Macquarie University
PHIL252 Medieval Philosophy
PHIL252 Medieval Philosophy
TAPE 7: AL GHAZALI AND AVERROES
Copyright © 1996 R.J. Kilcullen
To follow this lecture and the next you will need the Readings book, or Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut, translated S. van den Bergh (London: Luzac), p. 255 ff.
This lecture is about Averroes' Tahafut al-Tahafut, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Al-Ghazali wrote a work entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers; Averroes replies with The Incoherence of the Incoherence - a defence of the philosophers, or rather of Aristotelian philosophy. To defend Aristotle's philosophy Averroes rejects some of the ideas of the philosophers Al-Ghazali attacked, notably Avicenna: Time and again Averroes replies to Ghazali's attack by saying that his objections have force against Avicenna, but not against Aristotle properly understood.
Who were these people? Avicenna (ibn Sina), dates 980-1037, born near Bukhara in Uzbekistan, died in Isfahan (in Iran). He was primarily a physician, also a politician, also a philosopher; a man of many parts. His Canon of Medicine in Latin translation was one of the main textbooks in the medical faculties of medieval universities. Some of his philosophical writings were also translated into Latin and were deeply influential in medieval philosophy. Al-Ghazali, known to the Latins as Algazel, dates 1058-1111, born near Mashhad (Iran), taught in Baghdad and other places: a theologian and mystic, who studied philosophy but was not satisfied. Averroes (ibn Rochd), dates 1126-1198, was born at Cordova in Spain, at that time largely Muslim, spent some time in Morocco, for some time a judge in Seville, author of a series of detailed commentaries on the works of Aristotle. These commentaries were translated into Latin, and in the universities he was usually referred to as The Commentator.
Ghazali's Deliverance
Before looking at the Incoherence of the Incoherence I will give you a brief account of another work by Al-Ghazel, The Deliverance (translated in Hyman & Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages). It is a sort of intellectual autobiography. He tells us that after God had cured him of scepticism he considered which of several groups of thinkers he should join. Naive belief was not an option, "since a condition of being at such a level is that one should not know one is there; when a man comes to know that, the glass of his naive beliefs is broken. This is a breakage which cannot be mended, a breakage not to be repaired by patching or by assembling of fragments. The glass must be melted once again in the furnace for a new start" (p.266). He began to investigate how much understanding had been achieved by various groups, including theologians and philosophers.
He began with theology and obtained a thorough grasp of it. "But it was a science, I found, which, though attaining its own aim, did not attain mine. Its aim was merely to preserve the creed of orthodoxy and to defend it against the deviations of heretics. Theologians used premises admitted by naive belief, or on the consensus of the community, or bare acceptance of Qur'an and Tradition." This was of little use to one "who admitted nothing at all save necessary truths".
He began with theology and obtained a thorough grasp of it. "But it was a science, I found, which, though attaining its own aim, did not attain mine. Its aim was merely to preserve the creed of orthodoxy and to defend it against the deviations of heretics. Theologians used premises admitted by naive belief, or on the consensus of the community, or bare acceptance of Qur'an and Tradition." This was of little use to one "who admitted nothing at all save necessary truths".
So he turned to philosophy. He seems to have expected it to be defective. "I was convinced that a man cannot grasp what is defective in any of the Sciences unless he has so complete a grasp of the science in question that he equals its most learned exponents in the application of its fundamental principles, and even goes beyond and surpasses them, probing into some of the tangles and profundities which the very professors of the science have neglected. Then and only then is it possible that what he has to assert about its defects is true.... I realised that to refute a system before understanding it and becoming acquainted with its depths is to act blindly."
He found that the various schools of philosophy all fell into heresy and unbelief. The oldest school, the materialists, taught that the world has everlastingly existed just as it is, without a creator. The second group, "the naturalists, see in nature enough of the wonders of God's creation and the inventions of his wisdom to compel them to acknowledge a wise Creator who is aware of the aims and purposes of things. However the naturalists deny immortality, deny resurrection, and deny the future life - heaven, hell, resurrection and judgment". The third group are the theists, who include "Socrates, his pupil Plato, and the latter's pupil Aristotle" (p.268). These theists also did not altogether escape unbelief and heresy.
