Philosophers From The United States

"To the extent that people fail to actualize their fitra, they remain ignorant of who they are and what the cosmos is. To the degree that they are able to actualize their fitra, they come to understand things in their principles, or in their roots and realities. In other words, they grasp things as they are related to God or as they are known to God. They do not remain staring at phenomena and appearances. Rather, they see with God-given insight into the real names of things. These names subsist eternally in the divine intelligence, which is the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his body from clay."

"The key to the Islamic intellectual tradition is precisely the intellect, which is nothing but the soul that has come to know and realize its full potential. Inasmuch as the soul possesses this potential, it is often called fitra or innate disposition. If we employ the language of the Qur’an, the fitra is the very self of Adam to whom God “taught all the names” (2:31). It is the primordial Adam present in every human being. At root, it is good and wise, because it inclines naturally toward tawhid, which stands at the heart of all wisdom and forms the basis for the acquisition of true knowledge of God, the universe, and the self."

"The primacy of thought is made explicit in the first half of the Shahadah, the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God.” This is the one truth upon which all of Islam depends. The tawhid that is expressed here is not contingent upon the facts and events of the world. It is essentially a thought, a logical and coherent statement about the nature of reality. In the Qur’anic view of things, tawhid guides the thinking of all human beings inasmuch as they are true to their innate disposition (fitra). Every messenger from God came with tawhid in order to remind his own people of their humanity. In this way of looking at things, true thought is far more real than the bodily realm, which is nothing but the apparition of thought. This is not to say that the external world has no objective reality, far from it. It is to say that the universe is born from the consciousness, awareness, and thought of the divine and spiritual realms."

"To be human is to be born with the fitra, which is an innate recognition of tawhid that is represented mythically by the Covenant of Alast and the Trust. There is nothing extraneous or superadded about this fitra—it is precisely what makes people human. But the fitra tends to become obscured by upbringing and circumstances, and then people become less than human. They are "deaf, dumb, blind—like the cattle; no, even further astray." Dhikr is the all-important remedy that makes possible the actualization of the fitra. Dhikr is both God's merciful response to heedlessness, and the human response to God's mercy."

"If dhikr represents both the function of the prophets and the proper human response to the prophets, guidance (huda) represents the divine attribute that is embodied in the prophets. It sums up in a single word both God's motivation for sending the prophets and their activity in the world. If the opposite of dhikr is forgetfulness and heedlessness, the opposite of guidance is misguidance (idlal) and leading astray (ighwa). Just as the prophets incarnate God's guidance, so also the satans incarnate the quality of misguidance and error...Besides Satan, others are also said to be the source of misguidance. Among these is caprice, which we have already met as the worst of all false gods: "Follow not caprice, lest it misguide you from the path of God" (38:26)."

"The idea that human beings recognize tawhid innately is often expressed by using the term fitra, which is commonly translated as "primordial nature" or "innate disposition."...The Koran employs the word fitra itself only once, along with the verb form of the word. Here we translate the verb as "bring forth." The Koran is addressing Muhammad and, by extension, every Muslim: "Set thy face to the religion as one with primordial faith—the fitra of God according to which He brought people forth. There is no changing the creation of God. That is the right religion, but most people do not know. [Set thy face to the religion] by turning to Him. And be wary of Him, and perform the salat, and be not one of those who associate others with Him." (30:30-31) Here the Koran connects religion with the nature that human beings were given when they were created. By being human, they have accepted the Trust and entered into the Covenant of Alast. They were taught the names, created in God's form, and singled out for God's vicegerency."

