West Hall Selfie

            On Tuesday morning I heaved my body out of bed and as usual made my way like an automaton to the bathroom for my ablutions. But something made me hesitate in the living room. Where was my soundtrack? I couldn’t hear the rooster crowing that usually accompanies my journey. I looked at my phone and saw the reason why. It was 0:45 and only 40 minutes since I’d gone to bed. I took a pee and then headed back to the sack until 5:00.

            The fragrance of chocolate oozed into my nose like a double-filled cuberdon as I passed north of the Cadbury factory while riding to school along College.

            When I got to class I continued to try to get a handle on Anselm’s Proslogian so I could write my essay that’s due next week.

            Professor Black gave her last talk on Ghazali.

            Ghazali’s divorce analogy about god’s decision to create the temporal world is an argument against the philosophers even though the philosophers agree on rejecting variation with the divine will. God does not change its eternal will.

            Philosophers say that the world is eternal and has an infinite past. Avicenna says if the world is eternal that there would be an infinite amount of human souls existing at the same time.

            The philosophers worry about whether god creating in time is coherent or not. All moments in time are indistinguishable so why would god choose one moment to create the universe over another? No one can choose between identicals. Ghazali says this is wrong and that choices like that are made all the time.

            A little later, French philosopher Jean Buridan used a similar analogy to that of Ghazali’s dates, involving a hungry ass or donkey with two identical bales of hay equidistant in front of it. Will the donkey starve before deciding which one to eat? This analogy is so similar to Ghazali’s that some think Buridan must have read a translation of Ghazali.

            The philosophers would respond that there is nothing truly identical in the physical world.

            Averroes would say that if a choice is made then there is a difference.

            Specification or particularization. Preponderance – the underlying concept in the scenario. The possible is between existence and non-existence. Necessary cause causes preponderance. If there is no prior reason, an act of choice is specification. This will become choice-worthy. Let this be the better of the two. We have a libertarian conception of freedom that imposes qualities. We decide and then we make up the difference.

            If hungry and confronted by two identical dates, you need to eat and so you specify and pick one. It’s a random choice.

            Ironic example: A radical notion of freedom. If you are an Asharite the concept of human agency clashes with occasionalism. The Asharites say that god causes everything and so we are not the parents of our own actions. We acquire or perform the actions written by god. Kasb-acquisition or performance. If two people are shoving, god causes the shoving but produces in you the agency of acquiring the act. God writes the script and you perform it (interpret?).

            Ghazali says we are appointed to perform and acquire power for the act that is simultaneous with the act. If the goal is to preserve freedom of choice, tension between paradigm and performance can apply to god. His idea that it’s freedom you just declare is an unusual account of free agency and model for creation.

            Averroes wrote “Incoherence of the Incoherence”. Most of the Islamic philosophers were from in and around Persia, but Averroes was born in Islamic Spain in 1126 into a family of lawyers. His grandfather was the chief justice of Seville and his father took on the same position. He studied theology, law and medicine and wrote on all of those topics. Most Islamic and Jewish philosophers of the time were doctors and lawyers at the same time.

            One of Averroes’s mentors, Ibn Tufail, who was also a physician, wrote the first philosophical novel, “Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan” (Literally: “Living Son of Wakefulness” but translated as “The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai ibn Yokdhan”). The story is about an abandoned boy that is raised by deer and teaches himself philosophy. The holy people arrive. He leaves to sample civilization, deems it necessary for the civilized but not for him and so he returns to the island.

            Tufail was a court physician for a caliph and he took the young Averroes to meet him. The two men had a conversation about the eternity of the world. Averroes politely held back for a while but finally joined in. The caliph was so impressed with his intelligence that he rewarded him with several gifts. The caliph was interested in Aristotle and Averroes wrote commentaries on Aristotle (Aristotle was known as “the commentator”). Averroes wanted to get to the core of Aristotle and lose the accretions. He developed new systems that were critical of what he saw as Avicenna’s corruption of Aristotle. He wrote three types of commentaries on Aristotle: Epitomes or brief summaries; paraphrases; and long, sequential discussions. Over the years he revised his positions and evolved his thinking.

            Averroes thought that human beings share the same intellect.

