Date:
Location:
With Mehmet Fatih Arslan, Assistant Professor of Islamic Philosophy at Istanbul University and Postdoctoral Fellow in NELC
A BETTER ARGUMENT FOR GOD'S ATTRIBUTES?
The subject matter of this presentation is the potential boundaries of philosophy- kalām interaction in the context of Sharḥal-ʿaqāīd commentaries and super-commentaries. In the Sharḥal-ʿaqāīd tradition, it is a very common practice to discuss the matter using very sophisticated metaphysical terminology like essence, contingency, necessity, and perpetual existence. Therefore, the presentation will focus on the ontological concepts such as eternality, necessity, contingency, multicity and dissimilarity in the context of their utilization in the discussion of God’s attributes’ontological status. Because of this dense philosophical language, even to penetrate the vocabulary requires a great deal of philosophical knowledge. Hence, the very dramatic transformations in the approach and structure suggest that kalām has been exposed to philosophical theories and was required to adopt both the vocabulary and the framework fashioned in philosophical debates. Of course, there are voluminous commentaries and super- commentaries on Sharḥal-ʿaqāīd and these works cover a variety of subjects. Therefore, the scope of this research is limited to Taftazānī’s Commentary, Mūsāal-Khayālī’s (d. 1457) and Ramaḍān Efendī’s (d. 1657) Super-Commentaries.
