A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Dates, and References
Throughout this manuscript, I have transliterated Arabic words into English, with the use of diacritical marks, and have put the words in italics. However, I used Anglicised versions of certain well-known Arabic words and names. For instance, I used âKoranâ instead of âQurâÄnâ or âhadithâ instead of âhÄdÄ«thâ, and the names âal-Kindiâ, âal-Farabiâ, âal-Ghazaliâ instead of âal-KindÄ«â, âal-FarÄbÄ«â, âal-Gáž„azÄlÄ«â. I used the Latinate names âAverroesâ for âIbn Rushdâ and Avicenna for âIbn SÄ«nÄâ. I used diacritical marks for the transliteration of the names of the lesser-known Islamic philosophers, but did not use them for the word falasifa and its cognates, since I used it so often. When quoting and referencing works in medieval Islamic philosophy, I used the full name of the work in English translation in italics, followed by page numbers; for those referred to in the original Arabic, I have used the Arabic name of the work, also in italics, with a endnote on the translation. All works, in translation or in the original, are referenced at the end of the book, before my list of secondary sources (by which I mean all non-medieval works). All dates used refer to the Common Era calendar.
1.1 Knowledge in Islam
In Knowledge Triumphant, Franz Rosenthal argues that the central leitmotif of all Islamic civilization is the concept of knowledge. 1 Understanding the Islamic notion of knowledge, according to Rosenthal, is necessary if one is to understand Islam, the civilisation to which it gave birth, and the particular historical course it has taken. Indeed, according to Rosenthal, âIslam means Knowledgeâ. The position is prima facie defensible, as Rosenthal suggests, when one considers that the Koranic term for the time preceding the Koranic revelation is jÄhilÄ«yah, a term usually translated as âignorance.â 2 The term suggests that the key difference between the time preceding the revelation and the time following it is that the latter was a time when people in this world came to have knowledge: specifically, knowledge given unto them by the instruments of revelation. 3 To the modern epistemologist, this claim will raise several questions: are we here talking about the claim that people living in pre-Islamic times merely had true beliefs about the world, or that they had only justified, true beliefs (falling short of knowledge) about the world? And if the latter, what does Islam tell us is the crucial difference between justified, true belief and knowledge? Are we to think that those who were alive in the jÄhilÄ«yah period lived in complete ignorance of any proposition? Or were they merely ignorant of certain, important propositions? If so, which ones? Did they lack merely propositional knowledge, or also practical? Were they living in âdeepâ ignorance (where there was no way they could have acquired relevant evidence) or living in culpable ignorance?
Rosenthalâs work, although presented as a work of epistemology, does not answer these questions. What we get, instead, is a historical study on how the Arabic concept Êżilm, âknowledgeâ, was taken by the various intellectual movements of medieval Islam, as well as how centrally this concept figured in all of these movements. As he puts it, âthere is no other concept that has been operative as a determinant of Muslim civilization in all its aspects to the same extent as Êżilmâ (Rosenthal 2007, p. 2). Rosenthal even advances the bold thesis that understanding the centrality of the concept of knowledge in Islam is crucial to understanding the turn the Islamic world has taken in recent times, and how that concept has indeed underwritten a species of Islamic fundamentalism. 4 Contrary to Rosenthal, however, I contend that the epistemology of the medieval Islamic philosophers in fact gives us the resources for not only understanding extremist belief, but further grasping what is uniquely wrong with it. As far as the medieval Islamic philosophers (falasifa) were concerned, the core philosophical issue was not about knowledge in particular, but about what constitutes justified belief. This is of course also a traditional concern in epistemology, but unless one makes the substantive assumption that nothing but evidence (or epistemic reason) can justify belief, then we can consider that the topic outruns epistemology. As such, I consider the falasifaâs intellectual project as one primarily engaged in the ethics of belief. That is, they were concerned with understanding the epistemic (and in many cases the non-epistemic) conditions of justified belief; in particular, they sought to understand when belief is blameworthy, and, as in the case of apostasy, when it is punishable by death. I will frame the views of the falasifa in terms of the contemporary debate in Western philosophy on the ethics of belief. Then, I will show how falsafa occupies a unique and defensible position-one that ought to be of considerable interest to those working on the issues sans phrase (that is, in a way that ignores whether the issues belong to a particular tradition).
