 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. The comedy sketches of Monty Python's Flying Circus seem at times to be aimed specifically at an audience of philosophers. Of course there's the Philosopher's Song, about how all famous philosophers were alcoholics — inevitably it ascribes to Descartes the sentiment, I drink, therefore I am — and the football match, pitting the great Greek philosophers against their German counterparts. But my favorite is the argument sketch, in which a man goes to an argument clinic and is dissatisfied with the service he receives. It includes exchanges like, I came here for a good argument. No, you came here for an argument. And argument is an intellectual process, contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes. No it isn't. I think that in the whole history of philosophy in the Islamic world, the person best qualified to work as a professional arguer at an argument clinic would have to be Fakhradin Arazi. His works are almost inaccessible to the English reader because they have hardly been translated. This is a shame because an arguer of his talents is ideally designed for today's audience of professional philosophers. Like a 21st century analytic philosopher, he delights in the deaf distinction, the counterexample, the terminological clarification that will defeat an opponent. Here's an example. Arazi was chatting with a colleague who was impressed by a passage in the great Al-Ghazali who had refuted an argument put forward by a Shiite theologian. The Shiite had tried to force an unwelcome consequence on his Sunni opponents. Either the human intellect can know God with its own resources, or guidance from an imam is needed. This is a dilemma for Sunnis, especially those of the Asharite theological school, like Al-Ghazali, since they deny the need for an imam, but do not believe our intellect is able to grasp God. So, Al-Ghazali responded that the intellect would itself be needed to adjudicate between the rival claims of the intellect and the imam, thus the Shiite has to accept the need for intellect as well. As what he makes of this, Arazi responds with an entirely characteristic remark. The original argument is false, and the objection of Al-Ghazali is pointless. Arazi is no defender of the imam, in fact he is an Asharite theologian, just like Al-Ghazali, but he has no hesitation in irreverently dismissing the move made by his great predecessor. Al-Ghazali gains nothing by showing that intellect is necessary. The Shiite opponent might very well admit this. What Al-Ghazali needs to do is that intellect is sufficient, because that would show that there is no need for an imam. This little anecdote tells you most of what you need to know about Arazi. He constantly tested the arguments of others, no matter how eminent they might be, and regardless of whether it would cause offense. He was adept at seeing both sides of any debate. In the case I just described, he provided a counter-refutation of Al-Ghazali, even though he himself agreed with Al-Ghazali's rejection of the doctrine of the imam. And he had a very sharp philosophical mind, maybe the sharpest in the eastern realms of Islam since Avicenna himself. His contrast between a necessary and a sufficient condition is one that philosophers nowadays wield, often with the same dialectical delight displayed by Arazi. Woe betide you if you show up at an American philosophy department to give a talk and confuse one of these with the other. Today's philosophers often annoy people with their aggressive argumentative behavior, and Arazi likewise found that his methods won him more arguments than friends. The scene I just described occurred during a tour of Transoxiana in Central Asia, during which Arazi seems to have arrived in each new city looking for people to refute. He wrote up an account of his trip called Al-Munadharaat, meaning, wait for it, debates. A sentence from the beginning again tells us most of what we need to know about Arazi. As his name indicates, Fakhradin Arazi was a stranger in these lands. The name Arazi means someone from Ra'i, a city in northern Persia. He's not to be confused with the earlier controversialist from the same city, Abu Bakr Arazi, who we looked at in episode 126. Fakhradin's vocation as legal scholar and theologian was a case of carrying on the family tradition. His father was an expert in these fields and could trace his intellectual lineage back to al-Jawaini, the teacher of al-Ghazali, and through him to al-Ash'ari himself, founder of the whole Ash'arite school of theology. So Fakhradin was steeped in what was by now a long tradition of Islamic theology, or kalam, pursued from an Ash'arite doctrinal perspective. This shows in all his works, especially his early ones, which adhere closely to Ash'arite positions. But as he matured, he seems to have developed a great appreciation for Avicenna's philosophy. Even more than al-Ghazali, Fakhradin Arazi grasped not only the challenge that Avicenna posed to Ash'arite theology, but also its power. He wrote enormous and enormously influential works in which he examined pretty well every topic dealt with in Avicenna's physics and metaphysics as well as Ash'arite theology. In these writings, his controversialist personality found its ideal literary expression. Each topic he takes up is subjected to a detailed dialectical consideration, with