The Poison of Philosophy 319
people with good mental conditions^281 – he again forces an open door.
One of his main opponents in logic, Ibn Sīnā, also held that the middle
term of a syllogism, i. e., what is usually apprehended through an act
of inference, can be an immediate knowledge. Ibn Sīnā calls the mental
power that is able to spontaneously grasp the middle term at some
instance fiṭra and at another ḥads (“intuition”).^282 In addition, he con-
siders it a kind of infallible understanding and thus superior to reflec-
tion, which can err,^283 a view that Ibn Taymiyya, again, advocates.^284
In fact, by the 13th century, ḥads and the ḥadsiyyāt had gained many
supporters, although ḥads seems not to have been “a tool of scientific
investigation that is to be honed and applied in order to solve prob-
lems, but rather a way of explaining, post facto, how a thinker hit upon
the solution to a difficult problem.”^285
Ibn Taymiyya, too, regards ḥads as a means of apprehension pro-
viding evident, certain knowledge. He seems, however, to prefer not
to count it as another kind of perception, and he apparently nowhere
identifies it expressis verbis with fiṭra. Instead, he classes the ḥadsiyyāt
as an experience, admitting that one might say that empirical matters
relate “to the very acts of the experiencers,” whereas the ḥadsiyyāt
relate to experiences that are out of the reach of one’s own acts, such
281 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, pp. 373–374; al-Suyūṭī, Jahd al-qarīḥa, p. 330; Hallaq,
Ibn Taymiyya, p. 159; see also above, chapter 10.2.
282 Dimitri Gutas has translated and scrutinized Ibn Sīnā’s many statements on
ḥads, which all amount to equating the knowledge of the immediate grasp-
ing of the middle terms with ḥads (“intuition”), be it in “an infinitesimally
short period of time” or “all at once” (Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradi-
tion, pp. 159–176, esp. 163, 165); see Langermann who assumes that the slight
difference in time did not concern the advocates of that way of understanding
(Langermann, Tzvi: Ibn Kammūna and the “New Wisdom” of the Thirteenth
Century, in: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15 (2005), pp. 277–327, 288–289,
292). For Ibn Sīnā’s identification of ḥads with fiṭra, see Gutas, Avicenna
and the Aristotelian Tradition, p. 170 and Gobillot, La conception originelle,
pp. 128–129).
283 Ibn Sīnā, De Anima, p. 250; Davidson, Herbert A.: Alfarabi, Avicenna, and
Averroes on Intellect. Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect,
and Theories of Human Intellect, New York and Oxford 1992, pp. 101–102;
Langermann, Ibn Kammūna, p. 288.
284 It is questionable, however, whether Ibn Taymiyya would have agreed to
count this immediate understanding among the “powers of prophethood” and
to regard it as a “sacred power (quwwa qudsiyya) that is the highest rank of
human powers”, as Ibn Sīnā does (De Anima, p. 250).
285 Langermann, Ibn Kammūna, p. 296.
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