This session focuses on the question of God’s existence: not whether God exists, but how God exists. What does it mean to refer to God (or to Allāh, Brahman, or Īśvara) as “existing” or as “being”? What is the relationship between Divine Being and non-divine beings? Do rocks and trees and people exist in the same sense that God exists, or does the word have different meanings in each context? Are there gradations within reality/existence/being? The papers will discuss a variety of Hindu and Islamic views; the aim is to provide a model for comparative philosophy that is attentive to historical context as well as to internal diversity within the traditions studied. Each presentation will be kept accessible to non-specialists, and short enough to allow time for discussion.
This paper examines the fourteenth-century thinker Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī’s engagement with philosophical and theological debates about the nature of Being (wujūd) through a close reading of his Muqaddimah, the prolegomena to his influential commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. Qayṣarī’s work offers a crucial vantage point for understanding and contextualizing several centuries of philosophical and theological debates on the nature of Being. As a pivotal figure in the Akbarian tradition of Ibn ʿArabī, Qayṣarī challenges and refines the positions of his intellectual predecessors, such as Nasīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, Suhrawardī and Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, bringing Sufi terminology and ideas into direct conversation with philosophical concepts such as the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd). In addition to bringing an unprecedented level of clarity and systematic exposition to Ibn ʿArabī’s often impenetrable ideas, Qayṣarī’s Muqaddimah serves as an important window to broader discourses about the nature of Being in the Islamic intellectual tradition.
Advaita Vedāntins face a paradox shared by other apophatic theological traditions. On the one hand, the Upaniṣads speak of Brahman as beyond all words and concepts; on the other hand, they affirm that Brahman exists. Insofar as “existence” (or “being” or “reality,” sat) is itself a word and a concept, how can Brahman be described as existent? In this paper I will consider two Advaitin attempts to address the paradox, drawing attention along the way to internal diversity and historical developments within the tradition. Ultimately I will suggest that Brahman’s “existence” and the “existence” of the world are equivocal terms. Advaitins themselves prefer to attribute existence to Brahman and to deny existence to the world, but I will argue that this position is not so different, in the final analysis, from attributing existence to the world and denying “existence” to Brahman.
In this paper, I revisit two key passages from Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1635) Īqāẓ al-nā’imīn through the lens of Gadādhara’s (d. ca 1660) remarks on causation in his Kāraṇatāvāda. Mullā Ṣadrā maintains that the Divine is “creator” only within a specific mode of being, adding that God and creation share the same existence at the level of manifestation. At first glance, this seems to conflict with Gadādhara’s emphasis on a firm distinction between cause and effect. I argue that there is no real contradiction, because Mullā Ṣadrā’s claim of shared existence highlights the effect’s total dependence on the cause rather than denying its distinct identity. Finally, I turn to eighteenth-century India and the writings of Kundan Lāl Ashkī to show how Hindu thinkers historically compared Avicennan and Naiyāyika perspectives on causation, demonstrating the implications of such comparisons for understanding intellectual history in South Asia.