Anthony Robert Booth, in Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief, advances a novel categorization of rationalist, medieval epistemology as what he calls “Moderate Evidentialism,” with the “Moderate anti-Evidentialism” of the orthodox Ash’arite theologians as the counterpoint to the writings of the Peripatetic falasifa. Booth’s analysis is oriented toward two significant aims: first, it proffers to unify the underlying philosophical commitments of the three major falasifa—Abu Nasr al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)—against those of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the Ash’arite credited with delegitimizing the rationalist project; and second, it uses these philosophical distinctions to shed light on contemporary philosophico-theological debates on Islamic politics. These aims are certainly ambitious, but Booth’s background in analytic epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind lend a unique clarity and systematicity to their notoriously complex subject matter.

I center my concern with Booth’s book around his discussion of al-Farabi, as al-Farabi occupies the focal point of his theory of Moderate Evidentialism. Specifically, I take up Booth’s lack of clarity as to the nature of the Prophet and of God, and the consequent implications it has on his assessment of al-Farabi’s notion of certitude. I myself do not offer any definitive interpretation of al-Farabi’s theory of prophecy; it is well known that he never makes explicit the precise nature of prophethood, whether because much of his work is lost to us or because we are unsure how genuine al-Farabi’s belief in prophecy actually was. Herbert Davidson, one of the leading authorities on the medieval reception of Aristotle’s theory of intellect, notes the possibility that many of al-Farabi’s views “were only intended to veil his real views from conservative religious leaders” (Davidson 1972, 143–44). What is consistent among medievalists, however, is that medieval epistemology cannot be considered separately from medieval cosmology, particularly since al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes alike wrote within the framework of Plotinian emanation. This is a point that Booth alludes to briefly at various points in his work, but is never taken up as the metaphysical background of his own analysis of Farabian certitude.

From the outset, Booth contours his exploration of the falasifa as “explicitly advocating an Islamic philosophy” which worked to “[further] the theistic enterprise” (Booth 2016, 8). He further qualifies their philosophical project as aiming to authenticate Hadith or, “in other words, the process of discerning prophetic speech” (Booth 2016, 10). This characterization of medieval, Peripatetic philosophy is quite bold, considering that neither al-Farabi nor Averroes explicitly mention, in their philosophic writings, Islam, the prophet Muhammad, or the Qur’an by name. In the case of al-Farabi, the generalized figure of the prophet is mentioned only in his al-Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), and is notably absent in the Conditions of Certitude, the “Book of Rhetoric,” and in his seminal political work, The Attainment of Happiness. Even Averroes, who does mention the Prophet in his commentary on Plato’s Republic, expresses that prophethood, as a condition for rulership, would be preferable rather than necessary (it should be noted that Averroes also mentions the Qur’anic verse 3:7 in his Decisive Treatise, although he does so to promote the compatibility of philosophical inquiry with the tenets of revelation as commonly understood; see Ahmed 2016).

That neither al-Farabi nor Averroes advocate for an explicitly Islamic philosophy is crucial, as it reinforces the profound significance of understanding their work against their Aristotelian Neoplatonic theory of emanative cosmology. Al-Farabi was particularly important in this regard; it was he who bridged the gap between the celestial spheres and the sublunar world by identifying the Active Intellect as the tenth Intelligence, a characterization absent in the writings of Plotinus, Themistius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias. His further identification of the Active Intellect as the external “source” of the intelligibles is precisely what allows for the attainment of human intellectual perfection. In the Conditions of Certitude, al-Farabi explicitly states that the meaning of truth is “the relation of what belongs to the belief to the object of belief insofar as the latter is external to the soul” (al-Farabi, Ketāb šarāʾeṭ al-yaqīn, 97, my emphasis).

