The Philosophy Book
Page 10
Most contemporary philosophers reject mind-body dualism, largely because of the increasing scientific knowledge of the brain. Avicenna and Descartes were both very interested in physiology and they produced scientific accounts of activities such as movement and sensation. But the process of rational thinking was inexplicable with the scientific tools of their times. We are now able to explain quite precisely how thinking goes on in different areas of the brain—though whether this means that we can explain thinking without reference to a self is not so clear. An influential 20th-century British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, caricatured the dualists’ self as “a ghost in the machine”, and tried to show that we can explain how human beings perceive and function within the world without resorting to this “ghost” of a self.
Today philosophers are divided between a small number of dualists, a larger number of thinkers who say that the mind is simply a brain, and the majority, who agree that thinking is the result of the physical activity of the brain, but still insist there is a distinction between the physical states of the brain (the gray matter, the neurons, and so on), and the thinking which derives from them.
Many philosophers, especially continental European thinkers, still accept the results of Avicenna’s thought experiment in one central way. It shows, they say, that we each have a self with a first-person view of the world (the “I”) that cannot be accommodated by the objective view of scientific theories.
Philip Pullman’s tale, Northern Lights, picks up on the ancient Greek idea of a person’s soul, or daimon, being separate to the body, by presenting it as an entirely separate animal, such as a cat.
AVICENNA
Ibn Sînâ, or Avicenna as the Europeans called him, was born in 980 in a village near Bukhara, now in Uzbekhistan. Although he wrote mainly in Arabic, the language of learning throughout the Islamic world, he was a native Persian speaker. Avicenna was a child prodigy, rapidly surpassing his teachers not only in logic and philosophy, but also in medicine. While still in his teens, he became known to the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur as a brilliant physician, and was given the use of his magnificent library.
Avicenna’s life was spent in the service of various princes, both as physician and political adviser. He started writing at the age of 21, and went on to write more than 200 texts, on subjects as diverse as metaphysics, animal physiology, mechanics of solids, and Arabic syntax. He died when his medications for colic were altered, possibly maliciously, while on campaign with his patron Alâ al-Dawla.
Key works
c.1014–20 Book of Healing
c.1015 Canon of Medicine
c.1030 Pointers and Reminders
See also: Plato • Aristotle • Al-Kindî • Al-Fârâbî • Thomas Aquinas • René Descartes • Gilbert Ryle
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
c.400 CE St. Augustine of Hippo argues for God’s existence through our grasp of unchanging truths.
1075 In his Monologion, Anselm develops Augustine’s proof of God’s existence.
AFTER
1260s Thomas Aquinas rejects Anselm’s Ontological Argument.
1640 René Descartes uses a form of Anselm’s Ontological Argument in his Meditations.
1979 American philosopher Alvin Plantinga reformulates Anselm’s Ontological Argument using a form of modal logic to establish its truth.
Although Christian thinkers believe as a matter of faith that God exists, in the Middle Ages they were keen to show that God’s existence could also be proved by rational argument. The Ontological Argument invented by Anselm—an 11th-century Italian philosopher who worked on the basis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic thinking, and his own genius—is probably the most famous of all.
Anselm imagines himself arguing with a Fool, who denies that God exists. The argument rests on an acceptance of two things: first, that God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, and second, that existence is superior to non-existence. By the end of the argument the Fool is forced to either take up a self-contradictory position or admit that God exists.
The argument has been accepted by many great philosophers, such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. But there have been many others who took up the Fool’s side. One contemporary of Anselm’s, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, said that we could use the same argument to prove that there exists somewhere a marvellous island, greater than any island that can be thought. In the 18th century Immanuel Kant objected that the argument treats existence as if it were an attribute of things—as if I might describe my jacket like this: “it’s green, made of tweed, and it exists.” Existing is not like being green: if it did not exist, there would be no jacket to be green or tweed.
Kant holds that Anselm is also wrong to say that what exists in reality as well as in the mind is greater than what exists in the mind alone, but other philosophers disagree. Is there not a sense in which a real painting is greater than the mental concept the painter has before he starts work?
"We believe that You [God] are that than which nothing greater can be thought."
St. Anselm
Anselm’s Ontological Argument was written in 1077–78, but acquired its title from the German philosopher Kant in 1781.