Their mathematical science (e.g. astronomy) is undeniably true, but it has two drawbacks. First, enthusiastic students of philosophy are apt to suppose that since the philosophers have done so well in mathematics, all their philosophy is just as certain. "The second drawback arises from the man who is loyal to Islam but ignorant. He thinks that religion must be defended by rejecting every science connected with the philosophers", and the philosophers then suppose that Islam must be based on ignorance. "A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences".
Similarly religious people who reject the philosophers' science of logic give the impression that religion rests on the rejection of logic.
The natural science or physics of the philosophers does not need to be rejected, "except with regard to particular points which I enumerate in my book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers".
It is in metaphysics that most of their errors occur. On these points they must be reckoned infidels: (1) "They say that for bodies there is no resurrection; it is bare spirits which are rewarded and punished; and the rewards and punishments are spiritual, not bodily". (2) "They say that God knows universals but not particulars. This too is plain unbelief. The truth is that "there does not escape Him the weight of an atom in the heavens or in the earth" (Q.34,3)". (3) They say that the world is everlasting, without beginning or end". These three points are their worst errors: The denial of resurrection, the limitation of God's knowledge to generalities, the doctrine that the world is eternal.
Al-Ghazali goes on to survey the opinions of the philosophers on ethics and politics, and makes a few specific criticisms. He says that in ethics the philosophers have borrowed from religious people. "The philosophers have taken over this teaching and mingled it with their own disquisitions, furtively using this embellishment to sell their rubbishy wares more readily". This has two drawbacks. First, some people rejected the whole mixture. "This is like a man who hears a Christian assert, "There is no god but God, and Jesus is the Messenger of God". The man rejects this, saying, "This is a Christian conception", and does not pause to ask himself whether the Christian is an infidel in respect of this assertion or in respect of his denial of the prophethood of Muhammad (peace be upon him). If he is an infidel only in respect of his denial of Muhammad, then he need not be contradicted in other assertions, true in themselves and not connected with his unbelief". There is no God but God, and Jesus is a messenger of God. "It is customary with weaker intellects thus to take the men as criterion of the truth, and not the truth as criterion of the men .... If it is true, [the intelligent man] accepts it, whether the speaker is a truthful person or not". "If we adopt the attitude of abstaining from every truth that the mind of a heretic has apprehended before us, we should be obliged to abstain from much that is true" (p.273).
Well, this is enough to give an idea of Al-Ghazali's attitude. Islam is true, and where the philosophers contradict it they must be rejected. But a Muslim need not and should not reject everything the philosophers say, indiscriminately. The chief errors of the philosophers relate to the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, reward and punishment after death, God's knowledge of all things, and the eternity of the world. These and a few other topics are the content of his Incoherence of the Philosophers. In that book he does not simply point out the conflict between the philosophers' doctrines and Islam: rather, he sets out to show that the philosophers have not proved their doctrines: that even in philosophy they are without foundation.
(For more, see the text of The Deliverance.)
THE INCOHERENCE
Averroes' Incoherence of the Incoherence reproduces the whole of Al-Ghazali's book and comments on it, passage by passage. (In the version on the web, the text of Al-Ghazali is printed red, the text of Averroes' comment black.) The first and longest discussion concerns the eternity of the world. According to Aristotle and the philosophers who followed him the world has always existed and always will. Ghazali rejects this doctrine and brings up various difficulties and objections. This is a topic which will come up again later in this course with Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Let's move on (omitting a good deal) to the eleventh discussion, Readings, p.87 (or van den Bergh, p. 255). Aristotle did not think that God created the eternal universe, but the Muslim Aristotelians, being Muslims, and also being neo-Platonists, did regard God as the creator of the universe: it emanates eternally from him. The question now is, How much does God know of the universe? Aristotle said that God knows only himself. His Muslim followers said that in knowing himself God knows all things, implicitly, in general terms. He knows the genera and species of created things, but not the individuals. Ghazali insists that God must know the individuals too.
So read the first passage from Ghazali, down to 424.10 (notice the numbers in the margin of the translation).
This passage states the religious beliefs of muslims, not the theories of the philosophers.
Read Averroes' comment, to the end of the first paragraph, at 426.1.
