Divine attributes from Avicenna and Aquinas’s points of view: An analytical investigation

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Abstract

Beside human beings innate inclinations to recognition of God, Monotheist philosophers and theologians have always attempted to find some demonstrative ways for understanding divine essence and attributes. Among them, Avicenna as a pioneer peripatetic philosopher in Muslim world and Thomas Aquinas as a prominent Christian theologian in medieval ages, in different ways have made considerable efforts to present defensible proof for the existance of God, as the creator of the world. for example, although while Avicenna has offered the theory of "extensional and conceptual unification", Aquinas put forward the theory of “Analogy” on the divine attributes, but anyway, among long disagreement in which some philosophers have gone to one extreme and some to another, they could demonstrate that the divine arena is free from any kind of multiplicity even the multiplicity of aspects. It should be mentioned that Avicenna’s theory is opposite to the well-know theory of “extensional unification and conceptual difference”; similarly, Aquinas’s theory is one of the three main viewpoints in this regard, which has left a great influence on the realm of theology and philosophy.

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