Emma's blog

For Avicenna, ”one”, or ”being” or ”existent” are per se accidents of ”thing”. A per se accident is a predicate (something which is affirmed or denied concerning an argument of a proposition) that belongs to a subject in itself or per se, but not as part of its essence. When you think of a thing, any thing, its being or unity is not included essentially in itself. In order to exemplify this, I have picked the current prime minister of Finland, who became at the time of her confirmation by Parliament at age 34 not only the youngest-ever prime minister of Finland, but the youngest state leader in the world. I saw her on TV the other day, and that’s why she ended up here. Sorry girlfriend.

We already know that for Avicenna, essence is the most fundamental category there is. However, there are two different senses of existence of the essence of Sanna: in re, which means ’in matter’, and ante rem, which means in the mind or soul. Both of these senses are, according to Avicenna, superadded to the essence. Predicates such as individuality or universality do not belong to the essence of mrs. Marin: in herself, she is neither an individual nor a collective, neither a unity nor a disunity, ”neither potentially nor actually in any of these this in such a way that this would enter into [humanness]”.

For Avicenna, accidents such as race, length and body, do not define the human being. I am wondering, however, if gender does define the human being? Is there the essence of man and the essence of woman? This very interesting question aside, accidents are still crucial as they add to the idea of who one is, or who Sanna Marin is. The fact that she is the prime minister is not a part of her essence. Neither is her hair color, nor the fact that she is good at throwing hoops. These are the things that, however, make her recognizable to us. Would we be able to recognize the essence of Sanna? Do we have access to it?

At the core of Avicenna’s ontology and metaphysics is the idea that existence is the indubitable base of reality. In other words, there is no doubt that there is existence; in an attempt to deny existence you prove your existence. If you are anything you are, if you are nothing you still are (nothing).

In the fourth class of Al-Isharat wa’l-tanbihat, On Existence and Its Causes, Avicenna explains why it is illogical to assume that metaphysics are not possible, i.e., that there is not a possibility of non-sensible reality. The people who hold this belief think that everything is reducible to human mental activity. In this case, one believes that things exist because they have entered one’s mind. This leads to not only having to accept that our senses are merely imagined, a sort of mental activity, but that one’s very intellect is a product of one’s imagination as well.

Avicenna queries: if everything is reducible to human mental activity, how about the principle of love? What are you feeling if you are in love and there are no sensibles? There clearly are essences that lay outside the sensibles such as love. Where do you locate love? If you reduce your world view to an empirical world of sensibles, there is no room for love, courage, compassion…

It has been over a year since I finished with the course on Middle Eastern philosophy, for which this very blog was created. But now, as we are collectively approaching the end of September 2021, I find myself logging in to this humble blog once again. Frankly, I would not be doing this if it was not mandatory to upload a blog post every week in order to be able to write the exams for this course I’m following called Reading Avicenna in Medieval Times. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, or that I’m not interested in the course curriculum, not at all! The reason for my hesitance is that the subject of Avicennan metaphysics is so absolutely horrifying in its seeming complexity that I feel like it could swallow me whole. However, the exact reason why I enrolled in this course is the challenge I knew it would offer me. In this introductory post I will try to refresh my memory on who Avicenna was, on what metaphysics means and figure out what I’m doing here. I will be happy with having any sort of answer for the first two. Bear with me, we are on a learning journey together! Yay!

Avicenna (ca. 970–1037) was a philosopher and physician of paramount importance in the Middle Eastern realm of traditions. It was the time to be alive for a philosopher and scientist as him, as ”[s]cience was much more integrally related to the social and political life and discourse during this period, which is also a significant factor in its rapid spread and development in the Islamic world” (Gutas 2016). He was a philosophical mastermind, and produced immense amounts of scientific and philosophical works, including an extensive commentary on the works of Aristotle, and a comprehensive work of all parts of philosophy, a summa philosophiae, if you will. He aimed at bringing philosophy, in its whole glory as it had presented itself so far, up to date. Furthermore, one of Avicenna’s main aims in his works was to explain and study the relation between the human and the divine.