ST ANSELM
St Anselm of Canterbury was born in Aosta in Italy in 1033. He left home in his twenties to study at the monastery of Bec, in France, under an eminent logician, grammarian, and Biblical commentator named Lanfranc. Anselm became a monk of Bec in 1060, then prior, and eventually abbot in 1078. He travelled to England, and in 1093 was made Archbishop of Canterbury, despite his protestations of ill-health and lack of political skills. This position put him in conflict with the Anglo-Norman kings William II and Henry I, as he tried to uphold the Church against royal power. These disputes led to two periods of exile from England for Anselm, during which he visited the pope to plead the case for the English Church and his own removal from office. Ultimately reconciled with King Henry I, Anselm died in Canterbury aged 76.
Key works
1075–76 Monologion
1077–78 Proslogion
1095–98 Why did God become Man?
1080–86 On the Fall of the Devil
See also: Plato • St. Augustine of Hippo • Thomas Aquinas • René Descartes • Benedictus Spinoza
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
1090s Abû Hâmid al-Ghazâlî launches an attack on Islamic Aristotelian philosophers.
1120s Ibn Bâjja (Avempace) establishes Aristotelian philosophy in Islamic Spain.
AFTER
1270 Thomas Aquinas criticizes the Averroists for accepting conflicting truths from Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy.
1340s Moses of Narbonne publishes commentaries on Averroes’ work.
1852 French philosopher Ernest Renan publishes a study of Averroes, on the basis of which he becomes an important influence on modern Islamic political thought.
Averroes worked in the legal profession; he was a qâdî (an Islamic judge) who worked under the Almohads, one of the strictest Islamic regimes in the Middle Ages. Yet he spent his nights writing commentaries on the work of an ancient pagan philosopher, Aristotle—and one of Averroes’ avid readers was none other than the Almohad ruler, Abû Yacqûb Yûsuf.
Averroes reconciles religion and philosophy through a hierarchical theory of society. He thinks that only the educated elite are capable of thinking philosophically, and everyone else should be obliged to accept th
e teaching of the Qur’an literally. Averroes does not think that the Qur’an provides a completely accurate account of the universe if read in this literal way, but says that it is a poetic approximation of the truth, and this is the most that the uneducated can grasp.
However, Averroes believes that educated people have a religious obligation to use philosophical reasoning. Whenever reasoning shows the literal meaning of the Qur’an to be false, Averroes says that the text must be “interpreted”; that is to say the obvious meaning of the words should be disregarded and the scientific theory demonstrated by Aristotelian philosophy accepted in its place.
"Philosophers believe that religious laws are necessary political arts."
Averroes
The immortal intellect
Averroes is willing to sacrifice some widely-held Islamic doctrines in order to maintain the compatibility of philosophy and religion. For instance, almost all Muslims believe that the universe has a beginning, but Averroes agrees with Aristotle that it has always existed, and says that there is nothing in the Qur’an to contradict this view. However, the resurrection of the dead, a basic tenet of Islam, is harder to include within an Aristotelian universe. Averroes accepts that we must believe in personal immortality, and that anyone who denies this is a heretic who should be executed. But he takes a different position from his predecessors by saying that Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul does not state that individual humans have immortal souls. According to Averroes’ interpretation, Aristotle claims that humanity is immortal only through a shared intellect. Averroes seems to be saying that there are truths discoverable by humans that hold good for ever, but that you and I as individuals will perish when our bodies die.
Later Averroists
Averroes’ advocacy of Aristotelian philosophy (if only for the elite) was shunned by his fellow Muslims. But his works, translated into Hebrew and Latin, had enormous influence in the 13th and 14th centuries. Scholars who supported the opinions of Aristotle and Averroes became known as Averroists, and they included Jewish scholars such as Moses of Narbonne, and Latin scholars such as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant. The Latin Averroists acccepted Aristotle as interpreted by Averroes as the truth according to reason—despite also affirming an apparently conflicting set of Christian “truths.” They have been described as advocating a “double truth” theory, but their view is rather that truth is relative to the context of enquiry.
Some Muslims did not view philosophy as a legitimate subject for study in the 12th century, but Averroes argued that it was essential to engage with religion critically and philosophically.
AVERROES
Ibn Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes, was born in 1126 in Cordoba, then part of Islamic Spain. He belonged to a family of distinguished lawyers and trained in law, science, and philosophy. His friendship with another doctor and philosopher, Ibn Tufayl, led to an introduction to the Caliph Abû Yacqûb Yûsuf, who appointed Averroes chief judge and later court physician. Abû Yacqûb also shared Averroes’ interest in Aristotle, and commissioned him to write a series of paraphrases of all Aristotle’s works, designed for non-specialists such as himself. Despite the increasingly liberal views of the Almohads, the public disapproved of Averroes’ unorthodox philosophy, and public pressure led to a banning of his books and personal exile in 1195. Reprieved two years later, Averroes returned to Cordoba but died the following year.