arguments, counter-arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and so on being listed and evaluated. Often Arazi's opinion appears only as a perfunctory conclusion, if he sees fit to betray his own view at all. He used this kind of procedure even in masterful commentaries on the Qur'an, regarding which the jurist Ibn Taymiyyah later commented, But most interesting for us are the works he himself called philosophical, including a massive commentary on the pointers of Avicenna. Because of the size and complexity of Arazi's writings, research on his thought is only just beginning. I'm going to give you a sample of what he offers by running through his remarks on several hotly debated issues from Avicenna, before ending with an area of Arazi's thought that has been particularly well explored, namely his ethics. Let's start with an issue from Avicenna's natural philosophy, time. Arazi discusses this in several of his large philosophical works, including the especially interesting Matalib al-Aaliyah, or Exalted Topics of Inquiry. In this work, he evaluates the conceptions of time put forward by a range of thinkers, including Aristotle, Avicenna, previous theologians, and the earlier Abu Bakr Arazi. You may remember that the first Arazi made time one of his five eternal principles. He also claimed that eternal, or absolute time, is simply obvious to us. We need no demonstration or proof to know that it exists. Perhaps because these ideas had been echoed by the more recent Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi, subject of the last episode, Fakhradin Arazi finds this proposal intriguing. Before he even gets to the question of how time can be defined, he dedicates a long discussion to the question of how we know that time exists. Pursuing his usual policy, he subjects this question to a forbiddingly thorough analysis, even considering seriously the possibility that time does not exist after all. Interestingly, Arazi seems to think that the burden of proof lies on the person who thinks that time does exist. In other words, its real existence must be proven unless we are persuaded that its real existence is so obvious that it needs no proof. This may strike us as odd. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the person who makes the surprising claim that time doesn't exist? Arazi's approach here can be understood better if we notice the way he poses the problem. The skeptic about time, he says, would be someone who thinks that time does exist, but only mentally. In other words, time would be only subjective, a feature of the way we perceive the world, but there would be no time out there in reality. Here Arazi is using a distinction borrowed from Avicenna, between mental and real existence. You may remember my trapeze artist sister who only exists mentally and not out in the world. In her case, we know that she does not exist, but some mentally existing things have a strong purchase on our minds. We can hardly help believing that they are real even though they are not. What if time was like that? Well, Arazi provides no fewer than 12 proofs to show that time is like that and has no real existence. He then gives 21 arguments to show that time can be grasped directly, as the earlier Arazi and Abulbarakat al-Baghdadi had claimed, and stands in no need of proof, before finally moving on to four ways of proving that time does exist. One of these is Avicenna's. In some cases, though not all, Arazi adds refutations of the proofs and arguments being listed. Finally, he makes a terse remark approving of the fourth and final proof that time does exist. This last proof is borrowed from the theological tradition. It claims that time must exist because we need it to coordinate two otherwise unconnected events. For instance, if I say to you that I will meet you when the sun rises, my arrival and the rising of the sun are being connected by a third thing, namely the time at which both will occur. In this discussion of time, we see two things that tend to push Arazi towards a rather more skeptical position than we might expect from an Islamic theologian, or for that matter, an Avicennan philosopher. First, there is his dialectical method, which involves examining all possible arguments for and against every thesis. The sheer abundance of proofs and counter-proofs tends to induce uncertainty, or at least bewilderment. This aspect of his approach was not lost on observers. Critics complained that Arazi was far better at explaining the arguments in support of heretical views than he was at refuting them. A second and deeper reason for his skeptical leanings is the way that mental existence comes into the discussion. Arazi seems to think that each and every concept we have must be proven to have some external reality to which it applies. In the absence of proof, merely mental existence is the default. Simply given the stringent standards of proof used in post-Avicennan philosophy and theology, this amounts to a major concession to the skeptic. Here I must mention an anecdote about Arazi, even if it is probably not authentic. A friend came upon him weeping and asked what was the matter. Arazi answered that he had just discovered that a belief he had held as certain was in fact false. If this was the case, then how could he be sure that any of his beliefs were true? Arazi's demand for ironclad demonstration is a hallmark of his treatment of Avicenna on other topics