Unless you follow the field closely, you probably aren’t aware of a major shift in scholarship on philosophy in the Islamic world. Since the turn of the century, experts on this topic have been increasingly interested in what happened after what one might call the “classical” or “formative” period. By this I mean, roughly, the ninth to twelfth centuries, the era that produced such famous names as al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā (“Avicenna”), al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”). These are the figures you would be most likely to encounter in, say, a class on medieval philosophy that includes authors from the Islamic world. People are still working on them, of course, but a lot of attention is now being paid to what happened next.
Actually, that’s rather oversimplifying. There was already a more well-established tradition of research centering on the seventeenth-century Persian philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā, especially in Iran and amongst scholars in Europe and North America influenced by Iranian scholarship. What is really new is the interest being taken in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. This was a time when philosophy and philosophical theology (kalām) was above all occupied with the thought of the aforementioned Ibn Sīnā. His works mark a kind of new starting point for intellectual history in the Islamic world, as he responded to both Greek-inspired philosophy (falsafa) and earlier kalām to produce a formidable new system. The signs of his impact are visible everywhere in subsequent philosophical literature, from the adoption of his terminology to the critique and defense of his signature doctrines. These include his revamping of Aristotle’s logic, his intriguing “flying man” thought experiment, and his famous proof of God as a “Necessary Existent” who necessarily gives rise to an eternal universe.
Reading through the superb work of the numerous scholars who were already delving into this material, it occurred to me that it would be helpful to have more of the relevant material available in English and arranged in a user-friendly way. So, together with Fedor Benevich and Andreas Lammer—later our team came to include Hanif Amin Beidokhti, Dustin Klinger, Michael Noble, and Sarah Virgi—I managed to get funding from the German Research Council (DFG) for a project called “The Heirs of Avicenna: Philosophy in the Islamic East, 12th–13th Centuries.” Our idea was to create a series of sourcebooks, modeled on books devoted to late ancient philosophy (A.A. Long and David Sedley’s The Hellenistic Philosophers and Richard Sorabji’s Philosophy of the Commentators). As in those cases, we would select and translate short passages that capture the philosophical debates from the relevant period. Since there are so many authors and so much material, we would organize the texts by theme, like “proofs for God’s existence,” “modal syllogistic,” and “the immateriality of the soul.” The idea was to give readers a sense of how a range of authors responded to Ibn Sīnā and to each other, as they grappled with his ideas.
The first of the three sourcebooks is now available open access, and there is also a free online resource providing the texts in their original language (mostly Arabic, some Persian, and occasionally Syriac). As you can see by paging through, we quote from more than twenty authors, though a few loom especially large because they were so innovative and influential: Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and for logic al-Khūnajī and al-Kātibī. If these names are unfamiliar to you, don’t feel bad. Their writings were very difficult to access for those who can’t read Arabic and Persian, and even once our sourcebooks are all out, there will remain a vast amount of material that remains untranslated and, in many cases, unedited (in other words, the texts are still only available in manuscripts). And mind you, this is only the beginning of the later tradition. Since we go up only to the end of the thirteenth century, we do not include significant later philosopher-theologians, for instance, al-Ījī, al-Jurjānī, and al-Taftazānī from the following century. So there is a lot still to do. Nonetheless I think it is possible to give a general description of the philosophy produced in this period. The comparison I like to use is that it is as if one were to discover Latin medieval scholasticism (as in Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and so on) all over again, except that this material came somewhat earlier, is written in Arabic and Persian instead of Latin, and focuses on Ibn Sīnā instead of Aristotle. The passages we translate display many of the traits familiar from European scholasticism: fine terminological and conceptual distinctions, nifty objections, replies to objections, replies to those replies (and so on), and organization of the material in thematically arranged sets of “questions” (masāʾil, cf. Latin quaestiones), with a profusion of supporting arguments arranged pro and contra a given answer to each question. Often, the discussions even anticipate later medieval debates, for instance, over the question of whether being is said in one or many ways and over the need to postulate multiple powers or “faculties” in the soul. It’s an exciting new field of research for historians of philosophy, especially those who like rigorous and detailed argumentation on metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of mind. And who doesn’t?
Peter Adamson
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is the author of "Al-Kindi" and "Al-Razi" in the series "Great Medieval Thinkers" and has edited or co-edited many books, including "The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy" and “Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays." He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast, which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.