Rosenthal notes that the Arabic concept Êżilm differs from the English concept of knowledge. For instance, in modern English âknowledgeâ does not admit of a plural formation, whereas Êżilm in Arabic does, as per âulum. More significantly, Êżilm can admit of degrees and can be graded, whereas âknowledgeâ in modern English cannot, at least not if used about propositional knowledge. Indeed, some contemporary epistemologists have taken as data the fact that âknowledge-howâ is gradable, where propositional knowledge is not. The former but not the latter locution seems felicitous here:
- I sort of know how to play the guitar.
- I sort of know that Brighton is in England.
And this bit of data is then taken to be part of a broader set of evidence for the claim that practical knowledge cannot be reduced to propositional, theoretical knowledge. In English the notion of justification (as applied to beliefs) does seem to be gradable, however. The following locutions seem perfectly felicitous, for instance:
- James is more justified than Andrew in believing that he is good at rugby.
- I have better justification for the belief that there is a Higgs Boson particle than I had ten years ago.
- James is sort of justified in believing that his date will arrive on time.
As we may infer from the above examples, the English notion of justification (but not knowledge) is gradable; yet, the Arabic notion of Êżilm is gradable. This distinction gives us prima facie reason to think that when the falasifa wrote about Êżilm, they had in mind a concept closer to epistemic justification than knowledge. Again, the fact that we can felicitously speak of âjustificationsâ and âreasonsâ in English (where talk on âknowledgesâ sounds odd) gives us reason to prefer (or at least consider as a plausible alternative) an interpretation where the Islamic medieval philosophers were primarily interested in the conditions for justified belief, rather than the concept of knowledge. The primacy of the issue of apostasy, as we shall see, further vindicates this last claim, for according to even the most notoriously strict accounts of apostasy in medieval Islam (for instance those of al-Ghazali) one can fail to be an apostate when one fails to know the claims of Islam. Most importantly, however, the falasifa themselves mirror the gradability of the Muslim concept of Êżilm in their epistemology, where, in Aristotelian fashion, they painstakingly enumerate the various differentiae to which knowledge-as-such is subject, and, in neo-Platonic fashion, the hierarchy that dominates that taxonomy. 5 This countenanced gradability concerning the subject of âknowledgeâ, when better considered as âjustified beliefâ, may provide the keys to understanding a unified view of the falasifaâs take on the relationship between faith and reason, with respect to well-known problems regarding interpreting both their individual views and their political philosophy.
1.2 The Ethics of Belief in the West
Let us grant the claim that it is initially plausible that the falasifa were at least somewhat concerned with the ethics of belief. Next, let us consider the modern, Western debate on this issue. The debate has become a complex one, and as with any topic in contemporary Western philosophy, replete with hyper-specialised jargon and hair-splitting distinctions. The way I conceive the debate here will necessarily look blunt-edged to the specialist, but I hope it will be both detailed to be useful, yet general enough to serve the broad ends of this particular book.
Traditionally, the âethics of beliefâ has been taken in the Western philosophical world of the last two or three centuries to denote a debate between two groups of philosophers considering the question regarding what is justified belief. The firstâEvidentialistsâthink that nothing but evidence, or more broadly, epistemic reason (reason to think that a proposition âpâ is true), can justify a subject Sâs believing that p. Not only do Evidentialists think that evidence that p is necessary for Sâs belief that p to be justified, they also think that no consideration other than evidence is relevant to whether S is justified in believing that p. They adhere to:
Evidentialism
Sâs belief that p is justified iff S has epistemic reason to believe that p.
The second group I term non-Evidentialists. This group of philosophers simply deny the truth of Evidentialism, and think the following:
Non-Evidentialism
Sâs belief that p is justified iff S has, for reasons of sort α, ÎČ, Îł, ÎŽ, either one or a combination of α, ÎČ, Îł, ÎŽ reason to believe that p.
Non-Evidentialists may admit that Sâs having epistemic reason to believe that p is necessary for S to be justified in believing that p, but they never admit that it is sufficient. That is, they deny that having epistemic reason to believe that p always entails that S is justified in believing that p.
The archetypal Evidentialist is usually considered to be W.K. Clifford, a late nineteenth century British mathematician 6 and philosopher, who wrote the following in The Ethics of Belief:
At first glance, Cliffordâs view follows Locke and the British empiricists 7 ; however:It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. (Clifford 1877)
Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which if it be regulated, as is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything, but upon good reason; and so cannot be opposite to it. He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither does he seek truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties as he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and...