Abstract

In Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief, Maria Rosa Antognazza offers a historical narrative of pre-modern epistemology. She argues that until very recently, philosophers generally held that “knowing and believing are distinct in kind in the strong sense that they are mutually exclusive mental states”. This paper tests, and ultimately confirms, that account by applying it two thinkers of the Islamic world, al-Fārābī (d.950 CE) and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d.1037 CE). It is shown that both of them used the term ‘assent (taṣdīq)’ as an umbrella term covering two very different states, knowledge and belief. In the case of Ibn Sīnā, this contrast is ultimately tied to his sharp distinction between immaterial intellective thinking and embodied thinking that uses a physical organ.