Books & Reviews of my Books by Mohammad Azadpur
Routledge, 2020
This work engages in a constructive, yet subtle, dialogue with the nuanced accounts of sensory in... more This work engages in a constructive, yet subtle, dialogue with the nuanced accounts of sensory intentionality and empirical knowledge offered by the Islamic philosopher Avicenna.
This discourse has two main objectives: (1) providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s epistemology that avoids reading him as a precursor to British empiricists or as a full-fledged emanatist and (2) bringing light to the importance of Avicenna’s account of experience to relevant contemporary Anglo-American discussions in epistemology and metaphysics. These two objectives are interconnected. Anglo-American philosophy provides the framework for a novel reading of Avicenna on knowledge and reality, and the latter, in turn, contributes to adjusting some aspects of the former.
Advancing the Avicennian perspective on contemporary analytic discourse, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in comparative and analytic epistemology and metaphysics as well as Islamic philosophy.
SUNY Press, 2011
"PRÉCIS OF *REASON UNBOUND: ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICE IN ISLAMIC PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHY,* in *Compar... more "PRÉCIS OF *REASON UNBOUND: ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICE IN ISLAMIC PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHY,* in *Comparative Philosophy* 3.2, 2012. <http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/158/135>
This work is a critique of the modern receptions of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy and a justification of the importance of Islamic Peripateticism for modern philosophy. Islamic Peripatetics are represented by Abū Nasr Muhammad al-Fārābi (Alfarabi) as the primary architect of this philosophical project and Abū ‘Alī Hussain Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), as the one in whose work the project came to fruition. These Peripatetics are in alliance with their Greek predecessors in their understanding of philosophy as a practice of spiritual exercises. However, they differ from the Greeks in the importance assigned to prophecy. The Islamic philosophical account of the cultivation of the soul to the point of prophecy unfolds new vistas of intellectual and imaginative experience and allows the philosopher an exceptional dignity and freedom.
It is perhaps undisputed that certain forms of Islamic philosophy stress the connection between spiritual practice and philosophical discourse, but Islamic Peripatetics are often understood as philosophical rationalists pure and simple. In order to establish this form of Peripateticism as inextricably bound to the practice of spiritual exercises, I draw from Pierre Hadot’s insightful readings of Greek philosophy. To put it rather briefly, Hadot advances the view that, for the Greeks, philosophy – Aristotelian and otherwise – was primarily the practice of spiritual exercises aimed at the transformation of the self and the acquisition of wisdom. I accept this account, which seems to fly in the face of the modernist understanding of philosophy – past and present – as abstract rational discourse, and interpret it as privileging ethics in the thought of the ancients and assigning it a foundational role vis-à-vis the other so-called “fields” of philosophy. I then place the Islamic Peripatetics, the inheritors of the Greek philosophical tradition, within this interpretative framework. I submit that the Peripatetic philosophers are in alliance with the Greeks in their commitment to the practice of spiritual exercises for the transformation of the self and its orientation towards the things themselves.
I relate this conception of philosophy to an Aristotelian account of ethical expertise as involving a kind of knowledge, in order to overcome the modernist’s divide between mind and world. In this view, virtue involves a sensitivity to the ethical requirements imposed by the situation. But this is not a naïve realism, because the virtuous judgments, as the active exercises of our relevant concepts, are answerable to a world that is experienced by means of a passive operation of those concepts. This refined realism contains important consequences for modern ethical theory as well as the crisis-ridden foundationalist epistemology (and its opponents who deny the rational bearing of the world on the mind). In this relation, I explore Heidegger phenomenology – through the readings of Islamic philosophy set forth by his disciple, Henry Corbin – for a pertinent account (inspired by Aristotle) of the mind that is always already in unmediated contact with things in the world, but requires the practice of philosophy to scour the obfuscations clouding its awareness. I argue that a more refined version of Heidegger’s view is available in the texts of the Islamic Peripatetics.
In their concern with philosophy as the practice of spiritual exercises and a metaphysics that does not eschew access to things themselves, Islamic Peripatetics draw from Greek philosophy. However, to repeat, they differ from their Greek predecessors and their modern successors in the importance they assign to the power of prophecy. This is how they bring the Greek philosophical tradition into contact with the Islamic tradition. Prophecy bridges the divide between the human and the divine, the rational and the super-rational; it is what Muhsin Mahdi refers to as the unity of the rational and the poetic and the imaginative. Prophecy has legal, ethical, intellectual, and imaginative dimensions, and the treatment of each of these dimensions enriches the philosophical tradition inherited by these thinkers.
