A topology of disagreement
Targum renders a text; Sugya maps the dispute over it; a chakira names the conceptual fork the dispute turns on. The discovery the engine is built for is that the same fork recurs: a Kabbalist arguing whether the Infinite literally withdrew and a Neoplatonist negating every name of God have walked up to one rock from different sides. The aim is never to dissolve the disagreements into a private synthesis. It is to show that they have siblings, and to hold each one exactly as its holder would state it. A fault-line stays provisional until the spine votes; the map is itself contestable.
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Unity and multiplicity in the divineIf God is one, what are the Names, the sefirot, the persons? Are the distinctions real in God, or only in us?
4 instances Akbarian Sufism · Jewish mysticism · New Testament · Islamic kalam -
Experience or constructionDoes a mystical text record a real practice, or is it a literary and exegetical construction?
4 instances Jewish mysticism · New Testament · Islamic mysticism -
Predication and the divineDoes language about God describe God as He is in Himself, or only God as related to creation?
3 instances Jewish mysticism · Akbarian Sufism · Christian apophatic · Islamic kalam -
Transmission or unveiling original cross-readingWhat makes a teaching authoritative: an unbroken chain of transmission, or direct insight?
3 instances Islamic mysticism · jewish rabbinic · Christian (patristic) -
Creation: from nothing, or by emanation?Did the world begin, made freely out of nothing by a God who wills, or does it flow eternally and necessarily from the One?
3 instances Islamic philosophy (falsafa) · Jewish philosophy · Christian philosophy -
Free will and the decreeIf God is omnipotent and knows all, are human acts truly free, or decreed? And if decreed, how is God just to punish them?
3 instances Islamic kalam · Christian (patristic) · Jewish philosophy -
Reason and revelationAthens and Jerusalem: are reason and revelation one harmonious truth, or does the revealed word stand above, and sometimes against, the philosophers?
3 instances Islamic philosophy (falsafa) · Jewish philosophy · Christian philosophy