"Like the philosophers, Sufis aimed explicitly at overcoming the forgetfulness endemic to the human “soul” or “self” (the same word nafs is used in both senses). Like them they offered broad overviews of reality rooted in metaphysics (ilahiyyat, “the divine things”) while describing the human soul as a microcosm, created in the “form” (sura) of God. God, as the possessor of “the most beautiful names” (Quran 7:180), is “the most beautiful Creator’ (Quran 23:14) who “formed you and made your forms beautiful” (Quran 40:64, 64:3). Both Sufis and philosophers held that the soul’s original divine form, created in the “most beautiful stature” (Quran 95:4), corresponded perfectly with God and the macrocosm. The soul, however, had fallen out of balance because of forgetfulness and the misuse of free will, so it needed purification and rectification.... Repeatedly the Quran asks it's readers to heed the signs. “In the earth are signs for those with certainty, and in your souls, What, do you not see?” (51:20-21). It rebukes them for not employing their seeing, hearing, understanding, and witnessing to perceive the signs: “They have hearts but do not understand with them, they have eyes but do not see with them, they have ears but do not hear with them” (7:179). It pays close attention to the soul’s diverse attributes and character traits (akhlaq), praising the beautiful and condemning the ugly. Some forms of Quran commentary - an activity undertaken by specialists in every school of thought - interpreted many verses as allusions (isharat) to the manner in which the soul experiences the divine presence while climbing the ladder toward realization."

"If forgetfulness and heedlessness mark the basic fault of human beings, dhikr (remembrance) designates their saving virtue. Just as forgetting God leads to the painful chastisement of being forgotten by him, so also remembering God leads to the joy of being remembered by him: "Remember Me, and I will remember you" (2:152)... God sends the prophets in order to remind people of the Covenant of Alast. They do so by reciting God's signs and mentioning their debt to him. People should respond to the prophets by remembering God, an act which demands that they mention him in prayers of glorification and praise (thus affirming both his tanzih and his tashbih). Those who respond in this manner are the people of faith, since to have faith is to recognize or remember the truth of tawhid in the heart, to mention it with the tongue, and to put it into practice by following the instructions brought by the prophets.Those people who fail to make the correct response are the truth-concealers. Although they recognize the truth in their hearts, they deny it with their tongues and refuse to follow the prophets' instructions. This, in short, is the drama of prophecy and the human response. All of it is connected explicitly by the Koran to the word dhikr, or to closely related words derived from the same root (such as dhikra, tadhkira, and tadhakkur)."

"The first function of the prophets is to “remind” people of their own divinely given reality. In speaking of this “reminder”, the Quran employs the word dhikr and several of its derivatives (é.g., dhikra, tadhkir, tadhkira). Moreover, it calls the human response to this reminder by the same word dhikr. The “reminder” that comes from the side of God by means of the prophets calls forth “remembrance” from the side of man. The use of the one word for a movement with two directions—from the Divine to the human and from the human to the Divine—is typical of the Quran’s unitary perspective. Here in fact there is only one motivating force, and that is the Divine activity that makes manifest the good, the true, and the beautiful, even if it appears to us as two different movements. Moreover, the Quran also makes it eminently clear that “remembrance”—the human response to reminder—does not mean simply to acknowledge the truth of tawhid. The word itself also means “to mention”. On the human side, dhikr is both the awareness of God and the expression of this awareness through language, whether vocal or silent."

"In short, already in the Koran and the Hadith, we find the idea that human beings are created with an innate capacity that allows them to understand things as they really are, but this capacity is clouded by the human environment. The function of the prophets is to “remind” (dhikr) people of what they already know, while the duty of human beings is simply to “remember” (dhikr). Having remembered, they return to the innate capacity from which they have never really become separate.’ If the human spirit knows God and affirms tawhid at the moment of its creation, this is because this spirit is not completely separate from God. In describing the creation of human beings, the Koran says that God molded Adam’s clay with his own two hands, then blew into him of his own spirit. The spirit is God’s breath, and Muslim thinkers were well aware of the implications of the metaphor. Breath is different from the breather; yet it is also the same, since a person without breath is a corpse. The divine breath that animates human clay is not identical with God, nor is it completely different. Human beings are near to God through their spirits, but they are far from him through their bodies made out of clay. The qualities of spirit and body lie at opposite extremes. The spirit is perfect, luminous, alive, rational, aware, intelligent, powerful, desiring, speaking; in short, it possesses all the attributes of God. But the body displays none of these qualities to any perceptible degree. It is merely earth and water, which represent the lowest of created things. When God blows the spirit into clay, this gives rise to the soul or self (nafs), which is an intermediate reality that possesses qualities of both sides. Hence the soul—which is the level of ordinary awareness—lies between light and darkness, perfection and imperfection, intelligence and ignorance, rationality and irrationality, awareness and unawareness, power and weakness. Within the soul, the innate capacity is represented by the luminous qualities of the spirit that are only dimly present. Actualizing the innate capacity in its fullest measure is seen as the goal of human existence. The soul must be transmuted such that its darkness becomes fully infused with spiritual light."

