What do we mean by “the West”? This term has become more contentious the more narrowly it has been defined. Is its claim as a marker for “global hegemony”, meaning the supposedly universal appeal to liberal democracy, economic organisation of markets and exchange, and historical progress, perhaps the narrowest definition of all? Originally “the west” as the “place of setting of the sun” was the name of an orientation, a way of speaking of how we find ourselves on the face of the earth. This “west” speaks of the “from where” the sun arises (“the Levant” means precisely this – or “the Orient” as an “arising”). Historically the name of “Europe”, as the orientations of West and East named something very different, and took for granted the inclusion of lands, religions, civilisations that the modern “West” often forgets or does not even include among its own. This research stream explores this “forgetfulness” as a way of better understanding our contemporary situation in “the West”. It asks whether “the West” is a proper location, one that is its own, one which might historically and geographically qualify the ambitions of any “global” reach, perhaps opening itself to the return of dialogues with traditions whose provenances are often as ancient and venerable as its own.
Current Projects
Falsafa: The Intellectual History of Islam in Europe
The aim of this research stream is to examine the widely accepted narrative that Islam can be conceived as an “outside” to the West. In fact, and almost from the beginning, Islamic scholars, and their Jewish and Christian interlocutors, preserved and reworked Greek philosophical ideas, especially Aristotle and his commentators, and the various strands of Neoplatonism, to lay the ground for a “theological” metaphysics to which later Western European Christianity (in the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries) had to prove itself to be at least the equal, and from which it inherited a very great deal, perhaps more than Christian scholars were able either to admit or even recognise. This interchange of ideas has been decisive down to the present day, often in ways we are yet to understand and bring to light.
Project Lead: Nader El-Bizri
Conservatism and Political Philosophy
In this research stream, the question of conservativism and its place in political philosophy is illuminated in the context of the complete neglect of conservative thought in modern philosophical discourses. Conservatism itself has long been conceptualised according to an opposition to liberalism and thus it has long been understood in terms of this dichotomy. This research stream aims to liberate conservatism from the shackles of this dichotomy and open up a more fundamental enquiry into the essential ground of conservative thought, not simply to reintegrate conservatism into the discourses of political philosophy but to confront the theory and practice of philosophy itself.
Project Lead: John Marenbon