The Poison of Philosophy 293
studies might develop more appropriate designations and markers of
distinction.
Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of the existence of universals outside the
mind, be it ante res as quiddities, for instance the species “horse,” what
would correspond to “radical realism,” or in rebus as part of the partic-
ulars (mawjūda fī al-aʿyān),^169 what one might call “moderate realism,”
for example the assumption that two men share in reality features of
the concept “human being,”^170 allows and leads him to dismiss his ene-
mies’ key concepts in metaphysical matters. There are, however, major
parts of human knowledge about particulars where he himself, some-
times implicitly, sometimes explicitly, adheres to “moderate realism”
and thus contradicts his absolute negation of it (see chapters 11.2–3).
On the basis of his rebuttal of the existence of extramental uni-
versals, be it ante res or in rebus, Ibn Taymiyya refutes much more
than what would have been subsumed under “universals” in Medieval
Europe. His concept of “universals” encompasses the Muʿtazilī and
in part Shiite concept of the “nonexistent,”^171 the Platonic forms, the
Aristotelian primary matter, the extramental existence of “duration”
and “place,” among other things,^172 and last but not least, the catego-
ries, “the essences of the species, the genera and the remaining univer-
sals” (māhiyyāt al-anwāʿ wal-ajnās wa-sāʾir al-kulliyyāt).^173
Now we will examine Ibn Taymiyya’s denial of the possibility of
encompassing in a definition the “essence,” the “reality” of a thing.
169 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, p. 64 (not reproduced in al-Suyūṭī’s Jahd al-qarīḥa).
170 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 6, pp. 26–27. He states that “we know
with necessity that this individual man has nothing in himself from the other
individual man, rather each of them is distinguished by his essence and his
attributes (mukhtaṣṣ bi-dhātihi wa-ṣifātihi) and they have nothing in common
whatsoever that is fixed outside [the mind]; therefore one of the two may exist
while the other is inexistent and conversely and one may die while the other is
alive and conversely.” This statement is part of a critique Ibn Taymiyya launch-
es against the element of universality with which Ibn Sīnā has invested the esti-
mative propositions (see Marcotte, Ibn Taymiyya et sa critique, pp. 50–51). In
al-Radd (pp. 9–10), Ibn Taymiyya claims that what the philosophers call the
“essence” (māhiyya) of a thing would exist only intramentally and everyone
would conceive it a little differently.
171 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, p. 66. See also Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya, p. xxiv–xxvii
(see Knysh, Alexander D.: Ibn ʿArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition. The Mak-
ing of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam, Albany 1999, pp. 100–111).
172 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, p. 66; al-Suyūṭī, Jahd al-qarīḥa, p. 215; Hallaq, Ibn
Taymiyya, pp. 24–25.
173 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, 64.
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