Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

Facets of the Islam and Science Relationship • 37This modification of the Aristotelian cosmos is not merely a cleverway of restating the same thing. For instance, the actual substanceof which the physical cosmos is made was conceived by Aristotle as“matter,, an abstraction that could only be reached by means of athought experiment: in his Metaphysics, after stating that substanceis “that which is not predicated of a subject, but of which all else ispredicated,” he says that this statement itself is obscure, andfurther, on this view, matter becomes substance. For if this is notsubstance, it is beyond us to say what else is. When all else istaken away, evidently nothing but matter remains. For of theother elements some are affections, products, and capacities ofbodies, while length, breadth, and depth are quantities and notsubstances. For a quantity is not a substance; but the substanceis rather that to which these belong primarily. But when lengthand breadth and depth are taken away, we see nothing leftexcept that which is bounded by these, whatever it be; so thatto those who consider the question thus matter alone must seemto be substance. By matter I mean that which in itself is neithera particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to anyother of the categories by which being is determined. (Aristotle1984, 1625)This description came under attack as early as the secondhalf of the eighth century. Jabir bin Hayyan, for instance, declaredthis conception of matter to be “nonsense,” writing no doubt inthe tradition of Plotinus, who had called it a “mere shadow uponshadow”:[You believe that] it is not a body, nor is it predicated ofanything that is predicated of a body. It is, you claim, theundifferentiated form of things and the element of createdobjects. The picture of this [entity], you say, exists only in theimagination, and it is impossible to visualize it as a definedentity … all of this is nonsense. (Haq 1994, 53)Likewise, Aristotle’s prime matter, which he thought to be eternaland indestructible, was not accepted in the Islamic tradition by themajority of philosopher-scientists. In fact, on closer scrutiny we findthat the many similarities between Aristotelian cosmological traditionand Islamic cosmological schemes are superficial; underneath there