that it is an effect of the beginningless cause. When one of them is asked, “Is the world temporally originated or beginningless?” he replies, “It is both temporally originated and beginningless.” By this he means that the celestial sphere is beginningless in itself(1), having always existed, and that it is temporally originated—by which they mean that it is the effect(2) of a beginningless cause.

[The Invalidity of Citing Setting as Proof of Contingency and Motion]

This expression is used by Ibn Sīnā and others like him among the Bātiniyya (esotericists). They take the expressions used by Muslims and apply them(3) to meanings of their own, just as he did with the term “setting.” When the adherents of innovated speculative theology argued from the temporal origination of acts to the temporal origination of the agent in whom those acts subsist, they claimed that Abraham, the intimate friend, had argued in this manner; that what was meant by “setting”(4) was motion and transition; and that he had thereby inferred the temporal origination of whatever moves and passes from one state or place to another.

Ibn Sīnā incorporated this material into his own doctrine and mentioned it in his (al-Ishārāt), making this(5) “setting” an expression for contingency. He said, “Whatever falls within the domain of contingency falls within the domain of setting.”(6) His exact words were:(7) “For falling within the domain of contingency is a kind of setting.”

This was because he wished to uphold the position of his philosophical forebears while also espousing something resembling the theologians’ approach. The theologians inferred the temporal origination of bodies by the method of composition,