Reconstructing Ibn Sina's “the Potential” Resolution to the Intentionality to the Past and the Future Based upon a Kind of Minimalist Holism

Ibn Sina says that if we have a piece of knowledge about the past or the future, then our knowledge is “potentially” about the external world. But he does not clarify the meaning of this “potentiality”. We show that if we take Ibn Sina's “the potential” view as the potentiality of the object of truth and then return it to the material causes, then by means of considerable modification and reconstruction we can obtain a reasonable kind of minimalist holism resolution: the object of knowledge to a future thing is its all material causes in the present time and the object of knowledge to a past thing is its all material effects in the present time. We will prove this presentist resolution by means of a kind of determinant reason of comparison with Ibn Sina's definition by a description of comparison with Ibn Sina's phrase that a thing can be distinct by its all causes and of the comparison between the validity of the Minimalist Holism Resolution and our knowledge about the past and the future in the ordinary situations (i.e. without considering the riddle of the intentionality to the nonexistent). In the end, we will have a glance at the degree of the correspondence between knowledge and its object in this resolution and then we show that this resolution can be provable even outside Ibn Sina's philosophical system without necessarily accepting such issues as the four causes and the potentiality.