 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. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Family Feud – Philosophy at Shiraz One stereotypical image of the philosopher is that of a hermit living in isolation in a cave or on top of a mountain, meditating and dispensing inscrutable wisdom to those who have had the wherewithal to make a pilgrimage to this remote location. We owe the image in part to the ascetics who have often appeared in the history of philosophy, for instance in classical India and among the Christians of late antiquity. But in reality, philosophy has usually been a creature of the cities. Socrates hardly ever ventured outside the walls of Athens. Along with Plato and Aristotle, he gave his hometown an indelible association with his favorite topic of conversation. Philosophically minded Romans like Cicero still visited Athens, even though there was more philosophical action in other cities like Alexandria and in Rome itself. Paris and Constantinople would probably claim bragging rights as the greatest centers of philosophy in medieval Christendom. As for the Islamic world, it's hard to look past Baghdad as the unofficial capital of philosophy. But, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, Baghdad eventually fell from its pedestal in the wake of the Mongol invasion. There were other cities ready to take its place, including Constantinople once it was in the hands of the Ottomans, and Lucknow in India under the rulership of the Mughals. Then there was the city that is still known today as the Athens of Iran, Shiraz. I guess that Athens is therefore the Shiraz of Greece. No less an authority than Wikipedia announces that this south Iranian city is also known as the city of poets, literature, wine, and flowers, adding that the wine grape variety called Shiraz has nothing to do with the place. On the other hand, Wikipedia thinks Peter Adamson was an actor who appeared on the British soap opera Coronation Street, so I'm taking all that information with a grain of salt. After consulting some other sources, I can however confirm that Shiraz is an old city continuously inhabited since the time of the pre-Islamic Sasanians and the capital of the part of Iran known as Fars. It survived the Mongols largely unscathed, since its rulers prudently offered to submit to Mongol rule rather than resisting. In the 15th century, it was visited by a traveler from Venice who recorded that it was a prosperous place with 200,000 inhabitants. The city had a long-standing reputation for scholarly activity and piety. In keeping with this, Shiraz has produced philosophers of outstanding vintage, if not the grapes for Shiraz wine. Among them was the greatest thinker of Safavid Persia, Sar al-Din Shirazi, better known as Mullah Sadra. He died in the year 1640, by which time the madrasas of Shiraz had been a hotbed of philosophical activity for several centuries. Philosophically speaking, we can trace the city's importance back at least as far as the middle of the 14th century, when it was the home of one of the greatest Sunni theologians of the Mongol era, Al-Iji. We met him in the last episode. You might recall him discussing the question of whether the earth might be revolving. In a sign that philosophy itself was beginning to revolve around Shiraz, another major theologian of the later 14th century, Al-Jurjani, also visited the city. Al-Jurjani wrote a commentary on one of Al-Iji's theological works which, to put it mildly, received a warm reception in later generations. In fact, Al-Iji has still been studied along with a commentary of Al-Jurjani in modern times, by religious scholars at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Though both of these men thought hard about astronomy, their main activity consisted in developing and systematizing Ash'arite Sunni theology or kalam, with the help of ideas borrowed from Avicenna. This process had been going on since the 12th century, despite the criticisms leveled at Avicenna by Ash'arites like Al-Ghazali and Ash'ar Hastani. But other Ash'arites, especially Fakhradin Arazi, had woven Avicennan philosophy together with kalam so tightly that there seemed to be little hope of unraveling them again. It's telling that the severest critic of Avicennan philosophy in the Mongol age, namely Ibn Taymiyyah, was also very hostile towards kalam. The more influential mainstream theologians of the Mongol period thought that Avicennan philosophy offered useful tools for systematizing and defending their theological school doctrines. And they did need to defend those doctrines. Something I haven't mentioned yet is that in Central Asia, there was another theological school that rivaled the Ash'arites. These were the Matoridis, who like the Ash'arites were named after a founding figure of the 10th century, in this case Abu Mansur al-Matoridi. It would take us too far afield to go into the details of the disputes between the Ash'arites and Matoridis. What matters for us is that in the period of the Mongol invasion, members of these rival schools engaged in particularly intense debate with one another. This is probably because Matoridi scholars from Central