Angel of Saturn

            On Tuesday at the beginning of Philosophy class, Professor Black handed the topics for our final essay and mentioned that our exam would be on December 14^th. I was suddenly worried on hearing that because I was scheduled to work on that Thursday night. I needed to find out that the test was earlier in the day so I could stop worrying.

            Deborah Black continued to talk about the ideas of the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.

            Emanation means creation and cause of existence. This is also a Neo-platonic metaphor. But Avicenna is distinct from the Greek approach because he gives an account of creation. Aristotle does not. God and the movers are responsible for the existence of universe. The movers each preside over one sphere (I wonder if they wear sailor suits). He links this up with the best astronomical knowledge of the time. God is the being that Exists necessarily in itself and everyone else only exists possibly. There cannot be two Necessary Existents because that would make them both merely possible. The Necessary Existent per se is one and the cause of all.

            The First Principle is the principle of unity. From the one, in so far as it is one, only one can come. God can only produce one thing like itself and so it did not directly create everything. God just purely thinks of and contemplates itself but produced other being by thinking.

            The Platonists said that the first being was one as well.

            Aristotle said the One is also intellect and being but Platonists thought the One was above the intellect.  The first intellect thinks god as being necessary in itself, thinks of self as necessary through god and thinks of self as being possible in itself.

            Avicenna focuses on human beings individuated by matter. Each of the other intellects preside over one sphere. They are universal and particular. The Earth is the sub-lunar sphere. The agent intellect causes the physical world.

            Aristotle talks of an active or producing intellect that is responsible for humans acquiring knowledge. Avicenna incorporates this. It’s the medieval version of a theory of everything.

            What kind of causality of god bringing causation into existence. Individual things are multiplied by matter. Individuals in the material world differ by virtue of their matter.

            Should Avicenna have an account of god’s knowledge? God only knows what it caused directly.

            Al Ghazali thinks Avicenna is a heretic.

            Matter for an Aristotelian is unintelligible. They think that explains why physical things change. The professor admits to decaying. No one knows individual material things, but we are acquainted with them. We have direct sensory contact with individuals and this is true for the entire physical world. Knowing them does not increase knowledge.

            Avicenna does think god is aware that the different kinds of things exist but how is this possible for a self contemplating being? It doesn’t see particulars, except in a universal way in so far as they are insubtantiations. If you look at the supralunar spheres and could find individuals fully individuated by their essences then god could know them. It can know Saturn and the other entities as individuals in a universal way.

            Eclipses are relations between two of these entities. God knows eclipses and their particulars through all time by universal astronomy but that does not extend to us. God knows every mote but is not watching the details of our lives. Humans are weird. Why doesn’t everything immaterial fall under god’s providence?

            After class I rode across one of the paths that connect St George to Kink’s College Circle. A very tall and slim young woman wearing green makeup, I think to represent Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, was walking in the opposite direction that I was riding. I was staring at her and smiling. She noticed my gaze and stumbled slightly at the same time, I assume because I’d made her feel self-conscious.

            As I continued on I approached from the back someone dressed in a bear suit but it turned out that she was just wearing a jacket that had a hood with bear ears.

            When I got to University College I had more than half an hour to kill before tutorial so I went up to the East Hall, sat at a desk near a plug and went online.

            In tutorial Cicilia talked about the Necessary Existent.

            In order to learn the Necessary Existent would have to change, which according to Avicenna would be impossible.

            The Possible Existent is like a teeter-totter balanced between non-existence and existence. It would need a toddler to sit at one end or the other to exist or not. The Necessary Existent immediately exists, uncaused, unique and wholly one.

            Avicenna got into trouble because he said that god can’t know that individual people exist.

                Start with something that exists. N or P. If N → NE.

If P it needs a cause to exist. What is the cause?

Either NE or infinite cosmic theories of all PEs.

NE or … (to infinity) ← P → P → P → P (but even this needs NE).

            Series as a whole:

     P     or      N (No whole composed of parts can be NE)

            If P is the cause it must be:

            Internal or External

             P or N        P or N

            To be the internal cause of this series P would have to cause itself and several others.

            N could not be the internal cause because because one can’t have NE in a group of all or only PEs.

            P could not be the external cause because one can’t have anything outside totality.

            NE has to be the external cause QED.

            Captain Cook brought a dead Platypus back to England but even people that saw it up close believed it was a hoax. They thought that someone had sewn parts of several animals together. The Necessary Existent has to be real. One can’t say, “This is god, but god is not real.”

            The PE cannot explain itself. Existence in the world or in the mind. Why is something real and not an idea.

            If the possible existents go on forever then nothing is caused.

            You can be a parent because you are human. It doesn’t matter if you had a parent.

            PE needs to borrow causal power and the ability to cause. It has to be necessitated.

            At the end of the tutorial we got our essays back. I was very disappointed to get a C-plus. I felt an ache in my chest on the way home and wondered if it was anxiety about the next essay and the exam in light of my low essay mark.