Ibn Khaldûn, Princeton University Press. 2020-03-31
This fall I am reading the Muqqadima by the 14th c. Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun. I will share my progress and thoughts here as I go.
“Civilization is always and everywhere marked by the fundamental difference between urban and primitive, producing a tension that is also an interplay between nomad and merchant, desert and city, orality and literacy.” (Preface)
Ch. 6 – The various kinds of sciences. The methods of instruction. The conditions that obtain in these connections
“God distinguished man from all the other animals by an ability to think which He made the beginning of human perfection and the end of man’s noble superiority over existing things.” (ch. 6)
“Man takes the pictures of the sensibilia, applies his mind to them, and thus abstracts from them other pictures. The ability to think is the occupation with pictures that are beyond sense perception, and the application of the mind to them for analysis and synthesis.”
“Speculative intellect…consists of both perceptions and apperceptions. They are arranged according to a special order, following special conditions, and thus provide some other knowledge of the same kind, that is, either perceptive or apperceptive. Then, they are again combined with something else, and again provide some other knowledge. The end of the process is to be provided with the perception of existence as it is, with its various genera, differences, reasons, and causes. By thinking about these things, man achieves perfection in his reality and becomes pure intellect and perceptive soul. This is the meaning of human reality.”
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