Al-Farabi’s Conditions of Certitude serves as the focus of Booth’s development of the falasifa’s Moderate Evidentialism, and it is here where the consistency of the theory is most opaque. Booth, drawing from Deborah Black, correctly identifies al-Farabi’s theory of certainty as containing strict K-K requirements, or the requirement that “in order to have certainty that p, it must be necessary that one could not but have been certain that p” (Booth 2016, 20). Al-Farabi himself classifies six qualifications for absolute certitude, and Booth highlights the fourth and fifth as indicative of the need for prophecy. In Black’s interpretation of the Conditions of Certitude, al-Farabi states that “it is impossible that p not be true” (or, as Booth states, the “necessity condition”) and that “there is no time at which p can be false” (or the “eternity condition”) (see Booth 2016, 44). Booth, after offering a more nuanced rewrite of these conditions, understands them to be illustrating “different kinds of epistemic possibility” rather than as distinguishing between epistemic and metaphysical conditions (Booth 2016, 48). This characterization is relatively uncontroversial, particularly since al-Farabi’s theory of emanation identifies four types of intellect that a human can possess: potential intellect, actual intellect, agent (or active) intellect, and acquired intellect. More peculiar is Booth’s assertion that only the prophet is capable of attaining the highest level of epistemic certainty: only she can fulfill al-Farabi’s sixth condition that the epistemic acquisition of the first five characteristics of certitude “does not happen accidentally, but essentially” (al-Farabi, Ketāb šarāʾeṭ al-yaqīn, 97). Booth further qualifies this position by invoking the “prophetic psychological makeup” unique to the prophet, allowing her to “have absolute certainty towards those propositions about which there can be absolute certainty—necessary, eternal truths” (Booth 2016, 49). Indeed, this qualification is what justifies Booth’s Moderate Evidentialism: although only prophets can have certitude absolutely, non-prophets can have justified beliefs without the need for absolute certainty. The role of the prophet is precisely why the falasifa advocated for a type of Evidentialism whatever.

That Booth discusses Farabian certainty without appealing to his emanative cosmology is troubling. We must remember that al-Farabi’s cosmology—taken up by Avicenna and Averroes in his wake—is directly tied to the Active Intellect, which Booth does address in brief. The existence of the Active Intellect, with its external permanency, necessity, and eternality, is the basis for al-Farabi’s characterization of the four types of human intellect: “It becomes the task of the active intellect,” Davidson writes, “to complete the perfection of the sublunar world by leading the human intellect from potentiality to actuality” (Davidson 1972, 137). It is the attainment of the acquired intellect which fulfills the K-K condition needed for absolute certainty and, as such, intellectual perfection. Fazlur Rahman summarizes the acquisition of this intellect in the following manner:

Every intelligible thing can be contemplated by the actual intellect by receiving its form and since the actual intellect is itself now an intelligible thing, it can therefore know itself. When thus our intellect becomes both self-intelligible and self-intellective, becomes a form of form, it becomes, in al-Farabi’s terminology, “acquired intellect.” (Rahman 1958, 12)

Why is this emphasis on acquired intellect significant, and why is it troubling that Booth fails to mention it in his analysis of certitude? Because for al-Farabi, the acquired intellect is the only part of the human soul that is immortal. And because the acquired intellect is the agent’s knowledge that she knows the necessary, eternal intelligibles (and hence, K-K in nature), it is indistinguishable from the acquired intellect of any other agent. The first consequence is, of course, that there is no possibility for individual immortality: immortality is predicated instead on the attainment of intellectual perfection. The second consequence is that Booth’s emphasis on the falasifa’s promotion of a distinctly Islamic philosophy loses strength. Indeed, much of why the dialectical theologians, the Mutakallimun, charged the Peripatetic Islamic philosophers for apostasy was for their denial of individual immortality, which is one of the reigning characteristics of Islam itself.

Bracketing the theological implications of this cosmology, we might turn to the inconsistency it produces for Booth’s characterization of the prophet as the only agent who can satisfy all six of al-Farabi’s requirements for absolute certitude. Booth identifies a “certain prophetic ability” as the necessary bridge to essential understanding, insofar as “God has predetermined that she [the prophet] will know all intelligibles by giving her a special faculty of imagination” (Booth 2016, 56). It is unclear whether Booth is here enumerating two faculties of imagination—one “ordinary” and one “special”—which allows for the existence of this “certain prophetic ability,” but it is in any case a mischaracterization to denote this capacity as predetermined by “God.” God, for the falasifa, is analogized most closely with the Active Intellect; explicit textual evidence thereof is almost impossible to identify, however, as the medieval philosophers—and especially al-Farabi and Averroes—offered theoretically inconsistent accounts of intellection across a number of their respective works. However, it is indisputable that the complexity of their own views of the Divine is intimately interwoven with their understandings of epistemology, cosmology, ethics, and political philosophy.

