Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 172 - All Things Considered - Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi.txt

 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.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, All Things Considered – Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi As we turn to the first major figure of this series of episodes on philosophy in the later Islamic world, a few warnings are in order. Firstly, beware that, as always, there will be some wince-inducingly bad puns, because a History of Philosophy podcast without puns would be like drilling holes in a wall. Secondly, even more than in the previous episodes on the Islamic world, there will be a lot of unfamiliar names coming at you. I suspect that most listeners will recognize at best a handful of the many thinkers I'm going to discuss, with the most famous probably being Rumi, Ibn Taymiyya, and Mullah Sadra. Among the less prominent names, you'll have to try to keep apart the founder of illuminationism, Sukhravardhi, and one of his followers, Shahrazuri, a Sufi named Al-Kunawi and a logician named Al-Hoonaji, and avoid confusing the great theologian of the 12th century, Fakhradin Arazi, with the unorthodox philosopher and doctor Arazi, whom we discussed many episodes ago. Here I should mention, in case you haven't yet come across them, the timelines of philosophers I put on the podcast website. These will show you not only how to spell all these difficult names, but also when they lived. There are so far three timelines on philosophy in classical Greece, late antiquity, and now the Islamic world, and they include every thinker I've mentioned in the podcasts. A third warning is more substantive. The episodes to come are going to be looking at figures and movements that are unknown even to most academic experts, never mind the wider public. Research on philosophy in the Islamic world, including my own research by the way, has always focused on texts written up to the 12th century or so. Averroes, Maimonides, and Al-Ghazali are the most recent thinkers who have been adequately studied and who are accessible in good editions and English translations. As I stressed in the last episode, this isn't because there is no philosophy happening later on. If anything, part of the challenge is dealing with the enormous mass of surviving material, which consists mostly of unstudied manuscripts housed in libraries around the world, from Europe to Cairo, Istanbul, Iran, and India. For many of the topics I'll be considering, it is only within the last decade or so that scholars have made significant progress in understanding this material. Probably the most egregious example is philosophy in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, which remains almost entirely untouched by secondary literature in European languages. Naturally, I am still going to try to cover all this without any gaps and to show the philosophical interest of the later authors, but I should first issue a general caveat that everything I will say is, even more than usual, subject to significant revision by future research. These warnings, including the one about the puns, already apply as we turn to our first major figure, Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi. Let's start with his name, Al-Baghdadi. As you might guess, this just means he was from Baghdad. As you might also guess, that is hardly unique. We just met at the end of the last episode a critic of Avicenna named Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi. They were not contemporaries. As you can see on the podcast website's timeline, Abd al-Latif died in 1231 AD. We're not sure of the death date for today's subject, Abul Barakat, but it would have been earlier, probably in the 1160s, so please don't confuse them. A worse problem than the danger of confusion with other men from Baghdad is that Abul Barakat, despite his considerable importance, is not well studied. The main publication on him is a collection of articles by Shlomo Pines published way back in 1979 when I was 7 years old. I'll just pause to let you work out my age before proceeding. It's not on a timeline, by the way. You'd think that in the decades since then, research on him would have made a lot of progress, but it hasn't really. Without enough complaining, let's at least give Abul Barakat a podcast episode to himself, which is the least he deserves. He emerged in the same cultural context that produced Avicenna and Al-Ghazali. We're still in the period of the Seljuks, when regional courts frequently supported philosophers even as an extensive system of madrasas for religious scholars was blossoming. Like Avicenna and unlike Al-Ghazali, Abul Barakat found more support at the courts than at the schools. This includes the Caliphal court at Baghdad. Probably you've heard enough by now about the good relations between faiths in the Islamic world that you will not be stunned to hear that this well-connected individual was in fact a Jew who converted to Islam only towards the end of his life. Alongside his philosophical writing, he even produced a commentary on