Asia were fleeing away from the Mongols and coming into more direct contact with Ash'arites further west. In fact, one of the prominent Mongol-era theologians I mentioned, Ataf Dezani, was a Matoridi. So an Ash'arite like al-Iji, all the way down near the Persian Gulf in Shiraz, had a new and pressing reason to reformulate his school's theology, to make it as coherent and convincing as possible. Philosophical theology is like any other business, it thrives under the pressure of competition. Avicennan ideas gave al-Iji and those influenced by him like al-Jurjani the edge they needed to prevail in these disputes. All of which means that as we come up to the 15th century and the dawn of the Safavid period, Avicennizing theology had already set down roots in Shiraz. In this city of flowers it will now blossom in the years just prior to the coming of the Safavids. But to be honest, this floral metaphor is a bit too tranquil for what happened in Shiraz in the late 1400s. The atmosphere was more vicious than verdant, as hostility bloomed between two scholars named Sadr ad-Din Tashtaki and Jalal ad-Din Dawani. Tashtaki and Dawani engaged in a long-running dispute that was personal in every sense. They had face-to-face debates as well as writing treatises against one another's positions. If philosophical theology really does benefit from competition, then these two were each other's greatest benefactors. They died within just a few years of one another right around 1500, but the hostility didn't end there. Tashtaki's son, Hiyyath ad-Din, carried on the family feud, writing work after work in which he took the side of his father, Tashtaki, against the hated Dawani. Some scholars have referred to these philosophers as forming a school of Shiraz, but in light of the deep hostility between Dawani and the two Tashtakis, a more appropriate expression might be the duel of Shiraz fought not with swords, but with sharply honed syllogisms. It isn't entirely clear what motivated the animosity between Dawani and the Tashtakis. Dawani seems to have been more comfortable with the integration of Sunni theology with Avicenna that had been dominant in Shiraz in the previous generations, thanks to figures like Ali Ji. By contrast, the Tashtakis are highly critical of the Sunni theologians, directing their invective at Asharites as far back as al-Ghazali. One possibility is that the dispute was confessional in nature, with Dawani as a Sunni theologian being targeted by the Tashtakis who may have been Shiite, but we can't be entirely sure which of these men may have been Shiite or Sunni. The Shiite Safavids took over Iran in Hiyyath ad-Din Tashtaki's lifetime, at which point he would certainly have had to at least pay lip service to the Twelver Shi'ism of the new rulers. And among Hiyyath ad-Din's students we find both Sunni and Shiite scholars, which doesn't exactly help to decide the issue. Whatever religious disagreement may have been underlying the feud, it's abundantly clear that Dawani and the Tashtakis had profound disagreements in philosophy. The younger Tashtaki, Hiyyath ad-Din, devoted most of his writings to attacking Dawani and his allies. Since he disagreed with Dawani about practically everything, in doing so he managed to touch on most of the key philosophical issues of the time. Even apparently dry and technical topics in logic could provide an opportunity to pursue the vendetta. As we saw a few episodes back, logicians over the past few centuries had been particularly fascinated by the liar paradox, what we should say about a statement like this sentence is false. Dawani and the Tashtakis produced treatises devoted specifically to this issue, passing judgment on earlier solutions offered by everyone from al-Qatibi, author of the standard textbook on Avasanin logic, to the illuminationist Ibn Kamuna, to recent theologians like At-Taftazani. And of course, they offered their own rival solutions. Dawani tried to dissolve the paradox by saying that the paradoxical statement is in fact no statement at all. It can't be, because it can be neither true nor false, and every meaningful statement is either true or false. Were they alive today, the Tashtakis would have loved the earlier episode where I discussed this topic, because I there mentioned this sort of response and said it is the simplest, but least satisfying solution. The reason it's unsatisfying is that it is so ad hoc. Dawani seems simply to stipulate that statements that would give rise to the paradox don't count as real statements. To be fair, his solution is a bit more principled than that. For Dawani, the ability to be consistently true or false is a kind of litmus test to qualify as a meaningful statement, and the liar statement fails that test. More interesting to my mind though is the solution proposed by Dawani's rival Sadr-Ad-Din Tashtaki. He says that the difficulty is caused by the fact that the liar statement is about another statement. If I say, what Zaid is saying now is false, then whether or not this is true depends on whether what Zaid says is true or false. In just the same way, the paradoxical utterance, what I am saying now is false, is a statement about