A New Reading of the Place of Contingency in the Fifth Namat of Isharat

Avicenna in the sixth chapter of the fifth Namat of his Isharat and Tanbihat deals with the problem of contingency in temporally created things. According to him, every temporally created thing is contingent and prior to it there must be some matter. Normally the commentators thought that here Avicenna merely is going to prove the philosophical principle that before every temporally created thing there must be some matter. This reading is not exact and cannot justify why in this Namat Avicenna speaks of contingency. Furthermore this reading does is not consistent with the whole project of the fifth Namat. According to the new reading presented here in this article, the discussion of contingency is part of a bigger argument in which Avicenna is going to prove that the theory of temporally creation is self-contradictory and the immediate creation of the Necessary Existent cannot be temporal. In this way, if the first creation is temporally created, then there must be some matter before it and then in the exact meaning it cannot be temporally created and a first creation. In this respect, nine commentaries on Isharat were surveyed and no commentator among them has pointed to the reading presented in this article.