too. Consider, for instance, his handling of the famous Flying Man thought experiment. As you'll remember, Avicenna asked us to imagine a person created in mid-air without any sensory awareness. He thought that the Flying Man would know that he exists, showing that one can be aware of one's self without being aware of one's body. For Avicenna, this was at least an indication that the self is not a bodily thing. He drew the further conclusion that self-awareness is fundamental to our mental life, to the point that it must continue even when we are deeply asleep. In his commentary on the passage where Avicenna proposes these ideas, Arazi first carefully explains what Avicenna is up to and then starts raising questions. One question is like the one he had posed concerning time. Is the fundamental nature of self-awareness just obvious, or does it need to be proven? If the latter, then the Flying Man thought experiment doesn't seem to constitute such a proof. Nor is it obvious. Compare the claim that you are self-aware while asleep to a really certain truth, such as the fact that the whole is greater than the part. Furthermore, even if it is true that we are always aware of ourselves, even that would not show that we must be aware of ourselves. It's a leap from saying that something is always true to saying that it is necessarily true. Speaking of necessity, what does Arazi make of Avicenna's most famous proof, the demonstration that there is a necessary existent? As Arazi himself might say there is an on the one hand and an on the other hand. On the one hand, like many other theologians in the later period, he is happy to accept Avicenna's characterization of God as the necessary existent. In fact, he frequently refutes some position by suggesting that it would either make God contingent or make something other than God necessary. On the other hand, Arazi raises problems for Avicenna's proof every step of the way. Concerning the basic argument that there is a necessary existent, he controversially thinks that Avicenna is trying to prove this by analyzing the very concept of existence, and this he believes cannot be done. You can show that God exists, but not as a matter of conceptual necessity. Rather, we must first observe that there are some contingent things, and trace back an explanatory chain to their first and ultimate cause, which is the necessary existent. Even then, Arazi challenges each step of Avicenna's attempt to show that the necessary existent is to be identified with God. He is not even convinced by Avicenna's arguments in favor of the uniqueness of the necessary existent. As we've seen several times, Avicenna's most contentious ideas about God concern divine thought. He tried to show that God is a perfect intellect whose unchanging thought is directed primarily at itself, as in Aristotle. This raised the question of whether God knows about particular things in our world at all. Notoriously, Avicenna said that God does know about such things, but in a universal way. As you would expect by now, Arazi is ready with a long list of complaints. It's not clear to him for one thing that Avicenna succeeded in proving that God thinks. For Avicenna, this followed from God's being immaterial. This in turn followed from the fact that God is undivided. As the necessary existent, God can have no parts, since if he did his existence would be dependent on those parts. Arazi retorts that some undivided things are in bodies anyway, like the geometrical point, which resides in a solid. As far as the nature of God's thinking goes, Arazi finds this especially problematic. If God has even universal knowledge, then this knowledge will reside in God's essence. This sounds to Arazi more like the theory of divine attributes defended by Asherite theologians like himself than the more austere theology of an utterly simple God intended by Avicenna. When he then turns to the hotly contested issue about God's knowledge of particulars as such, Arazi presents a whole battery of arguments on all sides of the question. Some of these are drawn from earlier theologians, others from Avicenna and his partisans. Particularly interesting are the considerations he mentions about whether God could eternally know about things that happen at a particular time. Perhaps so. Arazi asks us to consider someone's knowledge that Zaid enters a city at a given time. This knowledge will be the same whether one knows it before Zaid's arrival, at the moment of the arrival, or afterwards. But he wouldn't be Arazi if he didn't also ask us to consider a counterargument. Suppose that someone doesn't know what time it is. In that case, he will not be able to know whether Zaid's arrival is future, current, or past. To know that, our knower, or God, would need to change by becoming aware that the time of Zaid's arrival has itself now arrived. After a customarily detailed enumeration of arguments on all sides of the issue, Fakhradin finally concludes on a rather flat-footed note. He points out that everyone who prays to God is asking for him to intercede concerning something particular. I don't pray that there are giraffes, but that Hayyawatha the giraffe will recover from her recent neck reduction surgery. This sort of prayer only makes sense if Avicenna is wrong, and that, Arazi says, is good enough for him. As I've mentioned, this is another typical feature of Arazi's dialectical procedure. When he