Historians of philosophy in the Islamic world are increasingly unanimous in holding that the post-classical era holds many riches, contrary to the now discredited idea that philosophy died with Averroes after the onslaught of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa). Establishing this agreement among expert scholars was the (relatively) easy part. Now come the harder tasks: first, getting the message out to the non-experts and, second, doing the painstaking philological and philosophical work needed to understand post-classical philosophy. Ayman Shihadeh has for some years been at the forefront of this effort, and his new book is a major contribution to its eventual fruition. It provides an edition and analysis of a critical commentary on Avicenna's Pointers (Ishārāt) in the form of “doubts (shukūk)”, by Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī (not to be confused with the renowned historian).
Shihadeh shows that this author must have died before 600 ah/1204 ce. He is cited frequently by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, and emerges from this study as a precursor of Fakhr al-Dīn's intricate engagement with Avicenna. Al-Masʿūdī might be compared to Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and al-Ghazālī, both of whom influenced his own response to Avicenna. One may also think of Ibn Ghaylān al-Balkhī, another author of this period whom Shihadeh has brought to attention. But the comparisons are not exact. Al-Masʿūdī does adopt one of Abū l-Barakāt's distinctive theses that the human subjecthood is unified, not split across several cognitive faculties (pp. 63–4). But he does not seem to be nearly so original a thinker as Abū l-Barakāt: the positive positions he defends mostly adhere to anti-Avicennan kalām doctrines. Yet his nuanced and philosophical approach makes him unlike the highly polemical Ibn Ghaylān, and in Shihadeh's view the Doubts is unlike al-Ghazālī's Incoherence, even if al-Masʿūdī draws on this work (pp. 78, 83). Where al-Ghazālī was a mutakallim critiquing philosophy from the outside, al-Masʿūdī is more an insider (p. 84).
It would seem in any event that the Doubts was the first text to make the Ishārāt the focus of this sort of critical project, so its appearance in Shihadeh's edition is much to be welcomed. The value of the book goes beyond historical contextualization and edition of the text, however. Shihadeh offers in-depth discussions of several issues at the heart of al-Masʿūdī's critique, which often have to do with the eternity of the universe. Though one might wonder whether anything novel remains to be added on this much-discussed topic, both al-Masʿūdī and Shihadeh manage it. Avicenna could agree with the mutakallimūn that the universe is dependent on God for its existence. The debate concerned the nature of that dependence. For Avicenna, as is well known, created essences are contingent and contingent essences require an external cause to “preponderate” them to exist. Shihadeh usefully emphasizes that this is a permanent feature of contingent existence: even after being caused to exist, any contingent thing still requires an external cause to maintain or sustain it in existence (p. 90).
By contrast, the kalām understanding of creation makes it a one-time causal act: it means making something exist after it did not exist. And once God has made a thing exist, it will go on existing unless it is somehow destroyed. This, Shihadeh suggests, is why the mutakallimūn could not accept the world's eternity. They denied that creation could be an ongoing process in which the cause sustains the existence of its effect. From this they inferred that an eternally produced universe would not be created at all. As Shihadeh points out, the Avicennan view could be falsified by giving just one example of “ontological inertia” (my phrase, not Shihadeh's), in which an effect continues without being sustained by its cause. Al-Masʿūdī gives several such examples, for instance that hair dyed with henna will retain its colour without the constant application of further henna (p. 102).
A further aspect of the same debate concerns the relation between possibility and potentiality. In what Shihadeh sees as an original move (though I think it could be argued to be tacitly present even in Aristotle's arguments against the possibility of a first motion), Avicenna argues that possibility must be seated in a subject that has the potential to realize that possibility. Thus a created world, in the kalām sense of “created”, would have to be preceded by matter, which would potentially be the universe that is to come (p. 113). Against this al-Masʿūdī insists that things may simply be in themselves possible, and thus available for God to create from nothing. Al-Masʿūdī accuses Avicenna of confusing “the absence of dispositional possibility with the negation of per se possibility” (p. 133). Shihadeh leaps to Avicenna's defence here, but I think al-Masʿūdī may have a point. But I wonder whether Avicenna is so far from such a conflation himself. As Shihadeh notes, Avicenna remarks at one point that when there is no potentiality for a thing, that thing is “impossible in itself” (p. 116). Perhaps there is a solution here to a puzzle about Avicenna's system: why does he say that never-instantiated, yet conceivable, things are “impossible”? Might it be because matter is simply never suitable to become these things? This would not be an impossibility due to the lack of a particular potentiality right here and now, as Shihadeh describes (pp. 116, 126) – but rather an impossibility stemming from the fact that matter never offers the right sort of potentiality.
Shihadeh's book combines an important historical and philological contribution with rich philosophical analysis. Even readers who think they can afford to skip knowing about the relatively obscure al-Masʿūdī should consult it, if they have any interest in Avicenna's philosophy or its reception.
