Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

Volume 81, 2007

Freedom, Will, and Nature

What Makes the Efficient Cause Efficient?
The Notion of Will in Ibn Sīnā’s Emanative Scheme

The Aristotelian Ibn Sīnā places Necessary Being as the world’s Efficient Cause. Unlike “the standard” Muslim cosmogony of ex nihilo creation, however, his emanative scheme does not seem to grant Necessary Being freedom the exercise of which may cause the world to exist or not to exist. This paper will focus on Ibn Sīnā’s conception of the efficacy of Necessary Being in his emanative cosmogony. If Necessary Being does not have freedom, how does Ibn Sīnā maintain the causal explanation of the contingent being’s (be)coming into being?