O ye Gentlemen explores two vital strands in Arabic culture: the Greek tradition in science and philosophy and the literary tradition. They are permanent and, though drawing on Islam as a dominant religion, they are by no means dependent on it. That the strands freely interweave within the broader scope of Schrifttum is shown by more than thirty essays on subjects as varied as the social organisation of bees, spontaneous generation in the Shiʿite tradition, astronomy in the Arabian nights, the benefits of sex, precious stones in a literary text, the virtue of women in...

Relational inferences are a well-known problem for Aristotelian logic. This book charts the development of thinking about this anomaly, from the beginnings of the Arabic logical tradition in the tenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Based in large part on hitherto unstudied manuscripts and rare books, the study shows that the problem of relational inferences was vigorously debated in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottoman logicians (writing in Arabic) came to recognize relational inferences as a distinct...

Muslim philosophical activities on the cusp of the Safavid era (i.e., late 9th/15th and early 10th/16th centuries) have so far escaped the attention of modern scholars. In Iran, the city of Shiraz was the principal center of philosophy at this time, and it was here that Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī (d. after 933/1526), whose life and works are the subject of this book, spent his formative years. An accomplished Shīʿī scholars, Nayrīzī engaged with Avicennan as well as Suhrawardian philosophy in his works. Beside Nayrīzī, the...

The importance of Zaydī sources for historical research on Muʿtazilī theology is generally acknowledged since the spectacular discoveries of unique manuscripts in Yemen in the 1950s. Yet the knowledge transfer and adoption of Muʿtazilī thought by the Yemeni Zaydiyya still remain an understudied field. Al-Ḥasan ar-Raṣṣāṣ (d. 1188) was one of the main promoters of Muʿtazilism in 6th/12th century Yemen. His works mainly focus on natural philosophy and include a systematic treatise on causality which is comprehensively examined and...

This volume provides twelve essays on various aspects of Avicenna's philosophical and scientific contributions, approaching these topics from philological, historical and philosohical methodologies. The work is conceptually divided into four sections: (1) methodology, (2) natural philosophy and the exact sciences, (3) theology and metaphysics and (4) Avicenna's heritage. The First section provides considerations for distinguishing genuine from pseudo Avicennan works. The second section deals with topics encountered in Avicenna's physics, psychology, mathematics and medical theories. The third...

Comparing Avicenna's and Thomas Aquinas' positions regarding human knowledge, this volumes talks about God and the nature of the creative action and the beginning of the universe. The overall argument of the book is that their conception of theological language plays an important role in shaping their positions concerning the creation of the universe. In the first part, their conception of the theological language and divine formal features are explored and how their positions regarding theological language differ from each other is discussed. The second part includes a comparison of their...

This volume examines the process through which a historical character named al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī was transformed into a myth by several groups in medieval Islam. Al-Ḥasan lived in the city of Basra, southern Iraq, and was famed for his piety, which attracted to him a large number of disciples who went on to play important roles in the formation of several religious trends. The literary corpus (sayings, stories and letters) ascribed to him has been used as a window into early Islamic religious and intellectual thought. But as this study shows, this corpus was largely forged...

This study--the first monograph devoted exclusively to al-Fārābī's cosmology--provides a new interpretation of this thinker's philosophical development through an analysis of the Greek and Arabic sources and a contextualization of his life and thought in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time. It discusses key cosmological and metaphysical concepts articulated in his works, with a special focus on celestial causation, intellection, and motion. This book also examines al-Fārābī's cosmological method and particularly the connection between astronomy,...

Although the philosopher ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī (1162 -1231) received an extensive education in the thought of Avicenna, he still journeyed long in search of true philosophy. It was in Cairo that he finally discovered a model of philosophical metaphysics rooted in Greek thought as set out in Kindian and Farabian writings. This volume is devoted to the study of Aristotle's Metaphysics and other Greek metaphysical writing gathered together by this Muslim philosopher to form a 'Metaphysical Science' in his Book of the Science of Metaphysics...

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is...