Key works
1179–80 Decisive Treatise
1179–80 The Incoherence of the Incoherence
c.1186 Great Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘On the Soul’
See also: Plato • Aristotle • Al-Ghazâlî • Ibn Bâjja • Thomas Aquinas • Moses of Narbonne
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
c.400 CE The philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius establishes the tradition of Christian negative theology, which states that God is not being, but more than being.
860s John Scotus Eriugena suggests that God creates the universe from the nothing which is himself.
AFTER
1260s Thomas Aquinas moderates Maimonides’ negative theology in his Summa Theologiae.
Early 1300s Meister Eckhart develops his negative theology.
1840–50s Søren Kierkegaard claims that it is impossible to provide any form of external description of God.
Maimonides wrote on both Jewish law (in Hebrew) and Aristotelian thought (in Arabic). In both areas, one of his central concerns was to guard against anthropomorphizing God, which is the tendency to think about God in the same way as a human being. For Maimonides, the worst mistake of all is to take the Torah (the first part of the Hebrew Bible) as literal truth, and to think that God is a bodily thing. Anyone who thinks this, he says, should be excluded from the Jewish community. But in the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides pushes this idea to its farthest extent, developing a strand of thought known as “negative theology.” This already existed in Christian theology, and it focuses on describing God only in terms of what God is not.
God, Maimonides says, has no attributes. We cannot rightly say that God is “good” or “powerful.” This is because an attribute is either accidental (capable of change) or essential. One of my accidental attributes, for example, is that I am sitting; others are that I have gray hair and a long nose. But I would still be what I essentially am even if I were standing, red-haired, and had a snub-nose. Being human—that is, being a rational, mortal animal—is my essential attribute: it defines me. God, it is generally agreed, has no accidental attributes, because God is unchanging. In addition, says Maimonides, God cannot have any essential attributes either, because they would be defining, and God cannot be defined. So God has no attributes at all.
Speaking about God
Maimondes claims that we can say things about God, but they must be understood as telling us about God’s actions, rather than God’s being. Most discussions in the Torah should be understood in this way. So when we are told that “God is a creator”, we must understand this as stating what God does, rather than the sort of thing God is. If we were to consider the sentence “John is a writer”, we might normally take it to mean that being a writer is John’s profession. But Maimonides asks us to consider only what has been done: in this instance John has written words. The writing has been brought about by John but it does not tell us anything about him.
Maimonides also accepts that statements which seem to attribute qualities to God can be understood if they are taken as double negatives. “God is powerful”: should be taken to mean that God is not powerless. Imagine a game in which I think of a thing and tell you what it is not (it is not large, it is not red…) until you guess what it is. The difference in the case of God is that we have only the negations to guide us: we cannot say what God is.
The Mishneh Torah was a complete restatement of Jewish Oral Law, which Maimonides wrote in plain Hebrew so that “young and old” could know and understand all the Jewish observances.
"When the intellects contemplate God’s essence, their apprehension turns into incapacity."
Maimonides
MOSES MAIMONIDES
Moses Maimonides (also known as Rambam) was born in 1135 in Cordoba, Spain, into a Jewish family. His childhood was rich in cross-cultural influences: he was educated in both Hebrew and Arabic, and his father, a rabbinic judge, taught him Jewish law within the context of Islamic Spain. His family fled Spain when the Berber Almohad dynasty came to power in 1148, and lived nomadically for 10 years until they settled first in F
ez (now in Morocco) and then Cairo. The family’s financial problems led Maimonides to train as a physician, and his skill led to a royal appointment within only a few years. He also worked as a rabbinic judge, but this was an activity for which he thought it wrong to accept any payment. He was recognized as head of the Jewish community of Cairo in 1191, and after his death his tomb became a place of Jewish pilgrimage.
Key works
1168 Commentary on the Mishna
1168–78 Mishneh Torah
1190 Guide of the Perplexed
See also: Johannes Scotus Eriugena • Thomas Aquinas • Meister Eckhart • Søren Kierkegaard
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Epistemology
APPROACH
Epistemology
BEFORE
610 Islam is founded by the Prophet Mohammed.
644 Ali ibn Abi Talib, Mohammed’s cousin and successor, becomes Caliph.