The human as a rational being was an object of interest for Avicenna. How does the rational soul acquire knowledge? What are the operations of the soul that bring it about? The field of metaphysics, at the time, encompassed every problem that did not fit neatly with logic or physics. Put most simply, metaphysics is the study of being as such without additional tools; being qua being. The tools that I’m referring to are frameworks such as biology, psychology and physics, all of which are great disciplines that offer us understanding of the world around us. What metaphysics wants to do, however, is to characterize and explain the very nature of being only through the lens of language. Do you understand why I’m so nervous about this?

During the first part of the course, my fellow students and I will be reading Avicenna’s writings on metaphysics in his book Al-Isharat wa’l-tanbihat (Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics as translated by Shams Inati). The idea of the texts it contains is to hint at and signify possible solutions to problems, without necessarily offering the easy way out for the reader. What is accessible through acquainting oneself with the work is merely what the author indicated. It is an understatement to say that this will be a challenge. However, I am excited to jump into the figurative abyss with this one.

Source:

Gutas, Dimitri, ”Ibn Sina [Avicenna]”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/ibn-sina/

Very few things in this world are certain. One could go as far as saying that the only certainty is uncertainty. This is at least something I resort to stating, when I am (usually involuntarily) dragged into the depths of doubt and skepticism. It seems to me that philosophers more often than not are disposed to doubting and questioning the environment, and this could be both in the social, external sense of the word, or more internally, the inner environment of oneself. I think posing questions is healthy, but can easily, once one has hopped on the doubt-train, lead to doubting even the most fundamental pillars of our knowledge – namely, our own existence.

The question of existence is a popular one in philosophy. A classical example of someone questioning the nature of reality, and whether or not one exists, is René Descartes, who came to the conclusion cogito ergo sum – that he must be, because he thinks. He is infamous for doubting the existence of the external world, and saw this kind of skepticism as a dreadful, crippling state. The 20th century Middle Eastern philosopher Tabataba’i could have perhaps prevented Descartes from digging himself into a hole. Tabataba’i was an existentialist thinker, who did not see the point of doubting one’s existence. Even the basis of the idea seems absurd, as even doubting is an act of awakening, and therefore, of existence. Existence is indubitable, as it is all-encompassing. ”All of things lead us to believe that there is such a thing as existence”. Whether or not one exists is something that is quite pointless to reflect on, as one cannot lead a life of uncertainty. There has to be a foundation which allows for us to discern reality from unreality, and this foundation provides us with a suitable, demonstrative method: rational philosophy.

I am often met, when discussing the discipline which I study, with a rather amused reaction. ”Oh, so you study philosophy. So can you tell me if this chair is really a chair?” is a popular sentence resembling a joke that comes up in the context. I see why it can be a rather funny thing to invest time and money into education in a field that has seemingly not produced any definite answers or consensus considering the questions that are asked within the enterprise of philosophy. Why, for instance, sit and doubt one’s own existence when it is so painfully apparent?

Mulla Sudra Shirazi (1571-1635), who is one of the most important figures of modern Arabic philosophy (ofter paralleled in importance with Avicenna), is known amongst other things for his ideas on existence and being. He begins with going against the more common sensical conception of the chicken-or-the-egg question when it comes to essence and existence. Analytically it seems as if existence is derivative from essence; how can there be such a thing as a horse in existence without there having been an essence of the horse which was to be manifested preceding. Shirazi proclaimed that this is just a misunderstanding, and that existence is in fact an all-encompassing reality, which can neither be described nor defined. This is due to the fact that existence is the only thing immediately grasped by the human mind, and that it needn’t be defined because of its immediate availability. It is a common notion shared by all beings (in the horizontal dimension of existence), that we all participate in being. Existence is real because the proposition ’X exists’ is true if and only if X refers to an actual thing in reality. So, what Shirazi means by stating that existence is a real predicate is that one acknowledges the subsistence in reality of an X by saying that it exists. To define something, one needs a broader analytic category. For example, when one is defining ’horse’, one needs the broader category of ’mammal’ (which would then need the broader category of ’animal’ and so on). As existence is all-encompassing (i.e. there is nothing for it to relate to in the sense of being more narrow than something else, there is nothing broader), it cannot be defined.

