Quiddity
idea · 3 works · 3 mentions · 6 anchored passages
quiddity · al-māhiyyah · determinate quiddities · māhīyah · the absolute quiddity · the individuals of every quiddity · الماهية · ماهية · ماهيته
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
Māhiyyah, the essence considered apart from existence, whose relation to its individuals models the relation of Existence to existents.
(The fifth) Just as the individuals of every quiddity are the forms of its relations to its receptacles, while it is itself in all of them, so likewise are the forms of the determinations called existents in relation to the absolute quiddity that occupies them, called the Real Existence.
This is the real unity that holds for every quiddity in relation to its individuals, whether the one with a numerical unity or the many.
(So the rule is) that making and creating are an expression for the attribution of existence to that which is fixed, which asks for it from another and is receptive to it.
Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn
Essential whatness, the term in which the question about the jinn is put and in which later distinctions are drawn.
Why then may it not be said that bodies differ according to their proper essences and their determinate quiddities even though they share in receiving bulk and magnitude?
(He was asked) concerning what certain of the common people held about the meaning of the jinn, and was questioned about its quiddity (māhīyah).
this which you have named the imagining of letters and words — is it equal to the letter and the word in quiddity or not?
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Māhiyyah, quiddity or whatness: cited first as a specimen of the vocabulary students repeat without grasping its extension, and then used technically for the essence of contingency outside which the true determinant must lie.
and that cause terminates in a determinant outside the quiddity of contingency, namely the true Necessary, which is its own existence by its own essence.
Yet you do not know what lies outside this concept (*mafhūm*) — like one who hears the word “quiddity” (*māhiyyah*) and does not know of which individuals it is truly predicated, so that the ship of his thought is sunk in the sea of determination.