Those who criticise a conception of God as making him too much like a man sometimes use the term anthropomorphic, from morphe a form and anthropos, man. Averroes is making this criticism of the theologians. What does he mean when he says "It cannot be that there one single species which is differentiated by eternity and non-eternity" etc (425.8)? The species is man, and the division he is objecting to is of man into temporal man and eternal man (the anthropomorphic God). In your notes draw up a porphyry's tree, with "living being" at the top, divided into "man", "horse", "dog" etc, and man divided into "temporal" and "eternal". He is objecting that the "distance" between these two subdivisions of man is greater than the "distance" encompassed by all the sub-division of "living being"; all these sub-divisions share in temporality, yet the sub-sub-divisions of one of them is divided between temporal and eternal. Whether this is a telling objection or not, the point at the end of the paragraph seems plausible: that the difference between the eternal and the temporal is so great that analogies won't hold: terms like will or knowledge applied to both eternal and temporal entities will be equivocal. Remember the point from the second tape, that according to Aristotle a term may be used univocally, equivocally, or analogically: Averroes is saying that when a term like knowledge is applied to both eternal and temporal things it is used equivocally.
Now read the next paragraph, to 427.8.
Note what is said at the end of this paragraph. God's knowledge is of opposites, i.e., of all the possibles: God knows that the human race can exist, or not exist. God's excellence means that whichever set of possibles is best proceeds from God (this is the best possible universe). The human race proceeds from him though will only in the sense that it does proceed from him and he does know that it can exist or not exist. It is not as if God freely and knowingly chooses, arbitrarily, among possibles: what is best must proceed from him. He knows that it does by implication: he knows that this universe is best, and that what is best must proceed from him. "His power is not inferior to his will" (at the end of the paragraph): he can do, indeed must do, all that he wills.
Dialectic and Demonstration
Read the next paragraph, to 428.11.
Plato used the term "dialectic" for the highest part of philosophy, concerned with the unities and divisions of the Forms. Twelfth century writers used dialectic to mean first the art of conversation, and second logic. Aristotle often used "dialectical" to mean persuasive rather than truly demonstrative. A demonstration establishes that the fact is true, and also explains it, by showing why it must be true in the light of proper explanatory principles. A demonstration is an explanatory argument, one that conveys understanding of the real reasons why the thing is so. A dialectical or persuasive argument may prove that it is so, but does not convey understanding of why it is so. Now according to Aristotle, the explanatory principles on which a demonstration is based must be appropriate to the genus to which the thing being explained belongs. An argument that tries to establish a fact by means of premises appropriate to some other genus is merely dialectical. Demonstration, or explanation, is the business of science: Aristotle says that there are many sciences, each with its own subject genus and its own principles, and explanation must be sought within the appropriate science. So there is no short cut: if you want to understand, you must master the appropriate science, and not hope to understand from general knowledge, or by analogies drawn from some other subject matter. This is a major difference between Plato and Aristotle: according to Plato, dialectic - the power to "collect" individual instances into groups and see the shared form, and to divide and sub-divide higher forms into lower - is a universal science that covers all subject matters. According to Aristotle there is no such universal science: arguments such as Plato's method yields are merely dialectical, merely persuasive. Re-read to 428.1. Averroes is saying that if you want to understand the matters in dispute between Ghazali and the philosophers you must master the appropriate sciences.
"Eudaimonia" is the word in Aristotle's ethics usually translated as "happiness", the good life, the life best worth living. According to Aristotle an important element in eudaimonia is philosophical and scientific thinking. Averroes is saying that if you are able to live the good life and spend time on philosophy, then you will study these questions in a proper philosophical way. "Since non-demonstrative statements can be advanced without knowledge of the art, it was thought that this might be also the case with demonstrative statements"; Since you don't have to have studied dialectic and rhetoric to be able to produce, with luck, a persuasive argument, so it was thought that a demonstrative argument might be produced by the amateur philosopher; "but this is a great error". "The incoherence of both parties together", i.e., of the theologians and of the philosophers Ghazali had read.
Read the next paragraph, to 429.14. A few comments "on the letter". "All this is in excess of the Holy Law". Averroes and the other philosophers writing in Arabic did not want to make philosophers out of ordinary Muslims. The language of the Koran, often metaphorical in their view, had been used by God to convey the truths God wanted to convey to ordinary people, and they need go no further. Philosophical inquiry is for a small elite with the time and the capacity for such studies; they should not try to spread their ideas among ordinary people. For a detailed statement of Averroes' position on the relation between philosophy and religion see his Decisive Treatise in Hyman and Walsh. "Only perhaps the Zahirites are happier in the purely intellectual sphere"; i.e. perhaps in philosophy argument from analogy has no place - each subject matter has to be studied in terms of its own appropriate principles.