In any case, Booth is right to highlight the imaginative faculty as that which is unique to al-Farabi’s brief characterization of the prophet. Since the imaginative faculty is separate from the cognitive and intellective faculties, however, it is unlikely that al-Farabi, dedicated as he was to Aristotelian epistemology, would have believed that a “perfect” faculty of imagination could supply the agent with intellectual perfection. More simply, one can have a powerful imagination whether or not they possess the acquired intellect. Miriam Galston suggests as much when she states that there is a “crucial distinction between a powerful imagination independent of rational control and a powerful imagination under the direction of reason” (Galston 1990, 45). As such, we might say that there exist three types of “elite”: the philosopher, the prophet, and the philosopher-prophet. Booth is undoubtedly concerned with the third of these—that agent who has both the acquired intellect indicative of intellectual perfection and the superior imaginative faculty that allows her to convey the intelligibles in a manner suitable for all types of citizens. This “higher level of prophet,” as Davidson writes, “is found exclusively among men who have passed through all the stages of human intellectual development, reached the level of ‘acquired intellect,’ and had the active intellect ‘enter’ them” by means of the imaginative faculty (Davidson 1972, 147). The subtle yet significant implication here is that an agent can have the acquired intellect—and thereby possess absolute certitude—without being a prophet.

It seems uncontroversial to claim that the philosopher proper—she who has perfected her intellect—can have a level of absolute certainty of eternal truths without also being a prophet: it is the philosopher and not the prophet or philosopher-prophet, after all, that al-Farabi identifies as the virtuous ruler in The Attainment of Happiness. To deny this possibility would be to elevate al-Farabi’s ambiguous writings on prophecy to the status of a definitive, philosophical commitment, no less than to undermine the cosmological commitments of the falasifa altogether. Though his arguments for the intellectual primacy of the prophet are deeply compelling, Booth’s negligence of medieval, Peripatetic cosmology diminishes the force of the theory he intends to advance.

References

Ahmed, Sabeen. “The Genesis of Secular Politics in Medieval Philosophy: The King of Averroes and the Emperor of Dante.” In “Praxis, Virtues, and Values: The Legacies of Aristotle,” special issue of Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory, and Sociocultural Hermeneutics 18.2 (2016) 209–31.

Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr. Ketāb šarāʾeṭ al-yaqīn. Ed. in ʿAjam and Faḵrī, IV: pp. 97–104.

Booth, Anthony Robert. Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Davidson, Herbert A. “Alfarabi and Avicenna on the Active Intellect.” Viator 3 (1972) 109–78.

Galston, Miriam. Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of al-Farabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

My comment on Anthony Robert Booth’s Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief will focus narrowly on the framing of the problem of prophecy early in chapter 1. My question is a very simple one: What is the problem of prophecy? I ask this because, as a general notion, prophecy might be understood to mean distinct things and raise a number of different epistemological questions.

The term “prophecy” first appears early in chapter 1, in the course of a discussion of the general problem of evidentialism. Prophecy is not explicitly defined, but it’s clearly identified with sacred texts:

What is prophecy’s unique epistemic role? Does Evidentialism entail that we can reason our way, by investigating the world, into correct religious belief (if there is such a thing)? If it does, then it appears as if we can arrive at correct religious belief without consulting divine scriptures at all (9).

It is easy to see why prophecy so described is of central interest to the ethics of belief. In the first place, as Aikin pointed out in the introduction, contrary to a popular stereotype, philosophers of religion have long been concerned with the evidentiary value of prophetic utterances of various kinds. This is especially true when these prophetic utterances dictate the core message and core beliefs of the religion and, crucially, when failure to affirm these beliefs is punishable by death (on earth) or hell (after death). Second, these philosophers have not only been just interested in these questions, some of them taken decidedly evidentialist positions on them. Third, Islam, like Christianity, is a religion of the book. Its central claims are found in the pages of a special kind of religious text. In the case of Islam, the special text, the Koran, was dictated to the Prophet Muhammad. Christianity’s special text, the Gospels, were written by humans divinely inspired, at least on one telling. Knowledge of the claims made in these texts is of ultimate practical and theoretical value.

