Mehdi Assadi
Abstract
Ibn Sina says that if we have a piece of knowledge about the past or the future, then our knowledge is “potentially” about the external world. But he does not clarify the meaning of this “potentiality”. We show that if we take Ibn Sina's “the potential” view as the ...
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Ibn Sina says that if we have a piece of knowledge about the past or the future, then our knowledge is “potentially” about the external world. But he does not clarify the meaning of this “potentiality”. We show that if we take Ibn Sina's “the potential” view as the potentiality of the object of truth and then return it to the material causes, then by means of considerable modification and reconstruction we can obtain a reasonable kind of minimalist holism resolution: the object of knowledge to a future thing is its all material causes in the present time and the object of knowledge to a past thing is its all material effects in the present time. We will prove this presentist resolution by means of a kind of determinant reason of comparison with Ibn Sina's definition by a description of comparison with Ibn Sina's phrase that a thing can be distinct by its all causes and of the comparison between the validity of the Minimalist Holism Resolution and our knowledge about the past and the future in the ordinary situations (i.e. without considering the riddle of the intentionality to the nonexistent). In the end, we will have a glance at the degree of the correspondence between knowledge and its object in this resolution and then we show that this resolution can be provable even outside Ibn Sina's philosophical system without necessarily accepting such issues as the four causes and the potentiality.
mahdi assadi
Abstract
The present paper evaluates Ibn Sina's view about the intentionality and the truth of declaration in the case of the future and the past, the object of which is nonexistent. The paper strives to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between the well-known intentionality and the truth of the ...
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The present paper evaluates Ibn Sina's view about the intentionality and the truth of declaration in the case of the future and the past, the object of which is nonexistent. The paper strives to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between the well-known intentionality and the truth of the declaration (khabar), and that both can be used to elucidate certain unclear points in Ibn Sina's reasoning. Furthermore, an inconsistency in Ibn Sina’s view of intentionality is pointed out: He first states that regarding the knowledge of the nonexistent entities of the future, the mental forms we have of the entities in our mind have no relation to reality. However, he sets out to prove such a relation a few lines later. The paper tries to resolve the inconsistency as much as possible, and lastly, it criticizes the view(s) of Ibn Sina, i.e. the pure mentality of knowledge and the potentiality of knowledge about nonexistent entities in the future and the past.
