Ibn al-Tilimsānī (d.1260) on the Snares of Ontology

The ongoing explorations of post-Avicennian philosophy and Islamic theology (kalam) have tended to focus on thinkers from the Islamic East. In this paper, I will try to show that attention to later North African scholars can help enrich and nuance our sense of the philosophical landscape after Avicenna. I focus on the discussion of the existence/essence distinction by Ibn al-Tilimsānī (d. 1260), an Ashʿarī theologian active in Egypt. His discussion reveals that there were still influential scholars who rejected the mainstream post-Avicennian view that existence is additional or extrinsic to contingent essences.