God’s Knowledge of Particulars

Abstract

Avicenna was notorious for several theses put forward in his philosophy: his endorsement of the eternity of the world, his denial of bodily resurrection, his naturalist accounts of prophecy and miracles.But no one thesis was more notorious, or more associated with Avicenna in particular, than his claim that God knows particulars only "in a universal way."1With his other disputed claims, Avicenna was in the good company of other well-known Aristotelian philosophers, such as Aristotle himself in the case of the world's eternity, or al-Fārābī in the case of his account of prophecy.Here however he seemed to stand alone.2Why had he gone out of his way to make this provocative, and at the same time rather obscure, claim about God's knowledge?His rationale for denying that God knows particulars as such is set out in [T1], a famous passage from the metaphysical section of his Shifāʾ.It comes down to the idea that there is a mismatch between the way particular things exist and the way God's thought must be.Whereas the particulars are multiple and changing, God's knowledge is simple and cannot change.As a pure, immaterial mind God lacks the organs and faculties by which we humans grasp particulars as such, for instance when we use eyesight to watch them move or memory to recall them after they have ceased to exist.Thus His access