The nature of this prophetic evidence, Booth argues, poses a conundrum which sharply distinguishes evidentialists from anti-evidentialists. On the one hand, evidentialism suggests that it is possible we can reason our way to religious belief without the need for scriptures at all. Should it be the case, however, that we require the sacred texts for some reason, evidentialists will still insist that we will need a method for sorting out which sacred text to believe and which not to believe. Sacred texts do not free us from the obligations of evidence. Such dependence on evidence, however, calls into question the uniqueness of revelation, which, in this circumstance, would rely for its rational acceptability on evidence different from revelation. Alternatively, should we consider the problem through the lens of the anti-evidentialist, whereby scripture is to be believed for non-epistemic reasons, then we have to face the evidential question as to how to sort out real scripture from fake scripture. This dilemma, according to Booth, “stands as the central problem of medieval Islamic philosophy” (10).

It is clear why prophecy is central the argument in the book. But the central problem just described, I think, varies significantly depending on what one means by prophecy. To illustrate this point, I would like to borrow some distinctions from Aquinas’s discussion of faith and evidence in the early chapters of the Summa Contra Gentiles. Early in chapter 3, Aquinas distinguishes between two different types of truths about God. One kind of truth about God is one someone might discover on their own, by the natural light of reason (though with great difficulty and risk of error, as Aquinas urges). Aquinas’s examples of this sort of claim are that God exists and that God is one. The other type of revealed truth “exceed the ability of human reason,” such as the fact, for Christianity, that God is triune. There’s no way you’re going to get to the idea that God is triune under your own steam. Such a claim has simply to be revealed to you.

Aquinas will go on to argue that revelation is nonetheless necessary for both kinds of divine truths. It is necessary in the first place because knowledge of these things is essential for salvation and the vast majority of humans do not have the skill, the time, or the patience to sort through the various arguments for the existence of God. Besides, even when they do find the time and have the expertise, the risk that they misplace something in the middle of a very long chain of reasoning is very high, and thus must live with nagging uncertainty that they’ve made a mistake. It’s better, in other words, that such truths be delivered to us via revelation. For Aquinas this revelation is obviously centered on the account in the Gospels. The case for the truths of the second kind is an easier one: we’ll never come to them on our own, so we simply need to be told.

The nature of this revelation, and our relationship to its revelation, however, points to yet a third kind of prophetic claim. Christianity and Islam are historical religions, the central claims of which include knowledge of specific historical events and individuals. No amount of natural reason is going to lead you to the truth of the claim, for instance, that Muhammad or Jesus existed. These historical truths are unlike the Trinity-type claims because they’re completely clear to witnesses to the events. Some of the claims in scripture, in other words, are completely ordinary claims which, presumably, would not have posed unique questions of credibility for those who witnessed them. For later readers of scripture, however, their credibility is on par with the credibility we assign to historical texts. For Aquinas, claims of the second type provide the evidence for claims of the former kind. The ordinariness of the historical claims, that such-and-such people existed and did-such-and such things. Aquinas, of course, is an evidentialist about these matters.

In light of this, I’d like to close with some questions: Does the problem of prophecy exist in the same way for the living witness to prophets’ utterances and deeds as it does for later readers of accounts of them? Or does the problem only regard the credibility of the original prophet? Finally, does the problem of prophecy vary with regard to whether the question is solvable by the natural light of reason or completely beyond human understanding?