what I am now saying. It is neither true nor false, because there is no consistent way to say that the statement it refers to, namely itself, is true or that it is false. Sadr-Ad-Din thus shows how the paradox is generated by the clash between first order and second order truth. That's a nice point. So I say round one goes to the dashtakis. This logical issue though was not really at the heart of the conflict at Shiraz. When the debate turned to metaphysics, it became like a grill party in the mountains. The stakes were higher. Here the dispute was over the nature of God, and over something else that mattered a great deal to these figures, namely who could lay claim to being the better interpreters of Avicenna. We've seen in previous episodes how intellectuals in the later period boasted of their educational lineage. For instance, Fakhra-Din Arazi could claim to be the latest in a line of teachers and students stretching back to Al-Ashari, the founder of his theological school. In the same way, both Dawani and the elder dashtaki claim to be 11th generation students of Avicenna. Their two chains of teachers overlapped, splitting only after the familiar figures Atuzi and his student, the illuminationist Qutb-Adina Shirazi, whose name incidentally reminds us that he was yet another major intellectual associated with our new favorite city. In any case, the arguments at Shiraz were fought not only over philosophical issues but also when it came to the interpretation of Avicenna. In this respect, we might compare the Dawani-dashtaki rivalry to arguments in late antique or medieval philosophy. Proclus, Philoponus, and Simplicius mingled disagreement over the meaning of Plato's dialogues with their disagreement over the eternity of the universe. Another example would be Thomas Aquinas, who refuted Averroes's theory of the intellect not just by showing its falsehood but also by criticizing it as a reading of Aristotle. Similarly, for all their other disagreements, Dawani and the dashtakis agreed that the winner in their debates would be the one who could show that their position was closest to that of Avicenna. No wonder then that the most contentious issues at Shiraz were the ones where Avicenna's own view was hardest to pin down. As we know, by this time there had already been a long-running controversy about Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, especially in relation to his famous identification of God with the necessary existent. At the heart of the debate, especially as it was carried on in Shiraz, is what seems like a pretty basic question. Does God have an essence or not? Sometimes Avicenna says that God has no essence at all, while at other times he qualifies this, stating that God has no essence apart from his existence. The point may seem trifling, but on this issue turns the fundamental question of how we should conceive of God and his relation to the contingent things he creates. For Dawani, it is crucial that God does have an essence, and that this essence is nothing other than existence. He invokes this point in responding to a widely discussed problem posed by the early illuminationist philosopher Ibn Qamuna, whom we covered back in episode 175. The problem was known as Ibn Qamuna's Sophistry. It goes like this. Suppose we accept Avicenna's characterization of God as the necessary existent. Avicenna already asked how we know the necessary existent is unique. It would be a rather nice bonus of his theory if we could use it to prove that there is only one God, and Ibn Qamuna thought he could manage it. His argument was that there cannot be more than one thing whose essence is necessary existence. If there were, then both of them would be necessary, so they would need to have some other essential feature in order to be distinguished from one another. But the original idea was to imagine two things whose essences consist in nothing but necessary existence. So, this additional distinguishing feature cannot also be part of the essence, meaning that these supposedly distinct entities are in fact one and the same. The fact that this was known as Ibn Qamuna's Sophistry shows that, to put it mildly, his argument was not universally admired. From Dawani's point of view, Ibn Qamuna was making much ado about nothing. Or rather, much ado about the only thing that there is. God is pure existence, and it is ridiculous to suppose that there could be two different versions of pure existence. Dawani's idea has a further more radical implication. If God is nothing other than existence itself, then it would seem that, insofar as other things also exist, it is because they somehow partake of God. Whereas God is pure existence itself, in Arabic wujud, other things are merely existent, or mawjud. For Dawani, this means that other things are in a sense unreal. Whatever dependent reality they have is due solely to God's presence in them. In themselves, they do not exist at all, because unlike God, their essences are neutral with respect to existence. To draw an imperfect analogy, not used by Dawani himself, one might suppose that it is water's essence to be wet, and that other things become wet only thanks to