This little intellectual venture I went on in the previous paragraph, using the ideas of Mulla Sudra Shirazi as my vehicle, might not give any apparent answer to the standing question of what thinking about big things as existence is really use for. I feel like a proper philosopher when saying that there most probably is not a definitive response satisfying to all. According to Shirazi, philosophy takes the soul on four journeys. Through going on these voyages, first ascending to God and no longer being in denial of philosophy and later descending and returning to the world with the truth, the philosopher lives in the world with the highest principle (God), and has the ethical duty of communicating truths back to society. This is how philosophy cures sick souls, unveils the hidden, by philosophers starting to resemble (not become) the creator, helping others to think about things that must necessarily be thought about, such as life after death. So to answer the slightly doubtful questions anyone might have regarding my choice of study: I am doing you a favor. By embarking on these four journeys of the soul, I am one day to descend from the abstract truths of things back down to earth, resembling the creator, to salvage your sick souls that are oblivious to the importance of philosophy, becoming a link between God and the world. You don’t have to thank me, it is merely my moral duty to do so.

Sarcasm aside, I find subjective meaning in thinking about these things, as to me, there are no questions more profound than those having to do with existence itself, dived into by philosophers of all times and traditions. My interest does not have to necessarily be of any use to others outside myself, and I feel like the outreach of my influence is something partly out of my control anyway. I am just happy to have found an area that opens itself up to me as a playground that never seizes to amaze and baffle me in the best and worst ways.

”The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.”

– Cyrano de Bergerac

These words by the 17th century French author Cyrano de Bergerac ring true to me, and have done so for a while. They rang true to me when I was younger, and learned about how we, human beings, are destroying our planet by exhausting its resources: we go on vacations, boarding airplanes that pollute massively for our entertainment, to pass time. They rang true when I was exposed to vegan ”propaganda”, seeing how animals, innocent as they can be, are mass-slaughtered, becoming mere means to satisfy our entitled human ends, ending up as steaks on our Sunday evening dinner plates. Or what’s worse, as patties in microwaveable burgers. They continue to ring true today, when living through a highly unusual time and we humans being in isolation, and seeing how nature flourishes in our absence: skies are blue again, animals are taking back territory they have not been able to reach in ages. This forces us to face the possibility that we humans as a species are not superior to other animals in the sense we credit ourselves to be. I mean, how could we, when the world as a whole seems to beam with joy and life as soon as we take a step back. Why is it that we think that only our agency and freedom, our human reality, matters?

There is a feeling of unease and discomfort when coming face to face with having done something that does not morally seem quite right. It is not an easy thing to come to terms with that the habits one has that are considered perfectly ok and acceptable by both oneself and everyone else around, might with a shift in perspective suddenly make one’s apparent infallibility crumble. That in fact the things that one chooses to do in everyday life actually cause suffering and are of oppressing nature, and are based on self-inflicted authority. Who gave humans the right to, for example, exploit animals as we wish as our vehicles and instruments?

Of course the answer is that it is easier to deny that animals have an ontological nature of their own. For most people the starting point is that there just simply isn’t anything of value, any other metaphysical reality outside our biased, arrogant human-ness, and the possibility of anything else is unsettling. The Brethren of Purity, a group within the Ismailis (a sect within Islam, operating around the 700s AD) often appraised for their impartial approach to knowledge, made genius use of the unease that this shift in perspective brings about in the average human. When it comes to modes of teaching and knowing, they were of the opinion that the simple human intellect is not made for abstract learning, and that there is something to be rectified in the way humans fail to give thanks to the blessings that animals are. The Brethren of Purity (and the Friends of Loyalty, as the name continues) made it clear that one should ”shun no science, scorn any book…”, and see that all knowledge comes from the same source, and that there is a perennial and immutable truth underlying the surface-level manifold of sciences. When humans are oppressing the nature around them, they no longer moralize or philosophize. This new mode of teaching was based on pointing out the arrogance and ill-doings of humans by giving up the podium us humans have given ourselves. These teachings employed dramatic irony and produced an unsettling shift in dynamic by giving animals a voice, creating powerful conceptualizations where animals would mock humans and their arrogance, inviting human beings to think about abstract concepts which by nature are external to the human body.

