This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is on Peter Adamson’s Philosophy in the Islamic World. Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich; he was formerly at King’s College London and retains a fractional appointment there. His research has mostly concerned philosophy in the Islamic world and its Greek sources, and he has published and edited numerous books and many research articles in this area. He is the host of the History of Philosophy podcast, a series that launched in 2010 and has appeared weekly ever since.
What is your work about and how does it fit in with your larger research project?
This is the third volume of a book series based on my History of Philosophy podcast. The aim is to introduce the history of philosophy to a wide readership but without leaving anything out or just skipping from one major thinker to the next, as introductory overviews tend to do. Hence the motto of both the podcast and book series: they cover the subject “without any gaps,” or at least attempt to do so. Among other things this means that the series includes significant coverage of the non-European traditions that are so often passed over in English-language histories of philosophy. This third volume deals with philosophy in the Islamic world, which is also one of my main research interests.
Thus the volume is part of a larger story in which I am trying to describe how philosophy has developed across time and across cultures. In theory the ultimate ambition is to do this for the whole world and all time periods down to the twentieth century; time will tell how close the series will come to achieving this admittedly rather ambitious goal. Since I am trying to show the interconnectedness and continuity of philosophy across places and times, there are strong links between this volume and other volumes of the series. For instance I look at the way that classical and late ancient Greek thought was translated into Arabic and re-interpreted by readers of those translations, and I also look ahead to the major impact of ideas from the Islamic world on Latin medieval philosophy. On the other hand I also tried to ensure that this volume can stand alone, that you can read it without needing to consult other books in the series.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
Here we could maybe start with the title, which is Philosophy in the Islamic World. This is meant to indicate a broad approach, both thematically and chronologically. Chronologically, the book starts in about the eighth or ninth century CE and goes down to the present day, though I have to admit that I didn’t try to cover twentieth century thought in that much detail since this would have been a project for a whole additional book (and not one I would really have the competence to write). Still I wanted to pay attention to developments in later time periods. Often philosophy in the Islamic world is treated as a kind of branch of medieval philosophy, or even as plugging a hole in the history of philosophy between late antiquity in Europe and the rise of scholasticism in the thirteenth century – as if the historical purpose of philosophers who wrote in Arabic was to keep the discipline going long enough for European Christians to get their act together again.
I see that as totally misconceived, and actually as a holdover from the way Arabic philosophy was first received in Christian Europe. Around 1200 there was a major effort to translate philosophy from Arabic into Latin. Later thinkers (basically, anyone later than Averroes, the Spanish Muslim commentator on Aristotle who died in 1198, and even contemporaries of his who lived further east) have mostly been excluded from our histories of philosophy, because they came along too late to be translated into Latin so as to influence scholastic philosophers like Aquinas or Scotus. In the book I wanted to stress the achievements not only of figures from what I call the “formative” period, which goes to the eleventh or twelfth century, but also later figures, some of whom were philosophers of immense sophistication and influence, like Fakhr al-Din al-Razi or Mulla Sadra. I should say that I am not really the first to do this. Especially the later Iranian tradition has been included in some surveys of the subject. But I cast a wider net than that for the later period, taking in also the Ottoman and Mughal (Islamic Indian) traditions.
Another unusual feature of the book is the inclusion of Christian and Jewish philosophers, alongside Muslim ones. Again the title is relevant here. The idea wasn’t to cover philosophy that was distinctively “Islamic” (whatever that would mean) but philosophy that emerged within the cultural context of Islamic political rule. In particular I wanted to get away from a tendency to treat medieval Jewish philosophy as an isolated tradition that might as well have been happening anywhere. So I go into the intellectual links between Muslim and Jewish authors, while also highlighting distinctive developments in Jewish thought, like Kabbalah. Admittedly these traditions sometimes spill over borders in ways that make it hard to organize the material. One good example is a philosopher named Isaac Abravanel, who lived in Spain after the “reconquest” by the Christians. So I covered him in this volume as part of the story of Andalusian thought. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, he fled to Italy, where his son Judah Abravanel (also known as Leone Ebreo) also wrote philosophical works. So I wound up covering Isaac in this volume, while his son will be dealt with in a future volume that deals with the Italian Renaissance!
What methodology did you use in deciding which thinkers, events, theories, and schools of thought to include, and what picture of Islamic philosophy do you hope the reader will come away with at the end of the book? Are there ways for interested readers to find out more?
In the whole series the question of what to include is always difficult, since in theory I am including “everything” but of course in practice it’s hard to know what that means. Plus there are limits to the patience I can expect of my readers and listeners. Still, I have a rough and ready rule of thumb which is: if I am in doubt whether to include something, I include it. I realize that this is not exactly a sophisticated theoretical conception of what philosophy “really is.” But I don’t really have such a conception of my own to offer, rather I would see all answers to that question as being themselves historically and culturally conditioned (among the things my series shows is the difference in how philosophy has been practiced and conceived in different times and places). It’s more that I have a notion of the topics that fall under philosophy, like the nature of knowledge, the sources of moral norms, etc. So I just try to cover texts and traditions that speak to those topics in ways that strike me as interesting.
Also since I am convinced that the history of philosophy is usually approached too narrowly, I feel that it is better for me to risk being overly broad in my own approach, than too narrow. After all, as I always say, if I include something that should really have been left out because in the last analysis it does not count as philosophy, the worst that happens is that we learn something additional that we didn’t, as it were, “need” to learn. So in this book for example, some readers might contest the notion that mysticism – Sufism in Islam, and Kabbalah in Judaism – count as “philosophy.” I try to make a case that they do count, but even if readers aren’t persuaded they will at least come away from the book having learned something about these “non-philosophical” traditions too. And such traditions show something about the broader impact and context of philosophy if it is more narrowly defined. For similar reasons I try to keep an eye on developments in the sciences in each period, though it is not a history of science podcast.
