The Semantic Range of the Argument of the Truthful

The issue of proving the existence of the necessary being and its names and attributes has always been one of the concerns of philosophers and theologians in the Islamic world and is one of the important matters in Islamic philosophy. Therefore, Islamic thinkers have proposed many arguments such as the argument of motion, the argument of soul, the argument of occurrence and the argument of the truthful to prove the essence of the necessary being. For the first time, Ibn Sina proposed the argument of the truthful in a number of his works, and philosophers after him offered interpretations of this argument with slight differences. An important feature of this argument is that it proves the essential nature by eliminating intermediaries. In other words, it goes from essence to essence. In this article, we seek to prove and reveal the semantic range and scope of this argument in relation to names and attributes, and to answer the question: Does the argument of the truthful have the ability to demonstrate names and attributes in addition to proving the divine essence or not? For this purpose, we first deal with the recognizability of attributes and the provability of essence and attributes. Then we will show that the argument of the truthful also proves the names and attributes of the necessary being. The important premise of this issue is that names and attributes are identical with essence.