Ecclesiastes, a book of the Jewish Bible. So when he did write about philosophy, he did not approach it from quite the same point of view frequently adopted by later Avicennan thinkers, who were typically trained as jurists and Islamic theologians. Still, he shows a mastery of the dialectical methods employed by such authors. Here we might detect an echo of the earlier Saadia Gaon, another Jewish author who was influenced by the argumentative methods and ideas of kalam. Abul Barakat's conversion to Islam is the most intriguing thing about his life story. We hear about it only in Muslim sources, and there is no consensus among these sources about how exactly the conversion occurred. The one thing the accounts agree about is that the conversion was not motivated by a change in religious conviction. We are variously told that he craved more respect from his Muslim colleagues, or that he converted out of fear for his life, either after being captured as a prisoner of war, or because he failed in his duties as a physician. One version has it that the sultan's wife died while under his care, and he was afraid he would be executed if he didn't do something dramatic and fast. But we also hear that he set it down as a condition for his conversion that his daughters could still inherit his wealth without themselves converting. That casts some doubt on the idea that it was a desperate act of self-preservation. Rather, Abul Barakat seems to have been in a position to convert on his own terms or not at all. In any case, Abul Barakat's philosophical masterpiece shows few signs of his Jewish background, though the Bible is cited a few times. Its title in Arabic is Kitab al-Mawtabbar, which means the book of what has been carefully considered. This is explained at the beginning of the text where Abul Barakat tells us how he came to write the work. He says that he has carefully studied both the ancients and the moderns. This would mean, at least in the first instance, Aristotle and Avicenna. He didn't find either particularly illuminating, he says, and is now setting out to give us the fruits of his own reflections on all the main departments of Avicenna's philosophy. In English, the work might easily have been called all things considered. Of course, Abul Barakat's insistence here on his own originality is, ironically, not very original. He is harking back to the self-conscious independence of figures like Ahazali, Avicenna, and Ahrazi. This is in keeping with the disdain of Taqlid, the uncritical acceptance of authority that we've found throughout intellectual life in the Islamic world. And like Avicenna and Ahrazi, Abul Barakat was a doctor. Perhaps he was like them following the lead of the great medical writer Galen, who was similarly keen to stress his independence of mind. What then were the issues on which Abul Barakat felt the need to make like a lonely baseball player and strike out on his own? I did warn you about the puns. We'd need quite a few episodes to answer this question fully, but I'll mention ideas drawn from his physics and his views on the human soul. Let's start with physics, and the rather basic question of what happens when something moves. Just for a change of pace, let's use an example that isn't amusing in any way. Suppose you throw a stone into the air. Why does it first move up, then stop moving up and begin to fall back down? We know what Aristotle's answer would be, more or less. The force applied by throwing the stone makes it move unnaturally, that is to say, up. But since it is an earthy body, the stone has a natural tendency to move down towards its natural place at the center of the universe. At some point, this natural tendency kicks in and it starts to fall. If you want to try the experiment later yourself, do move out of the way before this happens. Also, of course, don't attempt any of this stone throwing at all if you live in a glass house. The difficulty at any rate is explaining in detail why the stone moves up as far as it does before beginning to fall. It seems clear that somehow the initial force of the throwing motion is being extinguished as the stone moves, until its natural motion can take over and make it fall. But why? In his typical fashion, Avicenna considered and rejected various answers to this question before formulating his own theory. That theory centers on the Arabic term mael, usually translated as inclination. Avicenna is here taking over and further developing an idea from the ancient Christian critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus. Philoponus had suggested that when you throw a stone, you temporarily give it a power for unnatural motion. The stone stops moving upwards once this power wears off. Avicenna partially agrees. He thinks that you do give the stone a so-called inclination to move upwards, but it doesn't just get used up like fuel running out. Rather, air resistance gradually wears away at the stone's inclination. Then the stone comes to rest in mid-air ever so briefly before beginning to fall as its natural tendency gives it a new inclination to move downwards. The story told by Avicenna has seemed exciting to historians