By breaking down a normal hierarchy like this and, in a way, humiliating arrogant humans and showing that there is no morality in not showing pity for animals crying for mercy before being slaughtered, one can get used to thinking outside the normal societal constructions. Philosophical salvation from the constraints of the fallible human intellect and the prison of materialism is only possible through challenging the comfort we have grown accustomed to. It is in revealing the ontology of otherness, or in other words, recognizing the ontological fundamentality of something outside of oneself, that the abstract can be accessed. Ideas have higher reality than sensory things. Animals have virtual subject-hood, and are free, responsible moral agents. I think one does a huge service for oneself by admitting to the suffering one has caused because of self-centeredness, and not only in the case of hurting animals but also us humans hurting one another (unethical labour and so on). For it is only by owning up to one’s past mistakes that one can grow and not continue to inflict pain on one’s surroundings. In a sense, discomfort is a gift, and should be embraced in order for a finer, better normal to emerge from the ashes of the former.

It seems that in today’s day and age, pieces of any given kind of literature, are often written with the aim of impressing the reader with technicalities and complicated subtleties only left for the truly intellectually capable to grasp. And quite paradoxically, the complexity seems to be embraced by the audience of these texts. There is a common belief that the more advanced the text is technically, the more advanced it is in content and intelligence.

This, quite modern, way of expression is something Medievalist thinkers (but also contemporaries as Einstein) disagreed with. One should be able to present knowledge in a simple and elegant manner, so that it can be grasped by the recipient. When a text is unnecessarily complicated and sprinkled with technical jargon, it is an indicator of the author not actually having understood the subject matter. This is the idea that if something is comprehended, it can be put simply.

I confess to having disguised my own uncertainty and self-consciousness when it comes to discussing philosophical matters behind technicalities and quirky language. So, dear readers, my at times colorful way of writing is not merely because I enjoy writing in that way (although that is most definitely the bigger reason). Maimonides, a household name in the Jewish philosophical tradition, was exquisite for being able to disseminate knowledge to the public by making his ideas and teachings available to all; he adopts a particular, non-condescending tone in these writings, his goal being that the reader can grasp what he is getting at. No need to impress or shock the audience. The simple manner in which he discussed the subjects at hand was impressive in itself, as the subjects are not from the simple end of the spectrum: the nature of God, prophets, sacred texts and how literally they should be taken etc. You know, not necessarily the lightest stuff there is to discuss.

”If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

I have been feeling a bit sad lately. For some reason, it almost seems radical to admit to feeling sad even on a platform like this, a blog read only by a few. On principle, I am against suppressing emotions deemed as negative like sadness and anger in order to seem more put together in the eyes of other people. Of course, there is a time and place for expressing such emotions, but at the end of the day, they demand to be felt anyway. One could say that they are a necessary evil. The Buddhists would say that they are the inescapable core of our existence, the fundamental experience (i.e. life is suffering). It makes me sad when my friends and loved ones tell me that they cannot recall the last time they cried, or that when faced with tragedy of any grade they just sucked it up and moved on with their lives. Me being against not facing one’s feelings (especially the unpleasant ones), I am on the flip side all for vulnerability. Vulnerability is not the same as being weak, or letting others walk over you. There is this common obstacle on the path to being vulnerable, which is the fear of looking weak in the eyes of others. This weakness would make us isolated; we would no longer be seen as equal to our peers, we would not be treated with the same respect and so on. I believe this is a misconception. By not sharing the weak moments and by being afraid of failing and avoiding failure at any cost, it becomes highly impossible for others to relate to us. Everyone fails. Everyone goes through hard times and bad days. What kind of person does it make someone who is no longer a part of ’everyone’ by always succeeding and never being sad? I think it makes them inhuman and truly isolated.

So, we have come to the conclusion that it is truly ok and natural to feel sad and to mess up from time to time. Although I think we would still all agree that sadness is a state of mind that you would rather have replaced with a feeling that is considered more positive. I do personally think that there is beauty and value to every feeling on the spectrum, but I also think that being in a good mood makes life flow just that much easier. Furthermore, when feeling things like sadness or loneliness, the human psyche makes it nearly impossible for us to seize in the moment and recognize the value of the discomfort. This acceptance and even appreciation for the lower moments in our lives usually only come to us when we view things in retrospect, and see how the bad times made it possible for us to get to the present, happier place. It always helps to find ways to cope with the more unwanted emotions, as they are going to be a part of this game we call life anyway, whether we like it or not. The Middle Eastern philosopher Al-Kindi had a thing or two to say about this, and in fact, wrote a treatise called ”On the means of dispelling sorrows” which, if I remember correctly, was something Al-Kindi wrote to a disciple or friend of some sort as advice on how to not be so overwhelmed by – you guessed it – sorrow. His whole point basically revolves around the notions that we feel grief when we lose something, and that pain is something that should be avoided.