Points of Logic
Read now to the end of the next extract from Al-Ghazali, down to 432.18. A couple of comments "on the letter"; near the bottom of p.89, "how, therefore, can you take it as a premise of a syllogism which must prove it"; i.e. it would be begging the question or petitio principii. At. 432.5, on the hypothetical syllogism: the argument, "If P then Q, but not P; therefore not Q" is invalid, because it is possible to find an instance of an argument with this structure that has true premises and a false conclusion - for example, the instance Al-Ghazali provides of man, animal and horse. But arguments of the form, "If and only if P then Q, but not P; therefore not Q" are valid.
Aristotelian natural philosophy
The next section includes some difficult material. The best approach, I think, is first to read it through in a cursory way, without puzzling over the difficulties, and then go back over it more carefully. So read cursorily to 437.4. At the end of the last section Ghazali says, "This is pure presumption; where is your proof?" In this section Averroes sketches the proof. Bear in mind what he say at the bottom of p.88: "Nothing of what we have said in this book is a technical proof". He gives a general sketch of the proof. First comes a sketch of the Aristotelian doctrine of potency and act. Potency means ability, act means actualisation. Both terms are ambiguous. Ability can mean being able to do something, or it can mean being able to be made into something. The first is called active potency - power or ability to act; the second is called passive potency - being able to be acted on in such a way as to become something. Similarly actualisation is ambiguous: an active potency is actualised when the thing actually does what it is able to do. A passive potency is actualised when the thing actually becomes what it can be made to be. According to Aristotle material substances are composed of matter and form. As an analogy, think of a bronze statue: the bronze is the matter and its shape is the form. With a living substance it is more difficult to say what is matter and what is form: the form is the soul, which "shapes" matter into a living body - a dynamic sort of form; the soul is the principle of life. The matter has potency - passive potency - to become part of a living being, the soul is what actualises this passive potency, what makes it become a living body.
The form of a substance is also the locus of the active potencies: the soul performs the acts of the living body, in some cases using bodily members as organs or instruments. Further, the form of a thing is what makes it be that thing: existence as that sort of thing comes to the thing through its form. The form makes it be that thing, to be a thing of a certain type with a certain definition (e.g. a "living body"), and enables it to do the activities characteristic of things of that type. We cannot inspect the form directly: we can look at the shape of a statue, but this is only an analogy for the form of a substance. We cannot directly perceive the soul, the form that makes a body a living body with the activities characteristic of a living body. Rather, we infer the presence of the soul from those activities.
Re-read from "I say" (at 432.15 or thereabouts) to "Now", at 433.7. "Substratum" (p.90,RH, top line) means whatever persists through a change. For example, a change from hot to cold is an accidental change, because hot and cold are qualities. Qualities are the qualities of something, of a substance. What persists though a change from hot to cold is a bodily substance of some kind. Substantial change - a change, for example, from a living body to a corpse - involves the loss of one substantial form (in this example, the soul) and the acquisition of another form or forms (which constitute the dead body); what persists through such a substantial change is the matter mentioned near the beginning of this paragraph. Matter is the substrate in substantial change, some substance is the substrate in accidental changes, such as change of quality. In any sort of change, according to Aristotle and Averroes, there is some substrate - something that persists through the change. Change is not the absolute annihilation of one thing and the creation in its place of something absolutely different: rather, it is the substitution of one substantial or accidental form for another in some substrate.
In reading and understanding this paragraph you are picking up some of the theses of Aristotle's "physics" or philosophy of nature. So far: that changeable things consist of matter and form; that the matter persists through substantial change, while one form is substituted for another; that the substrate is in passive potency to the forms it can acquire; that the form actualises the passive potency, i.e. makes the substrate become what it was able to become; that the form gives being - i.e., makes the thing be what it was previously able to become; that the form is the locus or principle of active potency, i.e., enables the thing to do whatever it is able to do.
