Substances in Subjects: Instantiation and Existence in Avicenna, 2022
By: Nathaniel B. Taylor
Title Substances in Subjects: Instantiation and Existence in Avicenna
Type Article
Language English
Date 2022
Journal American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association
Volume 96
Issue 3
Pages 453-471
Categories Avicenna, Tradition and Reception, Metaphysics
Author(s) Nathaniel B. Taylor
Publisher(s)
Translator(s)
In an effort to refute Avicenna’s real distinction between essence and existence, Averroes argues for an Instantiation Analysis of existence which thinks of existence not as an accidental addition to an essence, but rather as the recognition that there is an instance in extramental reality which matches a concept in the mind of a knower. In this study, I argue that Averroes’s Instantiation Analysis fails to refute Avicenna’s real distinction by showing that Avicenna himself endorses the Instantiation Analysis and, in fact, makes use of it to motivate his real distinction. To show this, I review several texts where Avicenna makes the puzzling claim that substances are found to be in subjects. These texts reveal how Avicenna discovers the real distinction with Aristotle’s help—not, as Averroes relates, against the view of Aristotle.

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Prophecy Between Poetics and Politics from Al-Farabi to Leo Strauss
By: Peter Makhlouf
Title Prophecy Between Poetics and Politics from Al-Farabi to Leo Strauss
Type Article
Language English
Journal International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Pages 1-29
Categories al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Maimonides, Aristotle, Poetics, Rhetoric, Politics, Tradition and Reception
Author(s) Peter Makhlouf
Publisher(s)
Translator(s)
Judaeo-Arabic prophetology, as developed in the wake of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, was highly attentive to the kind of representational modes produced by divine revelation and their political use—but also their political precarity. By drawing on another corpus, less often discussed in this context, the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, this study proposes to undertake a close analysis of how the medieval thinkers in question (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides) understood the poetics of prophecy to function. What emerges is an account of how the political theo-logic of poetics and rhetoric—as developed with respect to terms such as imitation, imagination and visualization—came to play a central role in the theory of prophecy, and how that theory of prophecy in turn gave rise to an understanding of what Leo Strauss once termed the ‘literary character’ of these philosophers' ‘art of writing’.

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Prophecy Between Poetics and Politics from Al-Farabi to Leo Strauss
By: Peter Makhlouf
Title Prophecy Between Poetics and Politics from Al-Farabi to Leo Strauss
Type Article
Language English
Journal International Journal of the Classical Tradition
Pages 1-29
Categories al-Fārābī, Avicenna, Maimonides, Aristotle, Poetics, Rhetoric, Politics, Tradition and Reception
Author(s) Peter Makhlouf
Publisher(s)
Translator(s)
Judaeo-Arabic prophetology, as developed in the wake of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, was highly attentive to the kind of representational modes produced by divine revelation and their political use—but also their political precarity. By drawing on another corpus, less often discussed in this context, the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, this study proposes to undertake a close analysis of how the medieval thinkers in question (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides) understood the poetics of prophecy to function. What emerges is an account of how the political theo-logic of poetics and rhetoric—as developed with respect to terms such as imitation, imagination and visualization—came to play a central role in the theory of prophecy, and how that theory of prophecy in turn gave rise to an understanding of what Leo Strauss once termed the ‘literary character’ of these philosophers' ‘art of writing’.

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Substances in Subjects: Instantiation and Existence in Avicenna, 2022
By: Nathaniel B. Taylor
Title Substances in Subjects: Instantiation and Existence in Avicenna
Type Article
Language English
Date 2022
Journal American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association
Volume 96
Issue 3
Pages 453-471
Categories Avicenna, Tradition and Reception, Metaphysics
Author(s) Nathaniel B. Taylor
Publisher(s)
Translator(s)
In an effort to refute Avicenna’s real distinction between essence and existence, Averroes argues for an Instantiation Analysis of existence which thinks of existence not as an accidental addition to an essence, but rather as the recognition that there is an instance in extramental reality which matches a concept in the mind of a knower. In this study, I argue that Averroes’s Instantiation Analysis fails to refute Avicenna’s real distinction by showing that Avicenna himself endorses the Instantiation Analysis and, in fact, makes use of it to motivate his real distinction. To show this, I review several texts where Avicenna makes the puzzling claim that substances are found to be in subjects. These texts reveal how Avicenna discovers the real distinction with Aristotle’s help—not, as Averroes relates, against the view of Aristotle.

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