This research stream interrogates the widely accepted narrative that Islam is to 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.
This research project traces the influence of the reception of Greek philosophy, “falsafa” on Islamic scholars in a number of places in and around Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Arab lands, examining the exchanges of ideas between Islamic, Jewish and Christian scholars. This interchange of ideas continued even with the collapse of “Christian” Aristotelianism, and with the emergence of the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
Even though some of this history has been well documented in modern scholarship, it remains the case that the discussion is obscured or falls into the background in the more pressing concerns of interreligious dialogue, and not always so focused on intellectual histories. Some of the most intriguing possibilities of this research have never fully been explored, as for instance, when Roger Arnaldez notes the inherently voluntaristic tendency of the Qur’an (1977), but does not connect this with the peculiar and seemingly quite spontaneous emergence of an extreme voluntarist (and rational) conception of God in Christian metaphysics from the twelfth century onwards (with apparently few antecedents, and unknown to the Christianity of the East and Orient). There is much still unexplored in the consequences of the “condemnations” of “Latin Averroism” in 1270 and 1277 at Paris, and which had so profound an effect on the centrality of the concept of the will in Cartesian metaphysics and Kant’s (and later) postulation(s) of philosophical freedom.
This project seeks to enquire into the intellectual history and development of the Arab, Iraqi, Syriac and Iberian schools (often referred to more generally as the Islamicate, in which many Jewish and Christian thinkers could be found), and through them the different strands in Islam itself. We also want to understand better the impact these developments had on the development of Christianity – complicating and enlarging the more commonplace thesis that focuses on what Islam owes to Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps challenging the tacit assumption that the development was all in one direction).
The website for the Falsafa Project can be found here.
Project Lead: Nader El-Bizri