, that ‘the subject of being is one of the most important of all philosophical concerns’ (p. v). He goes on to say that he will examine one great philosopher’s approach to being and from that demonstrate that it is ‘thoroughly confused’ (p. v), partly to allow for a critical reassessment of Aquinas that seeks to jettison those unacceptable aspects of his metaphysics that are precisely central to theological rehabilitation of Aquinas. Kenny’s aim is, therefore, no free inquiry but with a clear agenda and goal. But the foundation of this, as I remarked is peculiar. Is being such a central philosophical concern? Is it a rich concept or a simple and thin concept as many contemporary philosophers see it? Is it even fair to criticise the confused nature of Aquinas’ concept of being when it is clear, as Kenny admits, that Aquinas does not have a unified concept of being using both the Latin terms ens and esse to render the concept and describing at least twelve different senses and contexts in which Aquinas uses the term esse?

A study of the systematic failure of an elaborate metaphysics need not be in vain and one learns that Kenny thinks that there is much to be understood from these failures; after all, as he says, ‘all great philosophers have engendered great errors… It is no disrespect to the genius of Aquinas to try to dissolve some of the confusions on the nature of being to which he appears to have succumbed. We can gain rewarding insights by exploring even the false trails of a great mind’ (p. x).

Kenny sets out on this false trail by assembling a number of passages arranged chronologically in which Aquinas’ views on being as expressed. Nine chapters follow on the analysis of being in different works beginning with the early De Ente et Essentia and culminating with Aquinas’ commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Kenny acknowledges the Avicennan influence on the early text (p. 1) and the Neoplatonic influence on other works but does not adequately contextualise Aquinas’ writings. Analytic history of philosophy tends to approach texts as contemporary interlocutors and has little time of contextualisation, historicism and conventionalism (whether social or linguistic). Further, it tends to read the text of the past purely in the light of its own concerns. Kenny, therefore, writing, thinking and analysing in the aftermath of the linguistic turn, is mainly concerned with how Aquinas talks about being and existence, focusing on the semantics of existential propositions and not the metaphysical concerns of Aquinas himself. One would not wish for an obscurantist opposite extreme that would read Aquinas wholly and solely ‘on his own terms’ but one would expect some respect for the context and scholarly aims of the philosopher. Ultimately one either accepts, modifies or rejects the philosophical enterprise of the text which one encounters. For those seeking a more sympathetic yet analytic approach to Aquinas, Kretzmann or the work of Gyula Klima would be a better reference point. Perhaps the real question is how one ought to read Aquinas (or indeed any medieval thinker). The fecundity of their work and the constant re-visitation of the same questions and topics would suggest that they were continually changing and adapting the way they approached questions within the contexts in which they were posed. Those different passages therefore ought to be read alongside each other cognisant of their contexts in order to allow a clearer picture and doctrine to emerge. Kenny would have little sympathy with such an approach and does not allow for the conditions to obtain.

The general charge is that Aquinas’ views are obscure and confused. Kenny considers the twelve senses of esse to be a major obstacle which stops Aquinas from bringing into a consistent whole his insights on being. This leads him to three major critical conclusions (pp. 192-93):

1) Aquinas fails to recognise the distinction between being and existence.

2) Aquinas surrenders to a Platonic affirmation of pure forms and spiritual substances in the celestial firmament while at once rejecting it in the sublunar level.

3) Aquinas’ identification of God with subsistent being (Avicenna’s necessary of existence) is ‘deeply disturbing’.

Are these defects ascribable to Aquinas and are they in fact defects? Are these obscurities due to the language of being or to the attempt at articulating an ontological separation between this world and the divine? It is not clear what Kenny’s alternatives to these three defects are. Consider the first one. Aquinas’ main concern is the ontological distinction between divine necessary being and contingent existence. He also articulates a fairly opaque but consistent distinction between the actuality of esse (actus essendi) and existence. This does not amount to failing to recognise a distinction between being and existence. The significant of these three charges is precisely that some many medieval thinkers would be susceptible to them, not least the ‘father’ of them all Avicenna. But does that make them mistakes? Can they only signal theological affirmation and not philosophical inquiry and even defence?

Kenny finally tries to explain Aquinas’ mistakes in a final act of charity by citing these reasons for his lapses. First, even ‘better’ philosophers on existence such as Frege, the founding father of the analytic tradition as Michael Dummett puts it, made mistakes, so why not Aquinas? Second, Aquinas was remarkably prolific and one cannot expect such a writer to lack unresolved inconsistencies in his work. Third, Aquinas’ inclusive approach and style led him to overlook the errors in others’ thought and thus became susceptible to Neoplatonic errors. Each of these excuses can quite easily be set aside; they certainly do not explain Aquinas’ ‘errors’ nor are they a fair assessment of them. One can only assume that Kenny felt some obligation to try to excuse Aquinas of the gross errors of which he accused him.

Nevertheless, Aquinas on Being is challenging, captivating and exciting. It is certainly not the last analytic word on the subject, not even, one suspects, from the pen of Kenny. If the reader comes away with the sense that Kenny has not satisfied the problem and thus seeks to inquire further, then the book will have played the ultimate role in philosophical inquiry of asking questions and provoking thought.