/lit/ - Literature

>>17888850
Perhaps only to indulge your curiosity. My present understanding:
>Aristotelian causal reasoning in relation to God produces an understanding of God's nature that is incompatible with Qur'anic emphasis on God's transcendent will.
>The 'God' of Avicenna, al-Farabi and the Mutazilites (as the uncaused cause, made necessary to explain the existence of contingent caused things) is a mechanistic postulate - an entity functioning naturalistically to ground and produce causal chains, presumed to be as such because it is presumed to be necessary that such a function be performed in order to make causal realism a closed system
>Within such thinking, God's nature as the uncaused cause means it is necessarily God's nature to bring creation into being, thus 1: he does not radically choose to do so, being in a sense compelled to do it, and 2: He is not radically separable from / transcendent of His creation, since He is conceivable in terms of His causal relationship to it, and He cannot be conceived prior to / separated from His activity of causing it
>Al-Ghazali identifies this in both The Incoherence and The Standard of Knowledge and concludes that it is contrary to the characteristics of God in the Qur'an
>Develops the doctrine of occasionalism to avoid the problems that positing an intrinsic relation of cause and effect creates within Islamic thinking
Would welcome any correction of what I've said from those more familiar with Islamic philosophy

>>15937518
Culture of critique

>>15919304
Culture of critique

Has Culture of Critique been disproved yet?