Rosabel Ansari

This book explores the philosophy and genesis in al-Fārābī (d. 950) of the amphibolous predication of ‘being’, a key theory in Arabic logic and Islamic metaphysics that states that ‘being’ is predicated neither fully homonymously nor synonymously. As an amphibolous (i.e., ambiguous) term, ‘being’ causes us to be unsure of its meaning(s) and hence how we construe our understanding of what is. Developed in Fārābī’s logical works, the theory would go on to permeate Islamic metaphysics up to the contemporary period. This book argues that understanding its genesis in Fārābī is key to unlocking the theory’s significance in subsequent philosophers. To this end, the book begins by investigating problems that currently exist in scholarly approaches and concludes by showing that the Fārābian provenance is an essential component of theories of amphibolous predication until at least the fifteenth century. The central chapters are concerned with how Fārābī construes the relationship between language and being that helps us to understand the function of ‘being’ as an amphibolous term. First, he considers language to have an ideal ontological foundation, albeit one that is mediated through our intellection of what is. Consequently, how we understand language has metaphysical implications for what we consider there to be. Second, the book shows how Fārābī develops an essentialist theory of being whereby the primary meaning of ‘being’ is for something to be what-it-is. Through this investigation, the book proposes a revised take on the theory of emanation as a causal explanation for something being what-it-is.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam by Frank GriffelRosabel AnsariFrank Griffel. The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 651. Hardback, $135.00.In this monumental work, Frank Griffel provides a wide-ranging and methodologically diverse investigation into the nature and formation of philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world in the twelfth century. Griffel explores institutionally, biographically, and [End Page 502] textually how philosophy continued to be practiced in the century following the death of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), a time previously associated with the decline of philosophy in the Islamic world. The astonishing breadth of content is organized with great clarity into three principal sections: (1) “Post-classical philosophy in its Islamic context,” itself divided into three chapters covering the historical context, the meanings and conceptual frameworks of the two Arabic words for ‘philosophy’ (falsafa and ḥikma), and the relation of religious law to philosophy; (2) “Philosophers and philosophies: a biographical history of philosophy in the sixth/twelfth century Islamic East”; and (3) “The formation of ḥikma as a new philosophical genre,” which is subdivided into multiple chapters and subsections to examine key questions and methods of philosophy during this period. The book is encyclopedic in its scope. Researched over a ten-year period, it offers contributions to a vast array of issues, themes, and problematics that have been raised by modern and recent scholarship, both historical and philosophical. Instead of covering the book’s vast content in detail, this review will focus on one aspect of its argumentation.For this reviewer, the book’s most significant and exciting aspect is its metalevel discussions concerning the falsafa tradition (classical Arabic Aristotelianism) and its fate. From the outset, Griffel is careful to argue that philosophy in the Islamic world is much more than falsafa (10), and the reduction of the former to the latter is why Western scholars for so long thought philosophy found its demise after the fateful blow Ghazālī leveled against the practitioners of falsafa. The conflict was not, however, one of faith versus reason. Rather, Griffel surmises, it was a question of two competing perspectives concerning God’s relation to the world: an impersonal deity, or a creator-God. Both positions were philosophical, and both sides understood themselves to be grounded in an interpretation of the Quran (10–13).Moreover, Griffel goes on to demonstrate that falsafa would be conceptualized and discussed as a quasireligion with its own set of doctrines (80–94). It was not, therefore, synonymous with what we today call “philosophy,” but had the limited sense of one school of philosophy associated with Avicenna (d. 1037). The demise of self-identified practitioners of falsafa was not the demise of philosophers; it was the demise of a term that was associated with a particular school that had been discredited for its slavish imitation, as well as the moral shortcomings and impiety of its principal exponent, Avicenna.Yet Griffel’s principal thesis is that irrespective of the decline in use of the term ‘falsafa’ as a self-description, its approach to the nature of God and the relation of God to the world remained and continued to be discussed in the rebranded discipline of ḥikma (“philosophy,” or more broadly, “wisdom”). In fact, Griffel shows that numerous theologians and philosophers wrote and discussed contradictory positions under the guise of different disciplines, composing texts in both kalām (rational theology) and ḥikma, chief among whom was Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210). A large portion of the book is devoted to documenting and unpacking this phenomenon. The value of this investigation lies not only in uncovering the ḥikma tradition and its continuity with falsafa, but in Griffel’s insistence on presenting the two textual traditions of ḥikma and kalām side-by-side as counterparts to philosophical questions, such as the principle of sufficient reason (524–41). The approach is rich in its demonstration of the philosophical stakes in both positions concerning, for example, the status of God’s will.In its conclusion, the book returns to the question of what counts as philosophy. Griffel argues that while...

This study provides the historical background to, and analysis and translations of, two seminal texts from the medieval Islamic world concerning the univocity of being/existence and a theory of “ambiguous predication” (tashkīk), which is similar to the Thomistic theory of analogy. The disputants are Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1210), who defended a theory of the univocity of being, and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274), who defended the theory of ambiguous predication. While the purported issue is whether a quiddity can cause its own existence, the debate extends further. Rāzī draws on several arguments that “existence” must be predicated univocally of God and creature and then concludes that, given the univocity of “existence,” God cannot be simple, but is a composite of the divine quiddity and distinct attributes. In contrast, Ṭūsī denies that “existence” is said univocally of God and creature and rather is predicated ambiguously/analogously, and then defends divine simplicity.