İrânzemîn’den Rûm’a Erken Modern Dünyada İlliyet Anlayışları: On Beşinci Yüzyıl Osmanlı Tahkîki Bağlamında Arapça Felsefenin Yorumlanışı ve İkincil İlletler [Perspectives on Causality in the Early Modern Iran to Rum: Secondary Causes and the Interpreration of Arabic Philosophy in Regard to Verification (Taḥqīq)]

The phenomenon of the “philosophization of kalām” includes many different philosophical discussion that are often disregarded in the secondary literature of Islamic intellectual history. Looking at one of these highly contested issues, the nature of causal relations among post-classical philosophers will reveal us some important details about the intellectual world of a 15th-Century Ottoman scholar. The relationship between cause and effect gives us also the framework for the relationship among human agents as well as the particulars existing in nature. Questions such as “Could God intervene in nature?” or with regard to the issues of miracles and resurrection, “Could they be possible physically?” are among the most debated issues in causality. When the later two commentaries or independent works of Khojazāda and Ṭūsī on al-Ghazālī’s celeberated Tahāfut al-Falāsifa are assayed in detail, it is seen that these texts give us a significant picture of how these scholars perceived the issue of secondary causalities in a 15th-Century Ottoman madrasa context. In addition to accepting the theory of secondary causalities in broader terms, both of these Ottoman scholars also acknowledge that within some limitations, God could also interfere with the worldly affairs by changing the conventional course of things. On other words, what this paper argues is that all of the works that are analyzed here such as madrasa physics- kalām handbooks, Gennadios’ Orthodox creed and Mollā Jāmī’s adjudication among philosophers, theologians and sufis, argue against scientific causal determinism or in other words, the necessary relationship between cause and effect as it is accepted in classical Arabic philosophy (especially in Ibn Sīnā’s corpus). Instead of arguing for a necessary causal chain, all of these texts grant God an eternal power for creation and a room of intervening in worldly affairs. However, the rejection of Avicennan emanationism does not mean that there could be no necessary relationship between a cause and an effect. There is a very significant objection against the Avicennan (later Neo-Platonist) cosmology in Tahāfut and this objection is very instrumental in supporting the later post-classical arguments against the pre-eternity of the world. On the other hand, when we look at the important philosophical handbooks of the post-classsical madāris such as Tajrīd and Sharḥ al-Mawāqif, we see that according to the new conception of al-cilla al-tāmma, there is also a deterministic scheme for the necessary relationship between cause and effect such that when all the relevant conditions (as well as the removal of the obstacles) are acquired, then a cause has to necessitate its effect. That is to say, even though later madrasa handbooks or books of philosophy rejected the Avicennan emanationism and determinism, we see that there is a redefined determinism in causal relations that are accepted by the scholars of the time.