We have all been there. Our pet goldfish or rat or beloved family dog died, and we feel immense hopelessness and grief before this cruel world that took away that what was precious to us. Al-Kindi thought that all sorrow stems from being overly attached to our possessions and the blessings life has granted us, and that these attachments ultimately lead to a lot of pain when lost. How he would advise to go around this would be to place our attachment on things that cannot be taken away from us, and refining our values. Thus, in order to avoid grief, one must find pleasure in what the intellectual realm offers, and not strive for accumulating a lot of material goods like a nice house and fast cars, as they can disappear as fast as they appeared. Those who are the most invulnerable are the philosophers; those placing the most value on endeavors of the mind. However, Al-Kindi does not say we should stay away from bodily and material pleasures altogether, but that we should neither try to actively attain them nor avoid them. We should simply allow them to come and go. Even maybe let ourselves be happy for a nice external thing the universe grants us, but not be angered when said thing goes on to other things and no longer is ours. In fact, Al-Kindi says that nothing we deem as ours has been ours in the first place. Perhaps it is helpful to think of possessions as borrowed goods, that will someday, sooner or later, have to be returned to their rightful owner. You are lucky enough already only to have gotten your share of this nice thing (person, place, experience), whatever it may be.

I do not agree with Al-Kindi that pain is something to be avoided, because in order to escape it, at least on his terms we would have to become ascetic and isolated from what our fellow humans are going through. The (constant) absence of pain would reduce the fact that we are just fragile, fleeting beings that could at any moment be wiped off the face of the earth due to any odd sequence of events which we have no control over anyway. Maybe Al-Kindi saw this as a sorrow-inducing realization to come to, and saw getting rid of attachment as a way to not having to come face to face with it too often. I agree that it can be a borderline paralyzing notion, but I do think that it is a thought that when faced (not just once but again and again in different stages of one’s life) will ultimately lead to supreme vulnerability. Supreme vulnerability has nothing to do with you being scared your friend would see you as a failed human being if you would admit to her that you were having a bad day. Supreme vulnerability would be this, but on the universal scale (wow I’m sorry I will try to think of a better name for this than supreme vulnerability). It demands you tell your friend you are not doing so great even at the risk of her realizing that you are not immune to sorrow. It demands that you own up to your own fragility and imperfection, and learn to roll with the punches life throws at you with grace, knowing that you can’t really do shit about what you are fundamentally – which is a being that is significant in its insignificance, perfect in its imperfection and capable of seeing the good side of even the bad stuff – at least in retrospect.

It is rather easy to go through most of our days without coming to question our own freedom of agency. It is rarely the case that when faced with a choice like what to spread on our morning toast, we would feel like it was something out of our control. However, when analysed, this feeling or intuition of free will seems weaker and weaker a possibility not to be examined further.

The topics of free will and human agency have been present in intellectual discussion and subjects of philosophical speculation for a long time. In the medieval period in the Middle East, the Kalam debates came with an alternative wave of rationalism, addressing topics such as God’s nature, divine attributes and free will. These disputations involved systematic theological argumentations, and became important endeavours to rationalise religious commitments and (in this case muslim) beliefs. I find it to be a very interesting and common sense approach to try to provide some intellectual context and well-justified reasons for adopting any worldview. I feel like there is not enough questioning going on in general regarding these topics. People are willing to take a leap of faith just a tad bit too easily, hoping the easy answers of any given authority (religions, governments, politicians, fitness crazes… you name it) will fix their problems and feeling of bewilderment. I do think it is fine to search for things provided by these institutions, namely a community and a sense of belonging, but not without having questioned their legitimacy and tried to rationalise one’s own reasons for adopting a certain set of beliefs. Blind trust brings with it ignorance and an element of danger. It is harder to be manipulated when having done one’s own research. So, I think the Kalam discussions was really getting at something with this strategy.