In this compact book, Anthony Booth argues that Alfarabi, and perhaps other medieval philosophers writing in Arabic, collectively known as the falāsifa, were not utopian thinkers. Alfarabi, Booth says, believed that throughout history, perfect certainty has been attained only by prophets.1 All other individuals, including philosophers,2 can obtain at most fallible certainty. For Booth, this means that Alfarabi’s theory is an example of what he calls “Moderate Evidentialism,” which has two key characteristics: (1) it is a form of knowledge that is supported by evidence and (2) at the same time, what is known could be incorrect because the evidence or reasons it relies upon are not infallible (19–22). Booth contrasts Moderate Evidentialism both with “Evidentialism,” according to which knowledge can be attained with perfect certainty based upon epistemic or scientific evidence (see 5, 20), and Anti-Evidentialism, namely, the view that all knowledge is ultimately dependent upon God’s will.3

For Booth, one implication of the hypothesis that some of the great falāsifa believed that the certainty non-prophetic humans can at best attain will be “forever a grade below” prophetic understanding (61) is the circumstance that those who today claim absolute certainty for their own beliefs are mistaken about the degree of certainty that is possible for humans other than prophets to have. Thus, the teachings of the moderate evidentialist falāsifa undermine the contention of contemporary religious extremists that their interpretation of Islam, and only their interpretation, is absolutely certain and that all other interpretations are heresy, deserving of eradication. However correct Booth’s inference may be in theory, it is doubtful that, in practice, the extremists who could benefit from his insights would be capable of appreciating and learning from them.

The reason Booth gives for claiming that only the prophet can attain absolute certainty4 is that only in a prophet are the theoretical and practical virtues united (66, 79). This is the case because the prophet’s faculty of imagination is superior to that of the rest of mankind.5 Booth’s assertion is not, however, consistent with the fact that Alfarabi portrays the union of theoretical and practical perfection in The Political Regime without mentioning a “prophet” or “prophecy.”6 In fact, neither “prophecy” nor “prophet” is mentioned anywhere in The Political Regime, even though the book’s depiction of the universe, human life, rulership, and political communities is frequently parallel to the portrayals of those things in The Virtuous City, where prophecy and the prophet’s imagination are central concepts.

According to The Political Regime, the “first ruler without qualification” (al-ra’īs al-awwal ʽalā al-iṭlāq) attains both theoretical and practical perfection7 and, as a result, does not need to be ruled by anyone and is capable of guiding all others to happiness to the extent possible for each.8 Thus, the first ruler without qualification in that book appears to be a philosopher-king.9 Alfarabi adds that “this is the one of whom it ought to be said that he receives revelation,”10 suggesting a contrast with the one who typically is said to have received revelation, i.e., the prophet. In The Virtuous City, in contrast, the first or ideal ruler is called a prophet, and what makes him a prophet is said to be the revelation that comes to his imagination after he has become a philosopher and possessor of practical wisdom.11 In other words, both books portray a first or ideal ruler, but the portraits differ in that in The Virtuous City, the first ruler is called a prophet and has theoretical and practical perfection, which includes a superior imagination, while in The Political Regime the first ruler is not called a prophet and has achieved theoretical and practical perfection with no mention of imagination.

Booth concludes from the account in The Virtuous City that only the prophet is capable of absolute certainty, since it is the prophet’s superior imagination that is expressly said to enable him to attain the practical perfection that must accompany theoretical perfection for absolute certainty to be achieved. In particular, according to Booth, the prophet’s superior faculty of imagination is what enables the prophet to know “how to transform the ideal into the real” (66, also 54), which is the culmination of practical perfection. Alfarabi does say in The Virtuous City that the prophet is the man who grasps every action by which it is possible to attain happiness.12 This may be the text that underlies Booth’s statement that it is the prophet’s superior imagination that enables him to transform “the ideal into the real.”13 Yet Alfarabi also says, in The Political Regime, where prophecy is not mentioned, that the first ruler without qualification is able “to determine, define, and direct the activities toward happiness” because of the perfection of his rational faculty.14 In other words, based upon the theoretical and practical capacities he attributes to the respective first rulers in the two works, Alfarabi appears to recognize two paths to absolute certainty, one prophetic and one non-prophetic. It is thus not surprising that in his work The Attainment of Happiness, Alfarabi characterizes the first ruler as a philosopher, prince, lawmaker, and imam—but not a prophet.15

The preceding does not, however, undermine the main thesis that for everyone beside the two first rulers, absolute certainty is not obtainable. In fact, Alfarabi gives some indications that Booth’s larger thesis is true. For example, in the Selected Aphorisms, Alfarabi states that practical reason encompasses both (1) practical intellect (al-ʽaql al-ʽamalī) that grasps the premises upon which practical wisdom or prudence (taʽaqqul, phronēsis) is based and (2) practical wisdom, which actually engages in deliberation about the means to obtain the ends sought.16 He says that the practical intellect that attains the premises of practical reasoning acquires its knowledge through observation and experience.17 Significantly, Alfarabi adds that practical intellect becomes intellect in act through experience and that it “increases along with the increase in experiences with each of the years of a human being’s life.”18 This statement implies that the foundations of practical knowledge are in principle not completely attainable in the course of a lifetime, since in practical life, one can always have additional experiences that alter what one “knows,” thereby increasing one’s practical understanding.

