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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2024
In this brief note, I provide a concise overview of my book A Hidden Wisdom, and I highlight one aspect of each of the contributions that warrants further exploration.
1. Note from Andrew Arlig: Rea asserts that both the ontological and the phenomenological understandings of ‘annihilation’ are logically incoherent and asks, rhetorically it seems, why we would want to saddle our thinkers with obviously false positions. Well, here is one reason to take at least some apophaticists at face value. If we turn to the corresponding mystical tradition in the Islamic world, we see several authors allowing for the possibility that the realm of the truly real is one that fails to obey finite, human reason's basic rules (including the Law of Non-contradiction!). Ibn Tufayl, for instance, notes that ‘same’ and ‘different’ are predicates that get their sense by abstracting from our experience of material objects (after all, they are the beings that are first known by us). Why should we automatically expect that immaterial objects behave according to the same rules? In his rightfully famous Deliverance from Error, Al-Ghazali presents a dilemma to (human) reason, which is effectively the one that Aristotle famously arrives at in Metaphysics Γ: you cannot prove that the Law of Contradiction is true, since any demonstrative proof makes use of this very rule. To be sure, both of these Islamic thinkers eventually back away from an ontological notion of ‘annihilation’, but not necessarily because the laws of identity have been violated. Rather, their basic motivation is one that Rea also notes: there is a fundamental gap between Creator and Creation, one that can never be bridged precisely because this would violate the unicity of God. Still, we might want to allow for the fact that at least some thinkers did see this divide as porous. The Christian already allows the Divine to become a creature. Why, then, is it absolutely off the table that a creature can become Divine?