of science because it sounds quite a lot like modern impetus theory. Once something is set in motion, it will continue unless it is prevented or slowed by something else. The resonance with impetus theory is especially strong when it comes to what Avicenna says about motion in a void. In a void, the stone would just keep moving indefinitely because there would be no resistance to slow it down and overcome its inclination. The catch is that Avicenna doesn't think this can happen. In fact, he introduces the point about inclination and indefinite motion precisely to show that there cannot be void. If there were, then a finite source of motion like your throwing arm could in theory give rise to an infinite motion, setting a rock sailing off forever through the void with a mere flick of the wrist, and that, thinks Avicenna, is absurd. What does Abul Barakat do with all this? On the one hand, he broadly accepts Avicenna's idea of an inclination, but he thinks that things are more complicated. For him, the whole time the stone is moving upward, it has two inclinations simultaneously, the one imparted by the thrower, which causes it to move up, and the natural inclination that makes it tend downwards. Here he's exploiting another point made by Avicenna, namely that not all inclinations are actually effective in causing motion. Suppose you are holding something heavy in your hand, like a copy of a book based on your favorite podcast. Actually, make it two copies. Even when you hold them still, the books have an inclination to move down, which means you'll have to exert force to keep them from falling. On Abul Barakat's analysis, what's happening here is that the two forces, or inclinations, are in perfect balance. The power you exert to keep the books still is just enough to counteract their natural, downward inclination. Something like this happens in the case of the stone. When it is at the top of its arc, the stone's natural inclination for downward motion has just gained equilibrium with the externally imposed inclination to go up. Against what some predecessors had claimed, there is no moment of rest between the stone's rising and its falling. Rather, one inclination is fading as the other gains the upper hand, so there is no extended time, however brief, where the stone hovers motionless. This is a brilliant proposal, in that it can explain deceleration and acceleration. As the stone is moving up, its motion gets slower and slower due to the steady influence of its natural downward inclination, then as the inclination imposed by the thrower wears off, it not only stops but begins to accelerate downwards. This might just be the best explanation of these phenomena anyone managed to offer prior to the modern concept of gravity. Other aspects of Abul Barakat's new and unfamiliar physical theories sound rather, well, familiar. Unlike Avicenna, he affirms that void is indeed possible, and he also argues against the Aristotelian doctrine that time is the measure of motion. Broadly speaking, these views sound like what we found recently in the Jewish philosopher Crescus. On anyone's theory of time, though, it can't be the case that Abul Barakat was taking his ideas from Crescus. If anything, it would have to be the other way around. As a glance at that timeline will reveal, Crescus comes along about two centuries after Abul Barakat. Given that Abul Barakat was Jewish, for most of his life at least, it is tempting to connect the two thinkers, but as far as I am aware, this is a question that has not been settled so far. Still, we can at least say that they are probably drawing on the same sources, such as Philoponos. On these same points, Abul Barakat also sounds like the earlier Muslim philosopher and doctor Abu Bakr al-Razi with his infamous theory of five eternal principles. And there is another strong resonance between them. Both stress the fact that time is something we grasp immediately. We don't need to see anything moving to be aware of time passing. Rather, it is something that is just obvious to us. Both also refer to the beliefs of common everyday people to prove their point. Just as al-Razi got everyday people to agree that time would still exist, even if the universe were to vanish, Abul Barakat points to the way Arabic speakers wish each other a long and healthy life by saying, may God let you go on longer. What this expression reveals, suggests Abul Barakat, is a dim awareness that time measures not motion, but existence. Though the immediacy of time to our minds does sound like al-Razi, and like Immanuel Kant for that matter, Abul Barakat's argument once again has Avicennan roots too. Avicenna held that existence is something that does not need to be proven or grasped on the basis of anything else. It is rather something of which we have immediate awareness. We also saw with the famous flying man thought experiment that for Avicenna, the existence of one's own self is just immediately obvious. Abul Barakat has had the ingenious idea to claim the same kind of immediacy for time. Enough time remains to describe one other innovation made by Abul Barakat, which in fact concerns exactly the