"Few concerns are as central to Islam as the search for knowledge (‘ilm). In the Koran God commands the Prophet, by universal Muslim consent the most knowledgeable of all human beings, to pray, “My Lord, increase me in knowledge!” (20:114). Muslims must imitate him in this quest. “Are they equal,” asks the Koran, “those who know and those who know not?” (39:9). The answer is self-evident. Hence, as the Prophet said, “The search for knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim.”'"

"The potential infinity of the objects of human knowledge goes back to the fact that the creatures have already been “taught” this knowledge, for it is latent in the cosmos through God’s nearness or self-disclosure to all things. Since we already know everything, coming to know is in fact a remembrance or recollection (tadhakkur). In the process of explaining this, Ibn al-‘Arabi refers to the “taking (of Adam's seed) at the Covenant” (akhdh al-mithaq), when the children of Adam bore witness to God’s Lordship over them before their entrance into the sensory world. The Koran says, “When thy Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yes, we testify’” (7:172)."

"Knowledge is the most all-encompassing of the divine attributes, which is to say that “God is Knower of all things” (Koran 4:176, 8:75, etc.). “Not a leaf falls, but He knows it” (6:59). Nothing escapes His knowledge of Himself or the other. “Our Lord embraces all things in knowledge” (Koran 7:89). The only attribute said to have the same all-encompassing nature is mercy, which is practically identical with existence.’ “Our Lord,” say the angels in the Koran, “Thou embracest all things in mercy and knowledge” (40:7)."

"The Koran commonly refers to the knowledge brought by the prophets as “remembrance” (dhikr) and “reminder” (dhikra, tadhkir), terms that derive from the root dh-k-r. The Koran calls itself by these words more than forty times, and it refers to other prophetic messages, like the Torah and the Gospel, by the same words. The basic Koranic understanding of the necessity for a plurality of prophets is that Adam’s children kept on falling into heedlessness and forgetfulness, which is the shortcoming of their father. The only cure for this shortcoming is the remembrance that God provides by means of the prophets."

"It should be obvious that by real thought I do not mean the superficial activities of the mind, such as reason, reflective thinking, ideation, cogitation, and logical argumentation. Rather, I mean the very root of human existence, which is consciousness, awareness, and understanding. The Islamic philosophical tradition usually referred to this root as ‘aql, intelligence. Thought in this sense is a spiritual reality that has being and life by definition. In contrast, the bodily realm is essentially dead and evanescent, despite the momentary appearance of life within it. Intelligence is aware, but things and objects are unaware. Intelligence is active, but things are passive. Intelligence is living, self-conscious, and dynamic, but things are empty of these qualities in themselves. In its utmost purity, intelligence is simply the shining light of the living God, a light that bestows existence, life, and consciousness on the universe. It is the creative command whereby God brought the universe into being, the spirit that God blew into Adam after having molded his clay, and the divine speech that conveys to Adam the names of all things."

"Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation."

