knowledge or the occurrence of change.

The only argument he offered for denying that He knows particulars was that this would entail change. As for multiplicity, he has already accepted it.

[The Sixteenth Argument]

It may therefore be said:

The sixteenth argument is that Ibn Sīnā affirms His knowledge of enduring beings in their individual reality, despite their multiplicity, as we shall quote from him, Allah willing.

The arguments he offers for denying His knowledge of changing things include his claim that His essence would either be dependent for its constitution, or its intellection would be incidental to it, so that it would not be necessary in every respect; and his statement:

“There would be a state that follows not from His essence, but from something else.”

These and similar consequences follow from knowing enduring beings in their individual reality and the kinds of changing things, just as they follow in the case of changing things themselves. The only additional consequence peculiar to changing things is that something further comes into being, and he has no argument specifically excluding this. Indeed, he allows temporally originated events to inhere in what is eternal. He only denies that such events can inhere in Him because he denies that attributes can subsist in Him. Alternatively, he may advance the argument reported from Aristotle that this would entail weariness and fatigue for Him. Each of these claims is a disgrace; one would not expect even a person of the feeblest intellect to say such things.

Were it not that their own followers transmitted this from them in their books—whose attribution to them they themselves regard as established by mass transmission—one could scarcely believe that anyone known for rationality would utter such ravings.

Here are Ibn Sīnā’s words in al-Ishārāt, after he has established the falsity of the claim that the subject and object of intellection are one:

“From this it becomes clear to you that every