On the theoretical side, at the end of his book known as The Philosophy of Aristotle, Alfarabi portrays Aristotle’s metaphysical inquiries as incomplete.19 This is surprising because the title of the book is “The Philosophy of Aristotle, the Parts of His Philosophy, the Ranks of Order of Its Parts, the Position from Which He Started and the One He Reached.” In other words, it purports to be a comprehensive account of Aristotle’s philosophy. Lest the reader imagine that Alfarabi was tacitly contrasting the incompleteness of Aristotle’s philosophy to his own or his peers’ superior situation, he states in the final paragraph of the work that in his own time, they lack perfect natural science because “we do not possess metaphysical science. Therefore, philosophy must necessarily come into being in every man in the way possible for him.”20 Although he does not elaborate, these words indicate that Alfarabi believes that he, his peers, Aristotle, and presumably others have attained only an incomplete, thus imperfect, grasp of what they seek to know.

Booth’s important essay thus captures a foundational insight rarely associated with Alfarabi, namely, that what is available to most of us are beliefs that “are secure but not absolute” (49). It follows that our moral obligation, the ethics of our belief, is to “aim to have beliefs that are as justified as possible” (58).

References

Selected Aphorisms. Fuṣūl Muntazaʽah, edited with an introduction and notes by Fauzi Najjar as Alfarabi’s Selected Aphorisms (Beirut: Dar el-Mashreq, 1971). English translation by Charles E. Butterworth in Alfarabi The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 11–67. The English translation references the pages of Najjar’s edition in brackets and follows that edition’s paragraph numbering.

The Attainment of Happiness Taḥṣīl al-saʽādah, edited by Jafir al-Yasin (Beirut: Al-Andaloss, 1981). English translation by Muhsin Mahdi in Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (rev. ed., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 13–50.

The Philosophy of Aristotle: Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs, edited by Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut: Dār Majillat Shi’r, 1961). English translation by Muhsin Mahdi in Alfarabi, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (rev. ed., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 71–130.

The Political Regime. Edited by Fauzi Najjar as Al-Fārābī’s The Political Regime (Al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya also known as the treatise on the principles of beings) (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1964). English translation by Charles E. Butterworth, Alfarabi The Political Writings II: “Political Regime” and “Summary of Plato’s Laws” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 29–94.

The Virtuous City. Richard Walzer, Al-Fārābī on the Perfect State. Abu Nasr al-Fārābī’s Mabādi’ Ārā’ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fādila (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). This work contains both the Arabic text and an English translation on facing pages.

Anthony Robert Booth’s Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief is a comparative project that forges connections between medieval Islamic philosophy and contemporary analytic epistemology. A similar strategy has been used in my own field of classical Indian philosophy, most prominently by B. K. Matilal, who put contemporary analytic figures like Quine and Dummett into dialogue with classical Indian figures like Dignāga and Uddytotakara.1 This approach can be philosophically interesting, and it helps make Indian philosophy more visible within the discipline. Booth shows that a similar approach can yield fruits for Islamic philosophy.

My response will focus on Booth’s articulation of al-Farabi’s fallibilist anti-skepticism. I present two objections to al-Farabi inspired by Hellenistic and ancient Roman philosophy, followed by two responses inspired by classical Indian philosophers.

Al-Farabi’s Fallibilist Anti-Skepticism

After a critical engagement with Deborah Black’s interpretation of al-Farabi, Booth argues that al-Farabi’s position with regard to the ethics of belief is Moderate Evidentialism. Prophets ought to hold a belief if and only if they have epistemic reasons while non-prophets may in some circumstances believe on the basis of non-epistemic reasons (42–43).

