Reason, revelation & the reconstitution of rationality: TaqÄ« al-DÄ«n Ibn Taymiyya's (d. 728/1328) «Dar' Ta 'Ärud al- 'Aql wa-l-Naql» or "The refutation of the contradiction of reason and revelation"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the broad outlines of Ibn Taymiyya's attempt to resolve the "conflict" between reason and revelation in late medieval Islam in his 10-volume, 4,000-page magnum opus, Dar’ ta‘arud al-‘aql wa-l-naql, or The Refutation of the Contradiction of Reason and Revelation, by breaking down and systematically reconstituting the basic categories in terms of which the debate was framed. The perceived conflict between revelation and reason centered on the interpretation of a number of Divine Attributes, considered rationally indefensible by the philosophers and the Mu‘tazila because their affirmation would involve an unacceptable assimilation (tashbih) of God to created beings. This stance culminated in the Ash‘arite theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's "Universal Law" (qanun kulli), which stated that whenever a conflict between revelation and reason arises, the dictates of reason must be given priority and revelation interpreted metaphorically through ta’wil. Ibn Taymiyya counters these claims with a comprehensive response, attacking the logical integrity of the Universal Law but also articulating a textually self-sufficient hermeneutic and devising a radical reformulation of the philosophers' ontology, particularly their realist theory of universals which has resulted in a chronic confusion between what exists logically in the mind and what exists ontologically in external reality. This in turn allows him to elaborate a new epistemology based on three principal avenues for gaining knowledge, namely, "hiss," or sense perception; "khabar," or the transmission of reports (particularly revelation); and "‘aql," or rational knowledge (both innate and inferred). These sources of knowledge are corroborated by the mechanism of tawatur and under-girded by an expanded notion of the fitra. The disparate elements of Ibn Tay-miyya's theory of language, his ontology, and his epistemology eventually converge into a synthesis meant to accommodate a robust and rationally defensible affirmationism vis-à-vis the Divine Attributes while yet avoiding the tashbih generally presumed by the later tradition to be inevitably entailed thereby.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".