TENSED DIVINE KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT CHANGE

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان

Department of Islamic Philosophy, Faculty of Ushuluddin, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati

10.22091/jptr.2026.17137.3652

چکیده

A knower whose knowledge of an event shifts as that event moves from future to present to past appears to undergo change, and a knower who undergoes change cannot easily be reconciled with divine immutability. This paper argues that al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, in the discussion of divine knowledge, develops an independent solution to this problem through his distinction between a real attribute (ṣifah ḥaqīqiyyah) and a considerational relation (nisbah i'tibāriyyah). It tests this distinction, along with al-Jurjānī's associated charge that the philosophers hold an inconsistent position on universals and particulars, against the relevant primary and secondary literature, including Avicenna's own text. The paper finds that al-Jurjānī's distinction answers the tensed knowledge problem at the specific point Cyr's recent objection targets, since his ontology denies considerational relations the reality that objection requires, while leaving open, at a different point pressed by Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī, what grounds the correctness of each tensed description once both real change and real dependence have been ruled out. This second gap, the paper argues, could plausibly be closed by an occasionalist premise available within the wider Ashʿarite tradition, though not one al-Jurjānī is found to invoke explicitly at this point in the text.

کلیدواژه‌ها

موضوعات


عنوان مقاله [English]

TENSED DIVINE KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT CHANGE

نویسندگان [English]

  • M. Rachmatullah Arken
  • Bambang Qomaruzzaman
Department of Islamic Philosophy, Faculty of Ushuluddin, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati
چکیده [English]

A knower whose knowledge of an event shifts as that event moves from future to present to past appears to undergo change, and a knower who undergoes change cannot easily be reconciled with divine immutability. This paper argues that al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī, in the discussion of divine knowledge, develops an independent solution to this problem through his distinction between a real attribute (ṣifah ḥaqīqiyyah) and a considerational relation (nisbah i'tibāriyyah). It tests this distinction, along with al-Jurjānī's associated charge that the philosophers hold an inconsistent position on universals and particulars, against the relevant primary and secondary literature, including Avicenna's own text. The paper finds that al-Jurjānī's distinction answers the tensed knowledge problem at the specific point Cyr's recent objection targets, since his ontology denies considerational relations the reality that objection requires, while leaving open, at a different point pressed by Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī, what grounds the correctness of each tensed description once both real change and real dependence have been ruled out. This second gap, the paper argues, could plausibly be closed by an occasionalist premise available within the wider Ashʿarite tradition, though not one al-Jurjānī is found to invoke explicitly at this point in the text.

کلیدواژه‌ها [English]

  • Divine immutability
  • Tensed knowledge
  • Al-Jurjānī
  • Cambridge change
  • God's knowledge of particulars
CAPTCHA Image