The debates on free will were also building a kind of framework to make it easier to distinguish where human agency would fit in the picture of a monistic religion with an all-powerful God. If we have the ability to create our own actions, as many religions claim, how can God be all-powerful? One of the key doctrines appearing in the debates was that humans have some form of free will and that we as humans are morally and ethically responsible for our own actions. Consequently, our actions are not predetermined. It is smart to include an element of free agency to the system, as it is hard to convince people of their responsibility of their own actions if they do not see them as their own in the first place. Why would God punish us for actions that were predetermined (by himself)?

These questions remain puzzling. Easy answers to big questions like these provided by any authority should strike us as red flags. I think we should all struggle with big topics on our own and look at them from a spectrum of perspectives before settling with a stance. Even when taken, the stance should be held with a grip not too tight to not leave room for refinement. I think our professor agrees with my statement, as in the first lecture he stated something along the following: if your whole worldview does not completely change every five years, you are not learning, thinking or growing enough.

The term philosopher encompasses several things. A philosopher is a critical thinker, theorizer, speculator and dreamer. In the best cases even an innovator. When looking at these characteristics (if you will), one might see how they would serve as a solid foundation for any discipline really. I am personally having a hard time coming up with a field where an expert would not need the skills of critical thinking and innovation in order to solve problems and refine the art of whatever they are engaged with. This is why comparably a lot more philosophers were historically known as polymaths than what we see today. In other words, one was not merely a philosopher, but could additionally write extensive treatises on subjects like music and notation, logic, mathematics, astronomy, and the list goes on.

A prime example of this was Al-Farabi (870-950), a muslim philosopher and scientist, one of the most prominent of his time. In addition to establishing syllabus for young philosophers-in-training which I will touch on later in this post, he dove into subjects as linguistics and music with expertise and precision, pioneering in these areas as well. He was of course not the only polymath known to history. As mentioned before, it was rare to be specialized to the extent that people are today. Is there a reason why we have stopped producing these multidisciplinary thinkers who are capable in more than one area?

Puritanical boundaries between disciplines are largely accepted in our world’s intellectual atmosphere. It is more or less set in stone how different subjects ought be approached, and there is arguably less room for experts from other fields to put their fingers into nitpicking those of others. I do believe there is a reason for why this used to be easier in the medieval times. It is said that philosophy is the mother of all sciences, which means that there used to not really be a distinction between different disciplines; they all had to do with familiarizing oneself with the nature of reality, just from different perspectives. It is hard to raise multidisciplinary thinkers, as true skillfulness in just any area of knowledge might take more education than can be fit into a single lifetime – let alone doing this in several disciplines. With the sheer amount of information available to us at all times in any chosen subject, it might be unreasonable to expect not only mastery of several fields of study, but additionally expecting new discoveries and horizons in said fields. Perhaps if we would be able to eliminate the distraction that has come with the overflow of information, we could consider a new generation of polymaths a possibility.

Al-Farabi’s syllabus for an education to become a capable philosopher could be seen as an answer to how polymaths come to be. This very detailed and multi-faceted program seems to rest on the notion that knowledge is cumulative, and that true wisdom requires a strong foundation to flourish upon. By acquiring degrees in different fields in a specific order, the young thinker (this program should preferably be started with when around 10 years old) first looks inward with subjects like linguistics and logic, and then turns the focus outward on the more abstract, finishing with metaphysics. This syllabus is designed to set the student straight and to make them capable of innovation and profound research in any given subject. The boundaries and limitations between different fields of study are purely illusory, as the same skillset is required across all of them in order to make advancements.

The only problem is that in order to complete Farabi’s ambitious plan, one has to dedicate around 30 years of one’s life, and possibly also have to figure out a way to travel back in time to be young enough for the starting age to be optimal. It is obvious to me that this would only be possible for a tiny handful of people, especially considering the environment of today’s society where survival requires quick results and entering into the work force as fast as possible to benefit the common good (or in alternate wording, benefiting the market as consumers. Yay capitalism!) is borderline obligatory. But maybe we do not need an army of polymaths. Perhaps, a small bunch who have the possibility to put time and effort into several disciplines would suffice in filling the intellectual gap we seem to have.