"The growth of the human soul, the process whereby it moves from darkness to light, is also a growth from death to life (hayat), ignorance to knowledge (‘ilm), listlessness to desire (irada), weakness to power (qudra), dumbness to speech (kalam), meanness to generosity (jud), and wrongdoing to justice (qist). In each case the goal is the actualization of a divine attribute in the form of which man was created, but which remains a relative potentiality as long as man does not achieve it fully. All the “states” and “stations” mentioned earlier can be seen as stages in the process of actualizing one or more of the divine names."

"Elite capture is what happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements or parts of our social structure, like the justice system, towards their narrower interests and aims."

"To lose the ability to see with the eye of tawhid means to fall into seeing with the eye of shirk, or associating other gods with God. If the Qur’an considers unrepented shirk the one unforgivable sin, this is no doubt because it entails an utter distortion of human understanding, a corruption of the human fitra, and an obscuration of the intelligence that is innate to every human being."

"Any serious attempt to define and to classify forms of consciousness will act as a "red flag" waved in the face of many critics. The effort to define accurately and to classify in any detail is bound, they will urge, to result in a conservative clinging to conclusions once reached and in a love of schedules and schemes for their own sake. The system maker, they will insist, is likely to subordinate the facts to his classification and to cut down the truth to the measure of his framework."

"Psychology has most often been defined as science of consciousness, but this definition does not go far enough. For consciousness does not occur impersonally. Consciousness, on the contrary, always is a somebody-being-conscious. There is never perception without a somebody who perceives, and there never is thinking unless some one thinks. And this somebody is not an isolated self but a self which is affected from without and which expresses itself in its behavior. In view of these facts psychology is more exactly defined as science of the self in relation to, or conscious of, its environment."

"The phenomenon of dreaming has rarely been discussed or investigated in a thorough and in an experimental manner; of description, of theory, of discussion, of poetic analogy and illustration there has been no end; of accurate observation almost nothing. ... The most scientific books—those of and of —have been wholly or chiefly the result of the observations of abnormal subjects and in the interest, more or less distinctly, of pathology. The fullest discussion of the subject—the works of Radestock and of Spitta—are largely compilations of the recorded dreams of other people."

"All psychologists would agree to define their subject, at least in an introductory way, as the science of consciousness. But this definition is not enlightening unless its terms are thoroughly understood, and we must at once, therefore, proceed to discuss the nature of a science."

"A fetus is no more a human than an acorn is a tree"

"Many women of my generation, in many fields, had good reason to be grateful to the women's colleges."

"Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude."

"We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent."

"Quantum theory... formalism... uses no more than linear algebra and vector spaces. ...A particularly nice and accessible presentation of the requisite mathematics can be found in 's Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992, Ch. 2)."

"Pictures of space-time look misleadingly like pictures of space, and the novice must unlearn some of the conventions..."

"[M]ost clear philosophical ideas can be presented intuitively, shorn of the manifold qualifications, appendices and terminological innovations that grow like weeds in academic soil."

"The sparks which fly when quantum theory collides with Relativity ignite conceptual brushfires of particular interest... problems about causation, time, and holism. Unfortunately much of the work... presupposes a considerable amount of familiarity with the physics. This is particularly sad since the physics is not, in most cases, very complicated."

"I have often felt that whatever is of value in this book could be found in Bell's "The Theory of Local Beables" (1987, Ch. 7)... this book will have served a great purpose if it does no more than encourage people to read Bell with the care and attention that he deserves."

"The presentation of Bell's inequality needs no more than some algebra... Understanding Relativity also requires no more than algebraic manipulation... but would tax the patience of the average reader. So I have tried to present Relativity pictorially..."

"At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is ain't nothing like what we thought there is."

"Metaphysics is ontology. Ontology is the most generic study of what exists. Evidence for what exists, at least in the physical world, is provided solely by empirical research. Hence the proper object of most metaphysics is the careful analysis of our best scientific theories (and especially of fundamental physical theories) with the goal of determining what they imply about the constitution of the physical world."

