Peter Adamson
speaker
452 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2019
last heard Dec 2019
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like I'm bald but my baldness isn't exactly the same thing as me.
Right.
So th that's quite puzzling.
And there's like a long, long history of people thinking about this.
Um, what Ibn Arabi brings in is this really interesting idea, which I think actually could even be interesting for philosophers of language.
Which is that God's names, as are revealed to us in the Quranic revelation, are the way that God manifests Himself.
So they're both the way that God is known to us through his names, like through the name merciful or through the name powerful or through the name knowing.
These are ways that we kind of grasp God's ultimately transcendent and purely unified nature.
So I that's true on the one hand.
On the other hand, it's not just that we know him through the names.
The names are also the means by which he interacts with creation.
So for example, power is not really to be understood as identical with God, or maybe better, the name powerful is not just exactly the same thing as God, but it's not different from God either.
It's the way that God
manifests power in the world that allows us to describe him as powerful.
So that that idea, I think that sort of minimal distance between a thing and its name, that that could be a good way of thinking about the difference between God and the way that God relates to the world, or God and the way that we know about God.
I think that's a very fruitful idea, actually, and a a really interesting idea as well.
There's a lot more you could say about him.
Um
But maybe one thing to add would just be that
uh s some another kind of idea that people often have about the later Islamic tradition is that it becomes totally dominated by Sufism and that it sort of Ibn Atabi becomes the central figure for all post-twelfth century figures.
Showing 241–260 of 452 · page 13 of 23
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