An Evaluation of Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī’s Criticisms of Ibn Sīnā’s Argument Regarding the Finitude of Dimensions

The finitude of dimensions is one of the oldest problems of natural philosophy, the consequences of which have entered the realm of divine philosophy. The question is whether the dimensions of the world and each natural body is finite and limited or infinite and limitless. Aristotle was the first philosopher who studied this problem in the history of philosophy and ruled out the infinity of the dimensions of bodies and the natural world. In the same view, Ibn Sīnā maintained that the dimensions of body are finite and presented the three-fold arguments of correspondence, parallelism, and hierarchy in order to demonstrate this theory. Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, who is the most important critic of Ibn Sīnā in the history of philosophy, advanced some criticisms against this theory of Ibn Sīnā. This study proves that most of Fakhr al-Rāzī’s misconceptions in this regard originate in mixing the mind with the outside and the principles of the nine-fold categories with the category of quantity.