A Comparative Study of Ibn Sina and Khwajah Nasir al-Din Tusi on God's Knowledge

God’s Knowledge is one of the important philosophical problems whose various dimensions have continually been explored by different thinkers. In order to avoid the problem of change in divine essence, Ibn Sina argues that God’s Knowledge of particulars is possible through the knowledge of universals and causes. He also holds that the divine undifferentiated knowledge of existents is possible through imprinted forms. On the other hand, Muhaqqiq Tusi considers the necessary knowledge to belong to the category of relation and maintains that, in the Necessary Being’s Knowledge of changing particular affairs, some changes occur in the relation while the essence remains the same. Therefore, unlike Ibn Sina, Tusi accepts God’s Knowledge of particulars. He also criticizes Ibn Sina’s theory of the imprinting of established forms in the essence of the Necessary Being. Ibn Sina argues that the knowledge of divine essence through His Essence and the essential knowledge of imprinted forms, which is the cause of the appearance of existence, are of the presential type, while the differentiated knowledge of other existents is of the acquired type. In this paper, the writers explain and explore the philosophical principles of these two thinkers.