At 433.10-11, the two substances should be understood not as substances but as two components of the one substance: each substance has a potential part (matter) and an actual part (form, which actualises the matter and enables the substance to act). Read from 433.7 "Now when the philosophers" to the end of the paragraph. (Pause). Let me explain the first sentence. Aristotle's view of nature is teleological (from "telos" the end): i.e. Aristotle holds that natural processes happen for the sake of ends (goals, purposes). Oddly, he does not think that there is always a directing mind behind the process. What we do is often directed by our mind to an end, but the growth of a plant toward its mature state is not directed by a mind - Aristotle's God does not impose ends on natural processes; they just have ends. Aristotle thinks of nature and art as resembling one another: just as a craftsman sometimes imitates the processes of nature, so natural processes are like the operations of a craftsman, oriented toward ends - but there is no demiurge or divine craftsman directing them. So, to return to Averroes' sentence, when a potency is actualised, the resulting thing is the end of the process of actualisation. "Perfect" means completed, brought to its end: the actualised potency is the perfection or end of the potency. There is no difference between the actualised potency and the end or perfection of the potency - attaining the end is becoming the actualised thing.
The rest of the paragraph is a very brief sketch of Aristotle's argument that there must be a First mover. The sentence beginning "Then when they looked" states the conclusion of the argument. The next sentence, "For since the substance" is the argument. The first premise introduces a new point: that a passive potency cannot be actualised except by the action of some other thing that is already actual in that respect; e.g. a cold body cannot become hot except by the action on it of another body that is hot already. Another premise of this argument, a tacit (i.e. unstated) premise, is that the series of things actualising things that actualise things that actualise things cannot have an infinite number of members: there must be a first. The first is pure act, i.e. contains no potential part (it can't be acted upon by anything else so as to become something different); it must therefore contain no matter (which is the potential part of substances that are not pure act); it cannot be subject to exhaustion, weariness or decay - these are changes, which presuppose a passive element, a potentiality to be different. True to his statement that "nothing of what we have said in this book is a technical demonstrative proof" (418.7), Averroes does not claim that this argument is more than a sketch. He refers you to Aristotle's Physics, book 8, where you will find proof through "essential particular premises", i.e. principles specifically appropriate to the subject matter, as opposed to the persuasive generalities used in dialectical and rhetorical arguments.
Is the intellect a separate substance?
The next paragraph is about "forms in matter which produce motion", such as the soul, which is "in matter", since it is the form of a living body, and produces motion - the soul enables a body to move and do things. "They started to doubt whether the intellect belongs to the forms which are in matter or not"; Averroes himself holds that the human intellect is a separate immaterial substance, numerically one for the whole human species, separate from individual human beings, but acting on our imaginations. But he does not assert this doctrine here, he just says that some philosophers began to wonder. The point he does assert (or reports that the philosophers assert) is that the accidental forms in the soul through which intellectual perception takes place are not forms in matter: when you perceive a hot body your mind does not become hot; the form of heat comes to exist in your mind, but not in any matter capable of being made hot. By "inorganic" in the last line of the page he means not an instrument (organon) of perception. So re-read this paragraph, down to 435.7.
A comment on the last sentence: notice that although the argument of the paragraph has been toward the conclusion that intellect contains no matter or passivity, the conclusion he actually draws is that whatever contains no passivity is intellect. The conclusion to which the argument tends is the universal affirmative proposition, "Everything that is intellect contains no passivity"; the conclusion he actually draws is the simple converse of this the universal affirmative proposition, "Everything that contains no passivity is intellect". From Abbreviatio Montana (Readings, p.71, section 8d) you should remember that a universal affirmative proposition is converted per accidens, not simply, that is, to a particular affirmative proposition, in this case "something that contains no passivity is intellect". So he can not get the conclusion he draws by converting the conclusion the argument was tending towards. Look again at the last few lines of the Al-Ghazali passage he is answering, at 432.12 or thereabouts. We must still ask, "Where is your proof?" He seems to be assuming, without argument, that whatever is not a body is an intellect. Plato's Forms or Ideas, in the pre-Timaeus version of the theory, are a counter example: the Forms were immaterial, but they were not intelligences. Plato in the Timaeus, and the Neo-Platonists, made the system of Forms a living thing, an Intellect; in neo-Platonist systems all immaterial things are intelligent, and this is what Averroes seems to be assuming. But why must it be so?
