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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Avicenna's conception of being, used to establish the Necessary Existent, is spurious

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Avicenna proceeds from a conception of being alien to Aristotle rather than from analyses of motion and moved objects
      ?

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    • 2.Averroes dismisses this conception as spurious
      ?

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    • 3.Albalag, following Averroes, identifies errors and absurd implications in metaphysics that follow from this conception
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence treats existence as an accident added to quiddity, which Aquinas and later scholastics recognized as generating infinite regress problems.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.If existence were genuinely accidental to essence, then the existence of existence would itself require grounding, collapsing the Necessary Existent argument into vicious circularity.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 3.Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics Gamma treat 'being' as said in many ways but never as a property superadded to a subject, making Avicenna's univocal existential operator a post-Aristotelian importation.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Avicenna's concept of the Necessary Existent depends on possibility and necessity being genuine metaphysical features of essences considered in themselves, but Kant's critique shows modal properties cannot be read off from mere conceptual analysis of essences.
      ?

      Think about whether this reason is strong or weak

    • 2.The inference from 'possible being requires an external cause' to 'there must be a being whose essence is identical to its existence' smuggles in a substantive ontological assumption that possibility and necessity are intrinsic rather than relational properties.
      ?

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