 This issue was widely discussed by Arabic philosophers and theologians. In his commentary on Avicenna’s Pointers and Reminders, al-Ṭūsī attempts to resolve this problem by suggesting that we can attribute a sort of prior awareness (shuʿūr) to the nature of a body (Avicenna and Ṭūsī PR: part IV, 7, 18). Ṭūsī makes these remarks in reply to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s complaint that Avicenna’s conception of the final cause applies only to cognitive agents. By contrast, al-Ghazālī maintains that the inanimate is called “a seeker and a willer” only figuratively: