Circularity
idea · 3 works · 3 mentions · 4 anchored passages
al-dawr · circularity · الدور · an infinite regress · tasalsul · the absence of the preventer · the complete cause · the preventer
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
The machinery of the philosophers account of events: chains of preparatory positions, the impossibility of a regress in assembled things, and the preventer whose existence removes a part of the complete cause.
So when that preventing event exists, the complete cause passes away by the passing away of one of its parts — I mean the absence of the preventer, which is reckoned within it — for the existence of the preventer entails the passing away of its absence.
for everything for which passing away is permissible must have a stock of essence that abides, and this terminates in that to which the permissibility of nonexistence has no access at all, else it too would have another stock, and there would be an infinite regress.
And if those positions are not existent in external reality, they do not require a cause existent in external reality.
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
Al-dawr, vicious circularity, the fallacy that would result if the body conditioned the soul's subsistence, given that the body's own subsistence depends on the soul's governance and provision of nourishment.
So if the body or the temperament were a condition of the soul's subsistence, circularity would follow.
Kitāb mīzān al-ḥaqq fī al-manṭiq
The fallacy in which a proof or a definition depends on what it was meant to establish, given its technical Arabic name
or defining a thing by another thing which, were the question put about it, would be defined by the first — and this is called circularity (al-dawr).