Islamic Occasionalism and its critique by Averroes and Aquinas

Majid Fakhry
Paperback, 224 pages
Reprint, originally published in 1958
9781032586281

Occasionalism is generally associated in the history of philosophy with the name of Nicolas Malébranche (d. 1715). But long before this time, the Muslim theologians of the ninth and tenth centuries had developed an occasionalist metaphysics of atoms and accidents. Arguing that a number of distinctively Islamic concepts such as fatalism and the surrender of personal endeavour cannot be fully understood except in the perspective of the occasionalist world view of Islam, the volume also discusses the attacks on Occasionalism made by Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Contents
1. The Islamic Metaphysics of Atoms and Accidents
2. The Repudiation of Causality by al-Ghazali
3. The Averroist Rehabilitation of Causality
4. The Causal Dilemma and the Thomist Synthesis