Booth translates the Arabic ‘ilm as “epistemic justification” rather than “knowledge,” because ‘ilm is gradable and many philosophers claim knowledge is not (44–45). He then lists six conditions for absolute certainty. Prophets meet all six conditions, while non-prophets may meet fewer—someone meeting three conditions is more epistemically justified than someone meeting two, etc.

Booth calls these AFC₂.2

1* S believes that p.

2* S believes that p for epistemic reason.

3* S (infallibly) believes that S believes that p for epistemic reason [S has taken cognizance of her reasons for belief].

4* S (infallibly) believes that it is impossible for there to be no epistemic reason for her to believe that p.

5* S (infallibly) believes that there can be no time at which there is no epistemic reason for her to believe that p.

6* Conditions 1*–5* hold essentially, not accidentally. (Booth 2016, 45)3[/NL]

Booth claims this provides a fallibilist response to skepticism: “Beliefs can be less than perfectly justified, and so less than fully certain, but nonetheless admit of a certain degree of justification” (Booth 2016, 58). Non-prophets in certain contexts can claim their beliefs are justified enough insofar as they meet at least conditions 1*–2*.4

Two Objections

My first objection is inspired by Augustine’s Against the Academicians. Augustine criticizes the notion of “truthlike impressions” defended by Cicero and Carneades as an answer to the inconsistency objection (skeptics claim to know that knowledge is impossible) and the inactivity (apraxia) objection (skeptics cannot live according to skeptical principles).5 Academics said they have a truthlike impression that knowledge is impossible and they act on truthlike impressions.

Augustine’s criticism is simple yet clever: if one is never certain that one has an impression of the truth, how will one ever recognize that an impression is like the truth? It would be like claiming that someone’s brother looks like his father when one has never met the father (Augustine 1995, 41).6

Turning to al-Farabi: Since non-prophets can’t attain the absolute certainty of prophets (they can’t meet condition 6*), how can non-prophets have a basis for comparing their own beliefs, even those meeting conditions 1*–5*, with those of prophets to assign any level of certainty at all? In the language of modern probability that Booth uses later (84–85), how can one calculate the probability of one’s belief as .7 or .8 when one has no idea what 1.0 looks like?7

Perhaps we use prophets as guides. This generates a second objection: how can we be sure that a particular person is a prophet? Al-Farabi claims God guarantees that prophets possess perfect persuasion skills; if we fail to be convinced, it’s our own fault (60). But this creates a skeptical scenario: because we lack condition 6*, which is supposed to rule out skeptical scenarios, we can’t tell the difference between a convincing false prophet and a convincing real one. Booth argues against al-Ghazali’s tests and Averroes’s inconclusive methods (61). There is a gap between a prophet’s rhetoric and epistemic certainty that al-Farabi closes with divine help, but this gap is impossibly wide for non-prophets.

Two Classical Indian Responses

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu argues—1,200 years before Descartes—that dreams and hallucinations demonstrate a surprising fact about our epistemic situation. Here is the main argument of his Twenty Verses in the form of a classical Indian inference (anumāna):

1. Conclusion: This world is cognition-only.
2. Because of the appearance of nonexistent objects.
3. Whatever possesses the appearance of nonexistent objects is cognition-only, as in hallucinations and dreams.

Vasubandhu’s arguments in this text are similar to modern external-world external skepticism in that external objects are not the direct objects of perception, whether external objects exist or not (Mills 2016b).

Vasubandhu’s diagnosis of our ignorance is that our minds overlay our experience with a conceptual imputation of subject and object. Buddhas, however, have cured themselves of subject-object dualism. As a non-Buddha, Vasubandhu humbly does not speculate about what reality is truly like. Only a Buddha could know.8 While al-Farabi claims prophets know because they possess imagination (Booth 2016, 54), Buddhas are trustworthy because they lack imagination.9

Vasubandhu does not answer the question of how we can tell who’s a real Buddha. However, Vasubandhu’s view has parsimonious benefits (“lightness” in Indian terminology). Buddhists in India vociferously argued against anything like an Abrahamic omnipotent creator.10 Vasubandhu’s account is simpler than al-Farabi’s in at least one way: it does not require God to make it work. While Buddhist atheism is a non-starter for al-Farabi, a simpler account of non-prophets’ errors might help him respond to my objections.

