In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas states that the “aspect of pastness” involved in memory is a certain kind of cognitive object — i.e., an intention — apprehended by the “estimative power.” All told, however, Aquinas mentions this idea precisely once. In this article, I construct an account of the idea that pastness is an estimative intention by drawing upon texts in which I argue that Aquinas develops this idea, albeit without invoking the terminology of the estimative intention. I conclude that, by identifying the aspect of pastness as an estimative intention, Aquinas neatly synthesizes the Aristotelian and Arabic traditions on memory.

A meta-theology makes claims about the structure of theological claims: it identifies a single, fundamental claim about God, and shows how other theological claims are derivable from the fundamental claim. In his book Depicting Deity and other articles, Jon Kvanvig has identified three distinct meta-theologies: Creator Theology, Perfect Being Theology, and Worship-worthiness Theology. In this article, we argue that the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna's views about God have the structure of a meta-theology, and that it is distinct from the three projects Kvanvig identifies. This view is Necessary Existent Theology.

Muslim philosophers commonly endorse a version of the so-called ‘privation theory of evil’ (PTE), according to which all essential evils consist in the non-existence of an entity or privation of a deserved perfection. In this article, I first provide a short sketch of PTE based on clarification of its main conceptual components. Then I examine the main reasons for the truth of PTE offered by Muslim philosophers and show that none of them is sufficiently plausible. Finally, I investigate the most significant objections against PTE and criticize the proposed responses.

This study considers the notion of divine simplicity, the idea that God is not a composite of more basic features, and the criticisms by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Alvin Plantinga of that doctrine. What is shown is that most of the argumentation against divine simplicity frequently credited to Plantinga had been nearly perfectly anticipated by al-Ghazālī. Moreover, in responding to a stronger form of divine simplicity, which Avicenna (d. 1037) had presented, than the Thomistic version that Plantinga attacks, Ghazālī develops ‘new’ arguments and moves that are still valuable and informative to the discussion of divine simplicity today.

In his study of Arabic phonetics, Asbāb ḥudūṯ al-ḥurūf (The Causes of the Genesis of the Consonants), Ibn Sīnā briefly surveys some speech sounds found in languages other than Arabic, among them one particular to Khwarizmian, an Iranian language attested primarily in glosses to Arabic manuscripts of the 13th century. This study attempts to elucidate the sound Ibn Sīnā describes both through reference to his own system of phonetic terminology and through comparison with extant material in the Khwarizmian language.

This is a critical comment on Adamson and Benevich (2018), published in issue 4/2 of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. I raise two closely related objections. The first concerns the objective of the flying man: instead of the question of what the soul is, I argue that the argument is designed to answer the question of whether the soul exists independently of the body. The second objection concerns the expected result of the argument: instead of knowledge about the quiddity of soul, I claim the argument yields knowledge about the soul's existence independently of the body. After the objections, I turn to the masked man fallacy, claiming that although the Adamson-Benevich interpretation does save the argument from the fallacy, this comes at the cost of plausibility. I then give a more modest interpretation that both avoids the fallacy and is plausible. The paper concludes with a remark about the metaphysical possibility of the flying man.

(i) God is omniscient; therefore, for any change, C, among particulars, God knows the occurrence of C. (ii) If God knows the occurrence of C, then X. (iii) not-X. It is clear that the set of propositions (i)—(iii) is inconsistent. This is the general form of two problems—which I call the ‘problem of change in knowledge’ (PCK) and the ‘problem of change in essence’ (PCE)—for Avicenna concerning God’s knowledge of particulars. No work in the secondary literature has discussed exactly what PCK and PCE are. In this paper, I will clarify exactly what they are.

No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in the Healing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence.

Some authors have proposed that Avicenna considers mathematical objects, i.e., geometric shapes and numbers, to be mental existents completely separated from matter. In this paper, I will show that this description, though not completely wrong, is misleading. Avicenna endorses, I will argue, some sort of literalism, potentialism, and finitism.

The reception of Greek learning in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity was the occasion for a profound analysis of many theological doctrines. In particular, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian philosophy led to renewed thinking about what it means for God to be the Creator of all that is. In the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas benefited from the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides as he fashioned his understanding of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically. The recognition that creation is not a change and as a metaphysical dependence in the order of being does not challenge claims in the natural sciences (e.g., that something cannot come from absolutely nothing) are crucial features of the mediaeval heritage on the relationship between creation and the natural sciences. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that an eternal, created universe was intelligible.