The Poison of Philosophy 303
He does not disqualify sense perceptions, especially those perceived
by the spirit (rūḥ), that are not shared by everyone present at one place,
e. g., seeing and hearing jinns or angels, or the perceptions that will
occur only after death; indeed, he counts these perceptions of the hid-
den existences (mawjūdāt ghāʾiba) as certain knowledge (yaqīniyyāt)
and identifies them with the estimations (wahmiyyāt) that “Ibn Sīnā
and philosophers of his kind” reckoned as false. Ibn Taymiyya thereby
refutes the tenet that these perceptions are but in the soul of the person
who senses them and wants to assert the concrete existence of “hid-
den” existences in the sensible world, on the one hand, and the bodily
sensible torments and blessings in the hereafter, on the other.^218 How-
ever, Ibn Sīnā’s denial of the certainty of estimations that Ibn Taymiyya
quotes to support his rebuttal does not touch upon jinns or angels, but
apparently concerns illusions that Ibn Taymiyya himself also refutes.^219
Thus, Ibn Taymiyya rejects as corrupt estimative propositions (qaḍāyā
al-wahm al-fāsid), propositions that affirm the existence of what exists
neither inside nor outside the world.^220 He furthermore admits that Ibn
Sīnā affirms the existence of true estimative propositions and, appar-
son forms about the perception might be wrong, was falsely transmitted by
al-Rāzī, for instance van Ess, Die Erkenntnislehre, pp. 174–177.
218 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 6, pp. 109–111. In al-Radd ʿalā
al-manṭiqiyyīn, Ibn Taymiyya does not expound his views on estimations.
He asserts that he has already refuted at length the logicians’ exclusion of the
estimative propositions from the premises leading to certainty and that he has
shown that they belong to the class of knowledge that innate intelligence can
grasp immediately (al-Radd, pp. 206, 396; al-Suyūṭī, Jahd al-qarīḥa, p. 294;
Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya, pp. 120–121). He most probably was referring to his
statements in Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wal-naql (vol. 6 et passim; see vol. 11 s. v.).
Ibn Sīnā expounded his theory of the survival of the soul and his denial of
the bodily resurrection in al-Risāla al-Aḍḥawiyya fī amr al-maʿād, ed. by
Sulaymān Dunyā, Cairo 1368/1949; see Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of Ibn Sīnā’s
hermeneutical approach in this tract, which he also presents in Darʾ taʿāruḍ
al-ʿaql (Michot, A Mamlūk Theologian’s Commentary).
219 Ibn Taymiyya (Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 6, p. 101–111; see pp. 20–22) comments
upon Ibn Sīnā’s rather confusing passage on the estimative propositions in
al-Ishārāt wal-tanbīhāt (vol. 1, pp. 353–355; see Inati’s translation and expla-
nation (Avicenna, Remarks and Admonitions, part 1, pp. 123–124). It is not the
passage in which Ibn Taymiyya quotes Ibn Sīnā with a sharp difference about
the wording in manuscripts that were known to the editor of al-Ishārāt wal-
tanbīhāt, namely Sulaymān Dunyā (Marcotte, Ibn Taymiyya et sa critique,
pp. 51–53). Roxanne D. Marcotte has shown that Ibn Taymiyya repeatedly
misrepresented tenets of Ibn Sīnā in order to refute them (ibid., pp. 53–58).
220 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 6, p. 106.
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