On the Footsteps of Mentalist Tendency: Essence, Mind and Reality According to ʿAlī al-Qūshjī

Abstract

One of the most lively debates in the post-Avicennan Islamic philosophical tradition concerns how to establish the correspondence between the quiddities found in the external world and our universal knowledge of them in relation to external existence. In particular, following Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī's criticism of the Avicennan conception of mental representation—specifically his argument that the forms in the intellect do not reflect external immaterial natures—thinkers who sought to uphold the theory of representation developed a new position that diverged from Avicenna's metaphysical realism. Accordingly, they abandoned the notion that insensible nature exists beneath the sensible appearance of particular substances—a nature common to all substances of the same species—and instead argued that only particular substances exist in external reality. In addition to this approach—which rejects the external existence of the natural universal thatAvicenna claims externally as a part of particulars—they argued that universal natures exist only in the mind and not in external reality. This position, which attributes the emergence of universal natures in the mind to mental operations on the intellectual form—following a comparison of particulars and their sensible properties—reinterprets the correspondence between the mind and the external world by rejecting a direct correspondence between the intellectual form and the external form. This new position challenged Avicenna’s metaphysical realism on multiple fronts: ontologically, by denying the external existence of natures; semantically, by arguing that references to ‘nature’ actually point to particulars; and epistemologically, by asserting that what we know are not external natures but the common properties among particulars, with universal natures existing only in the mind. This approach, referred to as the mentalist tendency, weakened the external aspect of metaphysical realism while and strengthening its mental aspect. This article will demonstrate how the mentalist tendency, which began with Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and reached its peak with Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī, was continued by ʿAlī al-Qūshjī in the fifteenth century and trace its evolution from an interpretation of Avicenna’s philosophy intoan independent philosophical stance.

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