In the next paragraph Averroes says that according to the philosophers (i.e. Avicenna), and in this they did not follow Aristotle, the Intellect that is the First Mover imposes ends on natural processes, like a craftsman. But they did not think that in thinking about the many natural things the First has many thoughts, separate from his thought of himself. Rather, the First thinks himself and the many through the one thought (which is in fact identical with himself). Re-read this paragraph. At 436.4, "this intellect" is not the human intellect but the first intellect, in which there is no disjunction between thinking of self and thinking of others. (Why is there identity between the First, his thought of himself, and his thought of others? Because the First is absolutely one, containing no diversity whatever).
Logic again
Some comments now on the last paragraph. "For the hypothetical syllogism is only valid when . . . categorical syllogism"; From the Abbreviatio Montana you will remember that for Aristotelian logicians a hypothetical statement needs to be justified by applying some Topical rule. The application of a rule is a categorical syllogism. "In cases of such and such a type, so and so holds; this is a case of such and such a type", therefore etc. is a syllogism, AAA figure 1. "For correct hypothetical inference in this question is: "If what does not think is in matter, then what is not in matter thinks""; He calls this hypothetical proposition an inference, because Aristotelian logic treats every hypothetical statement as an inference from antecedent ("if" clause) to consequent ("then" clause). This hypothetical statement, asserting the convertibility or equivalence of not being in matter and thinking, is certainly the one that he needs to prove - as we noted above, the trend of the argument given earlier was to the conclusion that everything that thinks is not in matter, but the conclusion he wants to draw is that everything not in matter thinks. That will follow only if the hypothetical proposition stated here at 436.10 can be assumed as a premise. Ghazali says, "This is pure presumption; where is your proof?". Averroes replies (at 436.12-14) in effect, we have a proof, this is not an unargued premise. But he does not tell us what the proof is; we will have to read Aristotle and study demonstrative science thoroughly. At 436.11, "the conjunction and disjunction"; the conjunction of being immaterial and thinking, and the disjunction of thinking and being in matter. At 436.16, on the legitimate form of the argument. Write this down in your notes, on three lines at the left of the page. If not P, then Q; but not Q; therefore P". And to the right of that write: "If P then Q; but not P, therefore not Q". The argument on the right is invalid, and Ghazali attributes it to the philosophers. The argument on the left is valid, and according to Averroes it is the argument of the philosophers. Fill it in as follows: "If the First does not think then it is in matter; but the first is not in matter; therefore it thinks". He still needs to prove the generalisation behind the first premise, namely that whatever does not think is material, or its converse, that whatever is not material thinks. (Remember that universal negative propositions are converted simply.)
What does God know?
Look back over this discussion so far. Recall that the question for the eleventh discussion is whether God knows things other than himself, e.g. the material world, the human race. Muslims say that he does because everything exists through his will, and he must know the things he wills to exist (re-read Ghazali, 424.4.10). Averroes replies that this is an anthropomorphic idea of God: God knows all things (and their opposites) as possibilities; the best set of possibilities proceeds from him, but without his knowing them in particular; since he is cause, and has knowledge of his effects (knowledge in general terms of all possibilities), he can be said to have will, though the word as applied to both God and man is equivocal.
Ghazali turns to arguments by which the philosophers try to show that God does know things. First, the First is not in matter and must therefore know all things (see 431.3-5). To this Ghazali objects that matter is not the only possible impediment to knowledge. If it were we could say if and only if a thing is in matter does it fail to know things. But we can't say and only if, and it is a fallacy to argue: "If a thing is in matter it fails to know, but the First is not in matter, therefore it does not fail to know". Averroes replies, in effect, that matter is the only impediment, that whatever is immaterial must know all things; but he doesn't explain why this is so.
Now read the next passage from Ghazali, 437.3-438.5.
This is "The second argument"; the first was at 431.3. The second argument is that the philosophers say, in effect, that although they don't accept that God makes temporal decisions and has intentions about particular things - rather, the First is active eternally in an unchanging way - still, the First does know and does cause. Ghazali's first answer is that the causation the philosophers attribute to the First is not will. It resembles the production by the sun of light. (The emanation of light from the sun was a neo-Platonic image for the causation of the world by the One.) This sort of production does not imply that the cause knows its effects. Notice the contrast between nature and will (437.14). This was a common place in medieval philosophy.
Read now Averroes answer, to 439.10.