topic I just mentioned, the self. This is a rather slippery word, especially in Arabic. The Arabic word nafs can mean both self and soul. So if Avicenna and Abul Barakat are right and you are immediately aware of your self, then in Arabic at least, it seems to follow that you are immediately aware of your soul. Abul Barakat is happy to follow Avicenna this far. In fact, like a stone thrown through the void, he is happy to go quite a bit further. Avicenna and the other Aristotelians had tried to understand the soul in terms of the capacities and faculties that belong to living things. Your soul gives you the ability to nourish your body by digesting food, to reproduce, to grow, to move around, to see, hear, and so on, and of course to think. The Aristotelians also sharply distinguish between these faculties though. Some of them we have in common with plants, others with animals, while thinking is reserved for us humans. Okay, also God and angels, but who's counting? Abul Barakat thinks this is all wrong. Our souls are not just bundles of disparate capacities. Rather what the soul is, what the self is, what you and I are, is a single seat of awareness. It is the same soul that sees and hears, that imagines and thinks and dreams, and initiates motion by throwing rocks. It is, if you will, the principle that gives you a first-person perspective on things. Abul Barakat complains that the way Aristotelians like Avicenna have divided up the soul's faculties is arbitrary. Why say that there is one faculty for seeing and another for imagining, but not say that there is one faculty for seeing yellow and another for seeing red? He also appeals again to everyday speech, pointing to commonly used Arabic expressions like my soul is pleased. The fact that the soul is the subject of all our awareness proves firstly that the soul exists and secondly that it is one single thing. Its unity also proves that it is not a body, since the body, unlike the soul, is nothing but a bundle of various distinct parts. To this, Abul Barakat adds that if your soul were your body, then you would lose part of it if you lost a hand or a limb, but this is absurd. Of course, the body does play a role in conditioning our experience. The fact that your eye is pointing at a certain object in good lighting conditions explains why you see what you are seeing, and not anything else. This accounts for the variety of sensations that are brought to the awareness of the self, but the self that is aware remains a unity. Much like Avicenna's theory of inclination, Abul Barakat's theory of the self sounds strikingly modern, but that impression is to some extent qualified by his wider purposes. Avicenna wanted to use his impetus-like idea of inclination to show that void is impossible. In the same way, I suspect that Abul Barakat developed his theory of the single unified self, what we might be tempted to describe as a seat of consciousness, above all for theological reasons. Having sketched this theory of the human soul, he could go on to apply the same principles to the divine mind. In fact, he explicitly affirms that our thinking is like God's. With his notion that an external multiplicity of objects can be brought to the awareness of a single self, he can now say that God remains one, even though God is aware of the many things in the universe he has created. This will help to solve the problem faced by Avicenna, who had a hard time explaining how his necessary God could know anything apart from himself. As this small sample shows, Abul Barakat exemplifies a movement as real as that traced by a throne stone, doing philosophy by way of thoughtful consideration of Avicenna. Like Al-Ghazali, Abul Barakat's contributions to philosophy often came in the form of criticisms. But where Al-Ghazali was criticizing Avicennism from the outside, from his standpoint as an Asharite theologian or Sufi mystic, Abul Barakat was in some sense an Avicennian philosopher. And there was nothing more Avicennian than questioning the traditional authorities and adopting new and innovative positions when it seemed like a good idea. This is what we find in Abul Barakat and many other later thinkers. They were much like the ancient commentators, who had their own agenda and their own ideas but expressed these while elucidating Aristotle. Others of the later Eastern tradition similarly practiced philosophy by using and occasionally abusing Avicenna. A significant difference, though, is that few ancient philosophers ever explicitly criticized or disagreed with Aristotle. Avicenna was rarely afforded that level of deference. Abul Barakat is a case in point. He often takes over ideas from Avicenna, but just as often says loud and clear where Avicenna has gone wrong. The master of critical engagement with Avicenna, though, and here the stress should be on the word critical, was a man with a familiar method and a familiar name and a nearly unprecedented capacity for argument. My soul would be very pleased if you joined me to hear about another Arazi, this time one called Fakhr-A-Din. He's only a stone's throw away on the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.