59. Jalāl al-Dīn Dāwānī: The New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
Davlat Dadikhuda [+]
PhD candidate, LMU Munich
Description
Muḥaqqiq Dawani’s New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being represents cutting edge philosophical theology in 15 th century Islamic East. In this treatise, Dawānī sets out to make the case 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, and the rest. The first chapter on 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.