59. Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī: The New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Davlat Dadikhuda [+]
PhD candidate, LMU Munich
Description
Muḥaqqiq Dawānī’s New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being represents cutting edge philosophical theology in the 15th century Islamic East. In this treatise, Dawānī sets out to make the case for divinity. In doing this, he largely follows the Islamic philosophical tradition (ḥikma) in seeking to prove a being intrinsically necessary in its existence that is characterized by various attributes such as simplicity, uniqueness, knowledge, power, volition, etc. The first chapter in the New Treatise, arguably the most important, is on establishing that there in fact exists at least one such necessary entity. The argument Dawānī offers, unpacks, and defends against objections, is Avicenna’s famous “demonstration of the truthful,” which can be crisply, though densely, captured in the following line of thought: necessarily, something exists; therefore, something exists necessarily.