"Will" in human beings means desire for something you haven't got and would be in some way better for having (or so you think). Will does not exist in this sense in God - there is nothing he doesn't have that he would be better for having. So as applied to both God and man the term "will" is equivocal. In god will means causing with knowledge. The fact that he causes only one of the opposites both of which he knows implies the presence of another attribute besides knowledge, namely will. But previously, at 427.5, he had said that God's excellence implies that the best set of opposites must be caused. Will must be the same as excellence, and it implies no arbitrary choice among possibilities: only one universe can be produced, and it is produced necessarily.
Read now Ghazali's second answer to the philosophers' second argument, and Averroes' reply, to 440.10.
At 439.16 or thereabouts, "pure intellect" should perhaps have capitals, since it refers to a particular entity: see Supplement, p.3, the diagram in the margin on the RH side. Ghazali is saying that even if we waive the objection that the First need not know what proceeds from him by nature rather than by will, still only one thing proceeds directly from him, and he won't know the things he causes indirectly. Averroes' answer is to assert that the knowledge of the First is so perfect that it extends even to all the indirect effects. "Our knowledge is posterior to the thing known", that is, after it, "after" in the casual sequence, an effect. Things act on us and as an effect we know them, but the knowledge of the first is the cause of things. So we can't argue by analogy from what is true when we throw a stone from a mountain top.
Read to 441.8.
The asterisks (e.g. at 441.3, "follow*") indicate points at which the translator has amended the Arabic text he is translating.
Read the next passage from Ghazali, to 442.7.
The underlying premise here is that the First is perfect and therefore needs nothing more than himself, he is self-sufficient. Another premise, which comes into play at 442.1, is that the absolutely perfect being does not change: if he did, either he would become imperfect or he would not have been perfect; he is therefore not affected or acted on. So anything that implies change and a "being influenced" is not in the First. Now, Ghazali argues, if, as the philosophers say, sense knowledge and knowledge of particular changing things is not needed to perfect the First (and is even incompatible with its perfection), then so is any other sort of knowledge, including knowledge of the intelligible universals.
Now read Averroes' reply, to 443.13.
Again he makes the point that terms as applied both to the First and to men are equivocal. He criticises both Avicenna and his critic Ghazali for arguing dialectically from premises not appropriate to the subject matter, but purportedly common to all sorts of beings: "The premises used in this section are common dialectical propositions, since they all belong to those which compare the Divine to the empirical [i.e. to things we can experience - "empirical" means experiencable], although no common genus unites these two spheres and they do not possess any common factor at all".
Read now to 445.2.
This is clear enough, except at a few points. "The second cause and the first effect" (top line of Readings p.94 (or van den Bergh, p. 268)): In the neo-Platonic diagram you looked at a while ago in the margin of Supplement p.3, Intellect is the first effect following from The One, and it is in turn a cause of Soul; so Intellect is the second cause in this diagram, The One being the first. "The maxim which Avicenna applies to every intelligent being", that is, not only to men but also to the First, "that the more knowledge an intellect possesses the nobler it is". "And indeed this consequence is incumbent on Avicenna"; Averroes defends Aristotle's philosophy, not Avicenna.
Read now to the end of the eleventh discussion.
When Averroes says that both of the opposite propositions are true of God he does not mean true in the same sense. This would be self-contradiction. They can both be true because the terms are equivocal, so that the opposites do not contradict one another. "This is a knowledge the quality of which nobody but God himself can understand"; the doctrine that terms as applied to both God and creatures are equivocal seems to mean that we cannot really know anything about God. He has will, but as soon as we begin to make inferences from this Averroes objects that no inference can be drawn by analogy with wills we know, since the term as applied to God and to the things we know are equivocal. So what can we know of God?
This was an ongoing problem for medieval philosophy. One solution is suggested by St. Anselm, Monologion Chapter 15: (re-read that chapter, Readings, p.23). This suggests that we can say of God whatever implies perfection, but must deny any implication of imperfection. This seems to be, in fact, what Averroes is doing. He attributes knowledge, will, excellence, power to the First, because these are perfections: but not knowledge or will insofar as these terms imply the imperfections found in human knowledge and will. This suggests that some terms as applied to both God and creatures are not merely equivocal, i.e. do not have simply different meanings, but are analogical, i.e., have different but related meanings: insofar as the term implies perfection it applies to both God and creatures, but in respect of implications of imperfection it does not apply to God. This would be a suitable time to read Thomas Aquinas's discussion of the names of God, Readings, pp.114-122 (Summa theologiae, 1, q. 13).
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