ABSTRACT
In the course of his polemic against Islamic Kalām, Maimonides levels two major charges against Ash‘arite Occasionalism, the one epistemological, the other metaphysical. Ash‘arite Occasionalism threatens, in the first place, to divest things of their specific properties and powers and to abolish their fixed reality, in its teaching that the relative fixity of these things is grounded in the arbitrary fiat of God. And, in the second place, it threatens to repudiate the possibility of any conclusive knowledge about things, whether inductive or deductive; in its repudiation of the trustworthiness of sense-experience and the stringency of deductions from the proper quiddities and genera of things. 1