does come to tell us what he himself thinks, it is often rather underwhelming. His last-second appeal to common opinion and religious practice would hardly strike Avicenna as decisive. We may even be tempted to ask whether Arazi is being serious. Is he actually quietly suspending judgment, a skeptic in the end, or just more interested in the cut and thrust of dialectical debate than in solving the problems at hand? On at least some topics, he does develop a more robust positive theory. A nice example is his stance on ethics. As in other areas, early in his career he follows the Asherite tradition pretty closely. We saw in episode 137 that the Asherites accepted a divine command theory of ethics. Good and bad are whatever God decrees them to be. But as Arazi's thought develops under the influence of Avicenna in philosophy, he is increasingly tempted by the thought that humans are just using words like good and bad to express what they find beneficial and harmful. In fact, he says in several of his works that our moral language has no meaning apart from a reference to what we find pleasant and painful, whether physically or psychologically. This sounds like yet another skeptical or even relativist move. Political judgments would turn out to be merely subjective, just a matter of certain people expressing a preference concerning certain things. But Arazi is no skeptic when it comes to pleasure and pain. There really are such things, and they really do motivate us to act in certain ways. He finds a clever way to connect this with the classical Asherite tendency to conflate ethics with Islamic law. Arazi thinks everything we do is intended to win us pleasure or to spare us pain, and that applies to the next life as well as this one. Once one has accepted the revelation brought by Muhammad, one takes on board a whole raft of commands and prohibitions. Crucially these come along with threats and promises. Violate God's law and you will be punished in eternal fire. Obey and you will go to paradise. Thus it turns out that you should follow God's law precisely in order to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The Asherites may be right that divine law is laid down arbitrarily, but there is nothing arbitrary about our reasons for obeying. Here we see Arazi adopting a version of what is nowadays called consequentialism. The right thing to do for each person is whatever leads to the maximally beneficial results. In his version of consequentialism, it is the consequences for this specific agent that matter, not what would benefit humans generally. So sophisticated is Arazi that he anticipates a move made in 20th century consequentialism by devising a response to a potential objection. The objection is an obvious one. Sometimes people do things that are not in their interest, for instance by telling the truth when it would be advantageous to lie. His answer is that in such cases one is following a rule that in general maximizes benefit for all concerned. If everyone felt free to lie all the time, that would be disastrous. So we all agree to adopt honesty as a general policy and to disapprove of and punish liars. The apparently selfless do-gooder, then, is just looking to the bigger picture, promoting a policy that is beneficial over the long haul even if it is counterproductive in terms of his narrow concerns on this particular occasion. As this whole discussion shows, Fakhradin did develop interesting positive philosophical theories, so it would be wrong to think of him as nothing other than a one-man argument clinic. It can be hard though to see through the maze of thrusts and counter-thrusts in his voluminous writing. The main impression he gives to us is the one he gave to his contemporaries he writes for the sake of argument, in every sense of the phrase. His debating style was sufficiently provocative that by the time of his death in the year 1210 he had to ask to be buried in a secret location so that a group of outraged opponents would be prevented from desecrating the site. Of course, he annoyed not just other theologians, but also partisans of Avicenna. We'll soon be looking at Nasir ad-Din Atouzi, who wrote a commentary on Avicenna answering the criticisms of Fakhradin, whom Atouzi aptly and archly called, Prince of the Controversialists. But for all his ability to annoy, Fakhradin became an immensely influential figure. Many commentaries were written on his writings, which were chock full of Avicennan terminology and argumentation. That meant that even when philosophers and theologians weren't writing commentaries on Avicenna, they were often engaging with Avicenna anyway through the medium of Arazi. Despite his immense intellectual legacy, Fakhradin's arguments do not win him a clear victory in the contest to be the most influential philosopher of his period. His lifetime overlaps with those of the great Andalusian thinkers Averroes and Maimonides, for one thing. But even in the East, he had serious competition from a man who died, in fact was executed, about 20 years before Fakhradin passed away, and who founded a new movement of philosophy within Islam. The execution? It was ordered by the great Muslim leader and scourge of the Crusaders, Saladin. And the new philosophical movement? It was called Illuminationism. Join me next time as I shed some light on its founder, Sukhravarti, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.