"Perhaps the most vexing question confronting any study of Bell's inequality, and the experimental observation of violations of that... would never have been discovered if not for the existence of quantum formalism. On the other hand, the inequality... is derived without any mention of quantum theory and the violations are matters of plain experimental fact. So the explication and analysis of the importance of Bell's work can in principle proceed without mentioning quantum mechanics at all. Should an account of Bell's inequality emphasize its historical roots... or... sever those ties in the interest of clarity? ...I chose the second option ...the interpretation of quantum theory is troublesome enough ...to overshadow and confuse the relatively straightforward proof on non-locality."

"I believe that it is a fundamental, irreducible fact about the spatio-temporal structure of the world that time passes. ...The passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world, an asymmetry that has no spatial counterpart. ...The belief that time passes ...has no bearing on the question of the 'reality' of the past or of the future. I believe that the past is real: there are facts about what happened in the past that are independent of the present state of the world and independent of all knowledge or beliefs about the past. I similarly believe that there is (i.e. will be) a single unique future. I know what it would be to believe that the past is unreal (i.e. nothing ever happened, everything was just created ex nihilo) and to believe that the future is unreal (i.e. all will end, I will not exist tomorrow, I have no future). I do not believe these things... Insofar as belief in the reality of the past and the future constitutes a belief in a 'block universe', I believe in a block universe. But I also believe that time passes, and see no contradiction or tension between these views."

"Non-locality appears at exactly the point where the "measurement problem" which infects standard quantum theory is resolved."

"If one resolves the measurement problem by allowing a real physical process of wave collapse, it is the collapse dynamics which manifests the non-locality, and which resists the fully Relativistic formulation."

"Maudlin's book is likely to upset many physicists and metaphysicians, but in a positive, thought provoking way. Moreover, its plain presentation style makes it a good introductory book for students and non-specialists. In short, it is highly recommended for anybody interested in quantum theory, and especially in what "happens in between.""

"I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlin's ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch."

"...Maudlin takes up the conceptual and ontological foundations of classical and modern physics and explains in a lucid manner how Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity emerged from Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. ...revealing the foundations of physics to those with more interest in understanding the general philosophical concepts rather than merely understanding how to solve the equations."

"Present physics elucidates the "motion" of an object as its trajectory through space-time. A precise understanding... requires a precise account of the structure of space-time. The nature of space-time itself... is the topic of the companion volume... Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time. The present volume addresses the question: What is matter? ...Our main task is to understand just what quantum theory claims about the nature of the material constituents of the world."

"[P]hysical theories are neither realist nor antirealist. That is... a . It is a person's attitude toward a physical theory that is either realist or antirealist. ...[[Copernican heliocentrism|[T]he theory]] toward which Osiander was antirealist and Galileo realist is one and the same theory. The theory itself is neither."

"It has become almost de rigueur in quantum foundations literature to misuse the terms "realist," "realistic," "antirealist," and "antirealistic." These terms have a precise meaning in the philosophy of science... that seems to be... unfamiliar to most physicists. ...[T]hey simply toss them around with no attached meaning ...[with] terrible consequences in foundations of quantum theory."

"The scientific realist maintains that in at least some cases, we have good evidential reasons to accept theories or theoretical claims as true, or approximately true, or on-the-road-to-truth. The scientific antirealist denies this. These attitudes come in degrees... [T]his is a question addressed by epistemology and confirmation theory..."

"General Relativity is... completely clear and precise. ...[W]hat the theory says is unambiguous. The more one works with it, the clearer it becomes, and there are no great debates... about how to use it. (The only bit of unclarity... to represent the distribution of matter... using the . Einstein remarked that that part... "is low grade wood," while the part describing the space-time structure... is "fine marble.")"

"Starting from what we understand and seeing clearly its inadequacies can provide a path to conceptual progress."

"Physics aspires to a sort of universality that is unique among empirical sciences and holds, in that sense, a foundational position among them."

"If the correct solution to the measurement problem does not involve local beables, or if those beables have no nonrelativistic analogs, then starting with nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is counterproductive. But one has to start somewhere..."