As for how to find out more, there are suggestions for further reading for the whole tradition and also for individual topics, both on the podcast website and at the end of the book.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to?
Oh my, yes. As I always say, the “without any gaps” slogan is an aspiration, not a promise, and I am constantly facing difficult decisions about what and whom to cover. As I implied already I would have liked to get in more about recent philosophy in the Islamic world, for instance I don’t say anything about philosophy in Indonesia. In general I could have said more about political philosophy in all periods, though this is certainly covered to some extent. (Actually the whole project has made me realize this is a blind spot for me: my own interests somehow gravitate more towards topics in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and so on, and I have to remind myself to cover politics too.)
In a couple of cases I was able to circle back to cover things that could have featured here but didn’t. This especially concerns Christian philosophy in the Islamic world, since the volume I’m working on now deals in part with Byzantine philosophy. This has given me the chance to talk again about Christian thought across the border in the Islamic realm. So in the newer volume I’ll be talking about philosophy in Syriac, which I could have done here but didn’t much. I mention this mostly because it illustrates another more general point I like to make about the history of philosophy, which is that there isn’t necessarily one “best” way of dividing up the terrain. You can think about, say, the Christian philosopher Bar Hebraeus, who lived in the thirteenth century in the Islamic world and wrote in Syriac, either as illustrating the impact of Muslim philosophers like Avicenna on Christians in Islamic realms, or as part of a broader story of philosophy within the traditions of Christianity in the East. Both are legitimate.
As you point out, many living philosophers are not aware of the topics Islamic philosophy recently took up. Could you provide a brief summary of what ideas you cover from the 19th and 20th Century?
One thing I stress is that the exchange of ideas from “European” culture to the Islamic world was not a one-time thing, that only happened with the medieval Greek-Arabic translation movement. Rather there is a constant dynamic of ideas flowing back and forth. So I look at, for instance, the impact of political ideas from France on nineteenth century Ottoman thought. More generally, despite what I just said about political philosophy, the chapters on these more recent subjects do talk about that quite a lot, for instance about emerging ideas of nationalism as opposed to Islamic pan-nationalist movements. Another theme that gets picked up is how twentieth century scholars, like Seyyed Hossein Nasr or Mohammed Arkoun, have responded to the earlier historical traditions covered in the rest of the book, and how they have seen these traditions as being still relevant and used them as inspiration for their own philosophy.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
In this respect things have gone rather differently than I expected. When I first started, I basically thought of the project as distilling into popular form the material I teach in class. But now I realize that without the time constraints of a semester schedule, I can actually cover vastly more in this series than I ever could in a class. Nowadays, I recommend to my students that they go to the podcast or books if they want the “whole story” of, say, classical philosophy or philosophy in the Islamic world. What we do in class is instead to focus more narrowly on certain topics and texts, and discuss them face-to-face, which of course is a very different and in many ways superior pedagogical situation.
I would also say that working on the series has changed my attitude towards what I teach, and actually what everyone teaches, at university level. Even a philosophy major will have time to get only a tiny little glimpse of the riches of the history of philosophy. That would be true even if they only took historical courses with no attention being paid to contemporary philosophy, and even if these courses were devoted solely to European thought. Never mind the fact that European philosophy itself is far less than half the whole story, given the vastness of philosophy in the Islamic world, Africa, China, India, and elsewhere. In every case where I have tried to learn something new about non-European philosophy, I have been amazed not only at how interesting the material is but also just the size and complexity of the various traditions.
Even if we restrict our attention to the European tradition, I am struck by the arbitrariness with which figures and texts are chosen to be covered in philosophy classes. Suppose you are doing a course just on medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom. Surely you could cover that thoroughly in a semester, no? Well no, actually, even if one were doing it pretty superficially; my fairly superficial coverage of this topic resulted in a book with 78 chapters and more than 500 pages. The same thing is true of philosophy in the Islamic world: this book I’ve been discussing is 62 chapters long, about 450 pages, and as already mentioned arguably leaves quite a bit out. So when we choose what to teach, we should just give up on the idea of covering the “most important” topics and figures. There are just too many important topics and figures. We should stop pretending to be “comprehensive” and shoot for some more achievable target, like choosing texts that fit together well thematically, or including work by women authors, or whatever your priority is.
What’s next for you?
Actually this third volume has already been followed by two others: the fourth is about medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom, the fifth has just appeared and was co-authored with Jonardon Ganeri. It is devoted to classical Indian philosophy. I’m currently at work on two volumes’ worth of material about Africana philosophy, with co-author Chike Jeffers, and also plan at least one volume on philosophy in China, with co-author Karyn Lai. Ideally there will also be books covering developments later on in India and China, as well as Japan and Korea and perhaps other Asian traditions (perhaps I can get in Indonesia after all!).
Meanwhile I am also pressing ahead with the European tradition. There will be a volume, which I’m in the midst of writing now – it’s been appearing as podcasts in alternation with the episodes on Africana philosophy – which will be devoted to philosophy in Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance. After that there will be a volume on philosophy in the age of the Reformation, including a look at developments in Elizabethan England and the Counter-Reformation in southern Europe. That should take me up to 1600, setting up coverage of “early modern” philosophy with such famous names as Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and so on. I suspect that people who follow the project are probably a bit impatient for me to get to that, but they will have to bear with me. There is, as it turns out, just a whole lot of history of philosophy.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
