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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ETI (Epistemic Transitions in Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: From the 12th to the 19th Century)

Teaser

Summary

The project investigates how post-classical (roughly, twelfth-century CE and thereafter) Islamic philosophers, theologians, and scientists thought about crucial questions related to knowledge and science. Why did they think knowledge was important? What did they think are valid means of acquiring knowledge? Is knowledge derived from sense perception, from rational thinking, from divine revelation, or from a combination of such sources? Finally, what does knowledge consist in: is it a set of propositions that amounts to a theory, or is it rather something like informed experience of the world?

This kind of research is important, because it allows to critically reassess claims according to which Islamic intellectual history is a story of stagnation determined by a religion that is hostile to human reason and critical investigation. Our research shows that the post-classical Islamic tradition should be understood as a tradition of discussion and debate instead of imitation and repetition. By the same token, it shows that we should not think of Islam, or any other major intellectual tradition, in monolithic terms. Providing a historically and philosophically sound understanding of the plurality within the Islamic tradition is important, because Islam is presented as a monolith out of various political interests, including right-wing Islamophobes and jihadist fundamentalists.

Our overall objective is simple: to provide important foundational research in the direly understudied history of post-classical Islamic philosophy, theology, and science.

Work performed

For the first half of the project, we have conducted research in the areas of post-classical philosophy, theology, and Sufism. In all of these areas, the work of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d. 1037 CE) provides the decisive impetus for development.

In philosophy and theology, our focus has been on critiques of the metaphysical foundations of Avicennian theory of science, especially its robust essentialism and realism about universals. Two questions are of particular relevance here. The first concerns the critique, nascent in the twelfth century CE, of the method of definition as the way in which we know essences. We have found that this critical debate is continued in the subsequent centuries, but more work must be done to explicate the precise nature of the development, especially whether the theological critics are mainly trying to undermine the philosophical theory of science or offering a genuine alternative. It is quite frequent that one and the same author, in different parts of his corpus, may both endorse and criticise the Avicennian theory. Answering this seeming inconsistency requires us to assess the respective genres of writing at large.

The second big topical question is intimately related to the first and concerns another critical take on Avicennian philosophy, namely the charge that the key concepts of Avicennian metaphysics (such as essence, existence, substance, or the modal concepts) are merely mind-dependent notions and thus fail to latch on to reality. Interestingly, however, this critique rarely seems to result in a straightforward denial of these concepts, but instead gives rise to rethinking the nature of the science of metaphysics. We have found out that concepts like realism and nominalism, borrowed from the history of European philosophy, are not entirely accurate to characterise this development. The critique of Aristotelian essentialism and realism in the Islamic context, while parallel to that in European medieval philosophy, must be explicated in its own terms, and this is one of the tasks we are presently engaged with.

In the Sufi literature, we have observed and studied two interesting further developments, both of which mainly take place in the tradition of commentaries on the major twelfth-thirteenth-century innovator, Ibn \'Arabi (d. 1240 CE). The first of these is a consistent attempt at carving a niche for Sufism in the framework of the Aristotelian theory of science. More research needs to be conducted on this topic, but on the basis of our studies so far, it seems that the Sufi commentators argued that the special knowledge of the Sufis is not incompatible with philosophy, but a foundation for a science complementary to philosophical metaphysics. It will be interesting to look further into how the added value is articulated by further authors. Secondly, we have found that the Sufi tradition is witness to the emergence of an interesting new approach to the question of the relation between God\'s atemporal knowledge and human temporal knowledge. We are presently looking into the relations between this Sufi discussion and the parallel debates among philosophers and theologians, especially the question of how this connects to the later, seventeenth-century ideas radically revisionist theory of time introduced by Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1635/6).

In concrete terms, we have organised two thematic workshops so far, the proceedings of both of which are being edited into special issues of journals in the field. The first volume is already under review, and there is an agreement about the publication of the second volume. We have also started to organise the major conference of the project for summer 2020 as well as the last of the planned workshops, with a focus on the overlap between philosophical theories of science and the efforts of scientists in the Islamic context.

Final results

The project has produced important new research on authors on whom there have been practically no prior studies, such as Sadr al-Shari\'a al-Mahbubi, Yusuf Qarabaghi, and Abu Nasr Qursawi. The joint expertise has enabled the group members to provide new and historically more securely grounded perspective into already recognised figures, like Avicenna, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, and Ibn \'Arabi. Some of these results have already been submitted and/or published, and obviously, much more grounded will have been covered at the end of the project.