Quṭb al–Dīn al–Rāzī’s Critique of the Fourth Dimension and its Influence on the Muslim Thinkers

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor of Islamic Philosophy and Contemporary Wisdom, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Some Muslim thinkers, from the very time that the four–dimensionalism (static Eternalism) was suggested by Naṣīr al–Dīn Ṭūsī (1201-1274 AD) to resolve some difficulties of time, have intensely tried to criticize it. Critiques of Quṭb al–Dīn al–Rāzī (d. 1375 AD) in Muḥākamāt are of particular importance among them specially from a historical point of view. Because, so many Muslim thinkers here – i.e. in the sub–commentaries of Muḥākamāt – have tried to offer their own views about the four–dimensionalism either negatively or positively. So, we have paid a special attention to the so numerous sub–commentaries of Muḥākamāt most of them are unedited and unpublished manuscripts. Al–Rāzī in his critique puts an emphasis first on the fact that the movement and change are self–evidently existent in the present time and not in the past and future and then on the facts that the movement is nonfixed and the qaṭʿīyyah movement is nonexistent in the external world. Some of the sub–commentators have proposed even further critiques the most famous of them is Dawwānī’s view: contradictory coincidence of the qaṭʿīyyah movement and the past(/present) property. The other critiques of four–dimensionalism are: absolute nonexistence of the qaṭʿīyyah movement in future; its being counterintuitive; its being inconceivable; appearance of the impossible infinite regress; its being eristic. We will collect all of the views scattered in the sub–commentaries throughout history and will analyze them rationally to show that why the presentism is a suitable alternative to the four–dimensionalism: if there were not such a difficulty as being an infinitesimal atom about the presentism, it would be possible to say that it is correct and the four–dimensionalism is not. But, since there is such a difficulty, we can only say that it is a suitable alternative to the four–dimensionalism.

Keywords

References

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