A second response comes from Indian philosophers more like Pyrrhonian skeptics. Booth mentions Neo-Pyrrhonism (84), but let’s turn instead to Paleo-Pyrrhonism.11 Sextus Empiricus says that skeptics follow appearances when it comes to practical matters.12 If you go in for philosophy’s attempt at a deeper explanation of knowledge, that way madness lies (or so it seems—let’s not make any rash statements). A similar attitude was exemplified in classical India by Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa.

While these three differ in various ways,13 each offers extensive critiques of philosophical currents of his day as therapy for intellectuals, often relying on prasaṅgas, arguments aiming to show that opponents’ views contradict themselves.14 Furthermore, none of these skeptics thinks his devastating critiques are devastating for everyday life.15 Pursuing philosophical justification is the problem.16 While Nāgārjuna and Śrī Harṣa have religious motivations,17 Jayarāśi’s point as an irreligious Cārvāka is that once you get over philosophical squabbling, you can fully enjoy a worldly life.18

Hellenistic and Indian skeptics did not focus on what we call the problem of the external world,19 and modern skepticism is a theoretical conclusion that arises within epistemology while ancient skepticism is generally a therapeutic repudiation of epistemology.20 Risking anachronism, however, I think ancient skeptics would find the project of “answering the skeptic” to be doomed and the modern skeptic (who is a phantom place holder in philosophers’ imaginations, anyway) to be a negative dogmatist: claiming that knowledge is not possible is as dogmatic as claiming it is. What if ancient skeptics show us that we could learn to be okay with having no answer for the modern skeptic? What if modern skepticism is neither demonstrably wrong, nor necessarily troubling?

While I lack the expertise to ascertain whether al-Ghazali or other Sufis make similar moves, I wonder if quietist skepticism of Indian, Hellenistic, or Islamic varieties might make for interesting—if a bit outré—responses to modern skeptics and anti-skeptics alike.

Perhaps a larger lesson from cross-cultural philosophy is that for those not lucky enough to be prophets or Buddhas, philosophy has always been a messy, uncertain business.

References

Aikin, Scott, and Thomas Dabay. Forthcoming. The Mystery of Skepticism. Edited by Kevin McCain and Ted Poston.

Augustine. 1995. Against the Academicians and the Teacher. Translated by Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Booth, Anthony Robert. 2016. Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cicero. 2006. On Academic Scepticism. Translated by Charles Brittain. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Fine, Gail. 2003. “Sextus and External World Skepticism.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 24:341–85.

Fogelin, Robert J. 1994. Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Granoff, Phyllis. 1978. Philosophy and Argument in Late Vedānta: Śrī Harṣa’s Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādhya. Boston: Reidel.

Hayes, Richard. 1988. “Principled Atheism in the Buddhist Scholastic Tradition.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 16:5–28.

Jayarāśi. 1994. Tattvopaplavasiṃha. Edited and Translated by Eli Franco. In Perception, Knowledge and Disbelief: A Study of Jayarāśi’s Scepticism. 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna. 1986. Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon.

Mills, Ethan. 2016a. “Nāgārjuna’s Pañcakoṭi, Agrippa’s Trilemma, and the Uses of Skepticism.” Comparative Philosophy 7:44–66.

———. 2016b. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6:1–26.

Nāgārjuna. 2013. Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Translated by Mark Siderits and Shōryu Katsura. Boston: Wisdom.

Phillips, Stephen H. 1995. Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of “New Logic.” Chicago: Open Court.

Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. 2002. Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. New York: Routledge.

Sextus Empiricus. 2000. Outlines of Scepticism. Translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Śrī Harṣa. 1986. The Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya of Shri-Harṣa: An English Translation. Translated by Ganganatha Jha. Delhi: Sri Satguru.

Thorsrud, Harald. 2009. Ancient Scepticism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vasubandhu. 2005. “Viṃśikāvṛtti (Twenty Verses and Commentary).” In Seven Works of Vasubandhu, edited by Stefan Anacker, 413–21. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.