            Averroes was dedicated to legitimize philosophy in Islamic thought. The Qu’ran requires reflection on its writings and required the reader to philosophize. Ghazali made a mistake to attack philosophy and that might have made him a heretic.

            Averroes had a career of judgeships in Spain and North Africa. In 1184 the caliph died and his son took over. Pressure was placed on Averroes to be more orthodox and philosophers were being persecuted. Averroes was exiled to a small town. Later the caliph relented and brought Averroes back to his previous position, but he died shortly after that.

            After class I rode up to University College and went to the West Hall to work on my laptop. Sitting in the sunlight in that beautiful chamber inspired me to try out the selfie function on my new phone.

            A student passing through the hall stopped to play the piano for a couple of minutes.

            I stayed there until 12:55 reading and editing Anselm’s Proslogian and then I went down to my tutorial. As I was standing outside the classroom, James came up to wait beside me. I asked him what an anti-obstructionist was but he didn’t know what I was talking about. I reminded him that he’d said Professor Black was an “anti-obstructionist” and he corrected me that the word was “anti-abstractionist”. He explained that an abstractionist that if one, for example, looks at several different triangles, one can abstract an understanding of the universal triangle. An anti-abstractionist would say that one can only arrive at universals through inspiration either from a higher power or the higher part of one’s mind.

            The conversation continued after we were in our seats and Cilia joined in. I confess that I didn’t follow it much past what I wrote above. The talk ate up five minutes of our tutorial though.

            Cilia began the tutorial by telling us that it’s necessary to understand the fight between Avicenna and Ghazali.

            She explained the concepts of necessary conditions, sufficient conditions and necessary and sufficient conditions.

            It is a necessary condition to have flour to bake a cake or to have eyes in order to see.

            This contrasts with the sufficient condition. Being a poodle is a sufficient condition for being a dog but one does not need to be a poodle to be a dog. It is sufficient for being a fruit to be an apple but one does not need to be an apple to be a fruit.

            The necessary and sufficient condition is the holy grail of conditions and its specification is “if and only if”, as in 2 + 2 = 4 if and only if 1 + 1 = 2.

            Avicenna was committed to sufficient reason.

            Existence and not existence are equally possible but existence happened and so there must be a reason.

            Avicenna says the world could not have come to be in time because moments t1, t2, t3 and so on, are equal. If there is no difference between one moment and another it is impossible for god to make an arbitrary decision to have picked one over another, therefore the world must have always existed. If “god” is sufficient for creation at t1 but it created the world at t2 it implies that there was a change in god’s nature before it created the world.

             For Ghazali though the choices of identical objects are simply, whatever and pick one. That’s hat the will does.

We looked at the analogies of the dates, the water and the hay and I commented that each analogy is seeded with a motivation of need in order for the choice to be made. I wondered if they believed that “god” needed to create the world. Cilia answered that they thought that god created the universe out of inherent generosity. I argued that if “god” is inherently generous then the world must have existed with “god” through eternity and so it couldn’t have been created. She suggested they mean that there was an overflowing of god’s generosity but I countered that would imply that before hand there was less flow of generosity in god which would mean that it changed. Cilia said that was a pretty good argument and she didn’t know how Ghazali would respond.

            We finished the tutorial with a look at occasionalism. Avicenna or any Aristotelian will say that, with all things being equal, cause is necessary and sufficient for effect. A match is a sufficient condition for setting a bunch of gas soaked rags n fire.

            Ghazali says this is wrong. There is no reason to believe that a match is necessary and sufficient for setting the rags on fire. We have been tricked. Tricked into thinking that it is necessary to have a head in order to be alive. Reason is concurrence. We’ve been tricked by seeing it happen all the time.

            The blind man regaining sight is supposed to show that opening our eyes and see things then opening our eyes causes sight.

            I rode along College to Dovercourt and then down to Dundas and west again until I got to Sole Survivor. The cobbler there told me there was nothing she could do about my boots, but she advised me to take them back to Blundstone to see if they could do something.

            I rode east to Palmerston, south to Queen and then back west a few blocks to the Australian Boot Company. They were very busy but the manager was very nice and took the time to look at my boots. She thought their structural collapse was quite weird, since the boots were otherwise in pretty good shape. She took down my email and took a picture of the boot and told me she’d email Blundstone Canada about it. She said that I should hear back from them by the next day.