Eternity and origination
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
azaliyyah · essential coming-to-be · eternal · originated · post-eternity · pre-eternity · qidam · أزلية · ḥudūth
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
The problem of deriving originated events from an eternal cause without circularity or regress, and the distinction between temporal and essential coming-to-be.
Has it not become clear, from what has struck your ear in the conventional philosophy — that the coming-to-be of a thing out of nothing is impossible — that the case in essential coming-to-be is likewise?
That is because the cause of their existence, if it be eternal, entails the eternity of the events, and if it be originated, entails circularity or an infinite regress.
so much so that the theologians (*al-mutakallimūn*) said that the knowledge is eternal and the relation originated.
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
Azaliyyah, beginningless pre-eternity, the attribute whose denial to life follows, on the text's reasoning, from holding that the living arises out of the non-living.
The third of them is the view of those who hold spontaneous generation (*al-tawallud al-dhātī*), and of this view are Dr.