Universal Science: An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics The Modern Shīʿah Library Series Editors Sayyid Amjad H. Shah Naqavi (The Shīʿah Institute) Sayyid Sajjad H. Rizvi (University of Exeter) Editorial Advisory Board Ali Ansari (University of St Andrews) Rainer Brunner (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) Faisal Devji (University of Oxford) Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) Sabrina Mervin (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) volume 2 THE S HI AH INS TITUTE The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/msl Universal Science: An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics By Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī (d. 1420 ah/1999) Translated by John Cooper (d. 1997) Edited and Introduced by Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad leiden | boston Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936105 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2405-8092 isbn 978-90-04-34302-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34334-4 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-34311-5 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. To the friends of the Shīʿah Institute ∵ Contents Foreword xi Editor’s Introduction 1 1 Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī: A Philosophical Life 2 2 John Cooper: Oxford, Qum, and Cambridge 12 3 The Translation 16 4 ʿIlm-i kullī: Historical Context and Content 17 Universal Science: An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics 47 Preface 49 1 Introduction 57 1 The Definition of Metaphysics 57 2 The Central Subject-Matter of Metaphysics 59 3 The Divisions of Philosophy 61 4 Metaphysics in the General Sense 62 2 Existence (wujūd)–Being (hastī) 63 1 The Meaning of Existence 63 2 That Which Makes Existence Known is Neither a Real Definition Nor a Descriptive Definition 64 3 Which is Fundamentally Real: Existence or Quiddity? 64 4 The Definition of Quiddity 64 5 Arguments for the Fundamentality of Existence 65 6 The Concept of Existence 69 7 The Reality of Existence 74 8 Existence is in Addition to Quiddity 78 9 Truth (God, the Exalted) is Pure Existence 80 10 Mental Existence (or Existence in the Mind) 82 3 Mental Existence 86 1 The Enigma of Mental Existence 86 2 The Solution to the Enigma 87 3 The View of Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī 90 4 Unity of the Intellector and That Which is Intellected 94 viii contents 4 Further Issues Relating to Existence 97 1 Existence is Absolute Good 97 2 Existence is a Singularly Unique Reality 101 3 Existence is Not Substance and is Not Accident 102 4 Existence is Not Compound 103 5 Absolute Existence and Determined Existence 103 6 The Secondary Intelligible 106 7 A Non-Existent is Not Anything 108 8 There is No Differentiation between Non-Existences, or Any Causal Relationship 110 9 The Coming Back of What Has Become Non-Existent 111 10 History Does Not Repeat Itself 114 11 Making and Effecting 115 12 The Three Modes of Existence 118 5 Contingency (imkān) 121 1 General Contingency 121 2 Specific Contingency 121 3 Most Specific Contingency 122 4 Future Contingency 122 5 Pre-Dispositional Contingency 123 6 Contingency of Occurrence 123 7 Contingency in the Sense of Likelihood 124 8 Indigent Contingency 124 9 Analogical Contingency 125 6 Priority and Posteriority 126 1 Coming-Into-Being and Eternity 126 2 The Divisions of Priority and Posteriority 130 7 Unity, Multiplicity, and Predication 132 1 Unity and Multiplicity 132 2 Divisions of the One [That is to say an investigation into how many ways things are said to be ‘one’] 135 3 Predication 137 4 Division of Predication 137 5 Multiplicity, Alterity, and Opposition 141 8 Quiddity 144 1 Quiddity and Its Necessary Parts 144 2 Quiddity in Itself is Neither Existent Nor Non-Existent 146 contents ix 3 Mental Conceptions of Quiddity 147 4 The Natural Universal 149 5 Existence of the Natural Universal 149 9 Potentiality (quwwah) and Actuality ( fiʿl) 153 10 Cause (ʿillat) and Effect (maʿlūl) 155 1 Causality 155 2 The Divisions of the Efficient Cause 156 3 The Final Cause 159 4 Premature Death 163 5 The Formal Cause 164 6 The Material Cause 165 7 The Names for Matter 166 8 The Divisions of Matter 166 9 Things in Common between all the Causes 169 10 Some of the Properties of the Bodily Causes 169 11 Things in Common between the Cause and the Effect 170 12 A Discussion between Men of Wisdom 175 13 Vicious Circles and Infinite Regresses 180 Appendix 185 Bibliography 188 Index 197 Foreword It is a great privilege to present the second volume in The Modern Shīʿah Li- brary, ‘Universal Science: An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics’ (ʿIlm-i kullī), the first singly authored work by Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī (d. 1420 ah/1999), translat- ed here into English by John Cooper (d. 1997). This is the first of Yazdī’s several influential works on philosophy, jurisprudence, and political theory, to have been translated from Persian into English—and only the second to have been published in the West. Its author, Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī was born into a schol- arly family, son of the founder of the Islamic Seminary at Qum—one of the main loci of Shīʿī intellectual activity—Shaykh ʿAbd al-Karīm Ḥāʾirī Yazdī. He studied jurisprudence, philosophy, the ‘rational sciences’, and astronomy with many of the leading intellectual authorities of his day—including Āyatullāh al-Sayyid Aḥmad Khwānsārī (d. 1406 ah/1985) and Āyatullāh Rūḥ Allāh Khu- maynī (d. 1409 ah/1989)—before going on to teach at the University of Tehran. The work before you was written in the 1950s amidst a period of great political turbulence in Tehran, which coincided with a crossroads in the life of its au- thor; who soon after chose to leave Iran for the United States, where, having already developed a thorough grounding in Islamic philosophy, he then spent many years studying the Western philosophical canon and contemporary an- alytic philosophy at the Universities of Michigan and Toronto, respectively. He later went on to teach at Oxford, Yale, and McGill Universities; making Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī almost unique in his ability to navigate both the worlds of Islamic and Western philosophy. The Universal Science itself is an introduction to ‘metaphysics proper’; originally conceived as the first part of a trilogy that would go on to elaborate on both ‘theology proper’ and psychology. As an introduction it is remarka- ble both for its sheer philosophical breadth and for its clarity of exposition, and as such it serves as a fitting riposte to the still-prevalent Orientalist sup- position that ‘Islamic Philosophy’ reached its peak in the mediæval period and has hitherto been in decline. This edition of John Cooper’s translation therefore provides Western academia with a rare, but exemplary, insight into the ‘living tradition’ of Islamic philosophy as it continues to be practiced today in the Shīʿī seminaries of Najaf and Qum; a metaphysical–theologi- cal and epistemological discipline that has been transmitted continuously for the best part of a thousand years, which is concerned with examining matters of causality, existence, knowledge, and quiddity as these pertain to an understanding of the Divine. Although the permit of the Universal Science is often recondite in nature, the accessibility of its prose and the abun- dance of examples with which its author seeks to illuminate and invigorate xii Foreword the arguments of previous philosophical schools and authorities (Sadrian, Illuminationist, Peripatetic, and Avicennan), are qualities that have seen it utilised as a philosophical textbook for many years at the University of Tehran. Thus this translation will provide a guide through Islamic metaphys- ics for undergraduate students and scholars alike. A note of thanks is here due to the friends of the Shīʿah Institute, for their support, to Brill, for their commitment to this series, and to my dear colleagues, here at the Shīʿah Institute, namely, Aun, George, Mohammed, Nizam, and Sajjad, without whose indelible efforts and collective endeavour this work would still have remained a neglected draft of handwritten notes, queries, and untranslated passages amongst John Cooper's papers. It is our hope that the Universal Science will be of special interest to aca- demics in Islamic Studies and to philosophers seeking to understand and explore the shared philosophical heritage of the Western and Islamic worlds. خ ���خ��د�ہ ��ش�� ��دا خ ی ِر Sayyid Amjad H. Shah Naqavi Series Editor, The Modern Shīʿah Library The Shīʿah Institute Bloomsbury, London 17 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 1438/17 December 2016 Editor’s Introduction Philosophy is the foundation of all sciences. It is the universal science (ʿilm-i kullī). Without philosophy no other science can be established (banā kard)…Philosophy is the ontology of any reality (ḥaqīqat). For ex- ample, the reality (ḥaqīqat) of man. If you put philosophy to one side, you have put man aside. Because man is a rational and perceiving animal… the perceiver of ‘reality’. Āyatullāh Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī (d. 1420 ah/1999)1 These observations on the centrality of philosophy in the human experience, by the author of ʿIlm-i kullī, are redolent with the wisdom of the living Islamic philosophical tradition, a tradition which survives in all its fullness into our own times only among the Shīʿah.