ABSTRACT
Miskawayh’s opponent begins by setting out a sketchy version of empiricism: there are two kinds of cognition, namely sensation and intellection. These grasp particulars and universals, respectively, but intellection depends on sensation to grasp universals. Miskawayh invokes what modern epistemologists would call an internalist constraint on knowledge: if the intellect knows, it must also know that it knows, and the second-order knowledge cannot depend on the reliability of any mechanism external to the intellect itself. In both epistemology and ethics, then, Miskawayh defends the sort of intellectualist position that had been set out by al-Kindi; but in both cases he retrenches to a more nuanced version of this position. In fact, however, Miskawayh’s view is somewhat more nuanced than this: such a robust asceticism would after all be strange given the interest in practical ethics that is evident in a work such as the Tahdhib.