the presence of water in them. For Sadr-ud-din Dashtaki, it's Dawani who is all wet. He, rightly I think, identifies a Sufi flavor to Dawani's argument, according to which God is somehow unified with all things insofar as it is his presence to them that makes them exist. Dashtaki is right again when he says that Dawani's position looks a lot like the one that was put forward several generations ago by Atuzi. This is in a sense bad news for Dashtaki. He is facing a united front of rather formidable opponents. But he is nonetheless confident in rejecting Dawani's contrast between God as existence and other things as merely existent. Instead, Dashtaki insists that we are using the word existence in the same sense when we say that a God or a created thing is existent. To this extent at least, he is closer to the view of Fakhra-din Arazi, which I compared in an earlier episode to the position of Duns Skodas in the Latin tradition. As Skodas puts it, essence is unifical, having the same meaning in every case, even in the case of God. Of course, if both God and other things can be said to exist in one and the same sense, then Dashtaki owes us an explanation of what it is that makes God so different from the other things. Simple, he says, God has no essence at all. By contrast, the other things, the things that are contingent and must be brought into existence by God, have particular essences that distinguish them from God and from each other. Whether it was metaphysical questions like this one, or logical issues like the liar paradox, the thinkers of Shiraz tended to present their work in the form of commentaries, or glosses, on the works of earlier philosophers and theologians. Indeed, this was a widespread phenomenon. Writers in the later Islamic ages loved to present their ideas in the form of texts about other texts. Already before the Mongol period, we saw figures like Arazi and Atuzi writing not just independent treatises, but also commentaries on Avicenna. As the centuries go by, the production of commentaries, summaries, and glosses on earlier works becomes more and more common. This isn't true only of philosophy. It also happens in works of Islamic jurisprudence, for instance, and even in the Sufi tradition. As in antiquity, the writing of commentaries was closely tied to practices of teaching and learning. To teach someone, whether in philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, or the prophetic sayings, usually meant giving them expertise in the classic works of the field. In fact, students would obtain a license to teach from their masters, which listed which works they themselves had mastered and were now able to explain to a new generation. The commentary, or gloss, is a natural text to produce in a teaching context, but it may seem a curious format for debating with one's rivals. In fact, Hiyyath-Ad-Din Dashtaki felt the need to explain why his father wrote almost nothing apart from glosses, or marginal notations, on the works of other theologians. It was basically a matter of efficiency, he explained. Rather than going over all the points that had already been made in previous generations, the elder Dashtaki could focus on making truly original points of his own. This explanation overturns our expectations, suggesting as it does that in restricting himself to commentary on another text, Sarra-Din was actually able to be more original in his writing, rather than going over old ground. Academics of today might want to take note. And certainly we should avoid assuming that the dominance of commentary and glosses in these centuries is a sign of philosophical or intellectual stagnation. Dawani and the Dashtakis were clearly highly original and opinionated thinkers, even if a cursory glance at lists of their works shows that all three of them spent most of their time expounding the writings of others. For instance, Dawani wrote commentaries on works by the earlier Avisanizing Sunni theologians al-Baidawi, al-Iji, and At-Tafd-Azani, and on a treatise by At-Tuzi. He even wrote a self-commentary on one of his own works. In an even more dramatic demonstration of the dominance of commentary at this time, we see the emergence of commentaries and glosses devoted to texts that were already commentaries or glosses. This may sound like the very definition of a pointless text, but such a work could provide the occasion for serious philosophical controversy. One of the writings in which Dawani attacked his rival Dashtaki was a set of super glosses on glosses that Dashtaki had written for a commentary on a work by al-Qatibi. You may need first and second order sentences to understand the liar paradox, but if you want to understand philosophical literature of this later period, you need to reckon with third and even fourth order commentary. So pervasive is this trend that I want to devote a whole episode to it, in which I'll be joined by a guest who has done more than anyone to argue for the interest and importance of philosophical commentary in the Islamic world. How would I feel if you skipped my interview with Robert Wisnowski? No comment. Catch it next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.