al-Taʿlīqāt

(lit.: The Notes)

Notes a pupil took down from Avicenna's teaching, including the admission that the true natures of things lie beyond human knowledge.

by Avicenna339 passages held

Arabic, the original language

Original language: Arabic

Report a rights issue

Overview

Bahmanyār, a pupil of Avicenna's who had converted to Islam from Zoroastrianism, took down these notes from his master's explanations of the basic terms of metaphysics, physics and logic. al-Taʿlīqāt (The Notes) is therefore not a book Avicenna composed. No one has settled whether the notes come from his years at Hamadan or from the later years at Isfahan; the text that survives is a later editor's arrangement. They move from topic to topic with no plan beyond the questions in hand: God's will and power, perception, nonexistence, matter, emanation, the true meaning of reward and punishment, and the Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd), which admits no multiplicity at all. Some of what they say is blunter than anything in the finished books. Knowing the true natures of things, one note says, lies beyond human power. We know only their properties, concomitants and accidents, never what makes a body a body or an animal an animal, and we do not know the true nature of God, of the intellect or of the soul. Another note criticises the Muʿtazila, the rationalist school of Islamic theology, who believed they had proved that God is not a body and then described his power and will on the model of a man's, as the capacity to act when he chooses. Historians of Avicenna's metaphysics now count the notes among its essential sources, beside al-Shifāʾ (The Healing). ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, the Egyptian scholar, printed them in Cairo in 1973. One excerpt had already appeared at Hyderabad in 1927, as a work of al-Fārābī, the tenth-century philosopher whose approach Avicenna carried on.

Key concepts

What are a thing's concomitants, and why do they matter here?

Concomitants are features that always go with a thing without being what it is, together with its properties and accidents. The notes hold that these are all people ever know. We know a body only as something that has length, breadth and depth, never the difference that makes it a body. So human science is real, but it is knowledge of what follows from natures, not of the natures themselves.

How can God know a particular event 'universally'?

By knowing it through its causes rather than by perceiving it. God knows that a given planet, after such a course, will enter an eclipse at such an hour, as someone who knows the heavens' motions can know it in advance. What God does not have is the pointing knowledge of a watcher who says 'this eclipse, now', since that would make his knowledge change with time.

What is emanation, fayḍ, in the notes?

Emanation is the act of an agent that is always acting, for no reason that prompts it and no purpose beyond the act itself. God is called ever-emanating: nothing is held back on his side, and whatever fails to receive existence fails because of the receiver. Emanation is how the notes describe creation without making God choose, wait or gain.

Why are God's knowledge, will and power one thing?

Because the Necessary Existent admits no multiplicity at all, so nothing in him can be a separate faculty. His knowing himself as the source of things is the same as their coming to exist from him, and that knowing is also his will. Attributes that are many in a person are, in God, one simple reality described from different sides.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

God Beyond Human Measures

How can anyone speak of God's knowing, willing and giving when even the true nature of a body escapes us? The notes keep testing every human picture of God and setting it aside.

The notes start from a blunt limit: people know the properties and concomitants of things, never what makes a body a body, and they do not know the true nature of God, the intellect or the soul. Within that limit they press hard. God knows an eclipse through its causes, not by pointing at this eclipse now. His knowing himself as the source of things is their existence. He gives without any purpose beyond the giving, which is what generosity means and trade does not. The Muʿtazila are faulted for modelling his will on a man's.

divine knowledge
causation
necessary existence
divine simplicity
divine attributes
existence
metaphysics
universals
particulars
relations
will
causality
individuation

Enter a dialogue

The Self That Never Goes Dark

Is there a moment when a person is not aware of themselves at all? The notes answer no, and separate that steady awareness from the occasional act of noticing it.

Awareness of oneself, the notes say, is always actual and comes through nothing else; awareness of that awareness comes and goes, and can be learned. A person may be inattentive and then be reminded, but is never aware of himself twice over. Animals perceive themselves through estimation and cannot think about themselves, because thinking belongs to what is free of matter. The same notes treat the soul's end in these terms: reward is the soul reaching the perfection it longs for, and punishment the pain of a soul left short of it.

self-awareness
self-knowledge
intellect
soul
perception

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 339
distinct concepts: 323
by passages held, corpus-wide: #222

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “divine knowledge”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
causation	divine knowledge	26
causation	necessary existence	19
individuation	universals	15
causation	individuation	14
causation	metaphysics	12
causation	intellect	11
causation	universals	10
divine knowledge	intellect	10
causation	soul	8
divine knowledge	universals	8
individuation	necessary existence	8
metaphysics	universals	7
individuation	metaphysics	6
individuation	soul	6
intellect	soul	6
intellect	universals	6
divine knowledge	metaphysics	5
metaphysics	necessary existence	5
divine knowledge	individuation	4
individuation	intellect	4
necessary existence	universals	4
divine knowledge	necessary existence	3
divine knowledge	soul	2
intellect	necessary existence	2
soul	universals	2
intellect	metaphysics	1
necessary existence	soul	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

A Compendium on the Soul (Kitāb fī al-nafs ʿalā sunnat al-ikhtiṣār)
The earliest of his books, written for the Sāmānid court at Bukhara before any of the summaries of philosophy that made his name.
EN
A Treatise on Love (Risāla fī māhiyyat al-ʿishq)
Written at the request of a jurist, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿṣūmī, and set out in seven short sections.
AR
al-Najāt
Between the vast al-Shifāʾ and the allusive Ishārāt in both length and manner, and the usual way into his logic.
AR
al-Taʿlīqāt you are here AR
Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Fann al-Shiʿr)
Filed under logic, as the Arabic tradition filed Aristotle's Poetics, it closes the nine logical books of al-Shifāʾ.
AR
Kitāb al-Nafs
The fullest of his many accounts of the soul, written as natural science, and the one Latin Europe read.
AR
Kitāb al-Siyāsa
The household branch of practical philosophy, set out for a man, his family and his servants, in a short Arabic treatise.
AR
Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt)
Shorter than al-Najāt and far shorter than al-Shifāʾ, though written after both, as a statement of his mature philosophy.
AR
Risāla fī maʿrifat al-nafs al-nāṭiqa wa-aḥwālihā
A short epistle in three chapters and an epilogue, one of several treatises on the soul that circulate under his name.
AR
The Healing, Logic: Isagoge (al-Madkhal)
The first of the nine books of logic in al-Shifāʾ, and the place where the prologue to the whole encyclopedia stands.
AR
The Metaphysics of The Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt)
His fullest metaphysics, known to Latin readers as the Liber de philosophia prima; it closes al-Shifāʾ after the logic, the physics and the mathematics.
AR

— or open another of their works