Islamic Peripatetics give a psychological account of the various dimensions of prophecy, drawing on the Peripatetic accounts of the faculties of practical and theoretical intellect, and the imagination. In this work, I discuss each dimension of prophecy in relation to the relevant psychological faculties and the notion of philosophy as fundamentally transformative. In this connection, I bring out a heretofore unappreciated aspect of the Peripatetic account of prophecy which is a philosophical appropriation of the Islamic art of interpreting (ta’wīl) the figurative dimension of the Qur’an. Beginning with Avicenna, a significant moment in the Peripatetic cultivation of the soul involves the use of sacred poetry and philosophical symbolism. In my analysis, I relate this aspect of Islamic Peripateticism to the modern European philosophical exploration of the faculty of the imagination and the analytic of the concept of the sublime. I maintain that Islamic philosophers, following Avicenna, develop a transformative way of engaging the sublime that bypasses the Kantian paradox (imagining the unimaginable) without historicizing the sublime (pace Hegel). For the Islamic Peripatetics, the hermeneutical engagement of the sublime liberates the interpreter from the grip of the mundane and, in refining her feelings of pleasure and awe, culminates in an experience of the unconditional good.
Comparative Philosophy, 2012
Papers & Book Reviews by Mohammad Azadpur
Comparative Philosophy, 2023
In the perusal of contemporary philosophical literature, one rarely comes upon a work that engage... more In the perusal of contemporary philosophical literature, one rarely comes upon a work that engages in an analytic penetration of a philosophical topic with such erudition and cosmopolitanism. Faruque's study draws on primary philosophical work from English, German, French, ancient Greek, Persian, Arabic, Urdu sources and then supplements them with the latest and most cutting-edge scientific and historical studies; this is all done in an elegant and inclusive manner. Indeed, this study is not only a comprehensive philosophical treatment of selfhood, but it is also a blueprint for an exemplary philosophical analysis which is not cramped by scholarly parochialism endemic to the run-of-the-mill academic essays. After arguing why the self is not a modern invention, Faruque develops his theory of the "spectrum model" by a complex philosophico-philological argument, taking full account of the various terminologies such as nafs, rūḥ, dhāt, khud, etc., which are used to express the self in Islamic thought. In the process, he also notes astutely how the term has been misconstrued in various modern disciplines such as anthropology, religious studies, and neuroscience.
Sophia Perennis (Jāvīdān Khirad), 2020
John McDowell and Richard Rorty draw on Kant’s influential account of experience. For Rorty, Kant... more John McDowell and Richard Rorty draw on Kant’s influential account of experience. For Rorty, Kant is the antagonist who succumbs to foundationalism or what Sellars calls the Myth of the Given and Wittgenstein is the hero who helps in overcoming the siren call of the Myth. McDowell, however, is ambivalent toward Kant. With Sellars, he applauds Kant as the hero who helped us vanquish the Myth of the Given. But he argues that Kant failed to recognize the full strength of his account of experience and capitulated to a subjective idealism. Wittgenstein, for McDowell, is the hero who helps us achieve an account of experience that gets to the things themselves. I adjudicate the philosophical and the exegetical tensions between Rorty and McDowell and support the latter’s approach to experience and to the reading of Kant and Wittgenstein.
http://www.javidankherad.ir/article_119448.html?lang=en
Religious Inquiries, 2015
This is a short essay which I originally delivered at the 4th International Conference for the Ph... more This is a short essay which I originally delivered at the 4th International Conference for the Philosophy of Religion, Iranian Association for Philosophy of Religion, January 26, 2016. It requires a lot more work, but I posted it anyway because I thought it might still be of some value to my readers.
Abstract: The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of the mental by tracing it to linguistic intentionality. So in order to avoid the problematic claim that a physical phenomenon can in virtue of its own physical structure mean exactly one thing, they adopt a form of holism. Nevertheless, contemporary philosophers are attracted to a naturalist story about the emergence of the logical space. In this work, I am interested in the naturalism and the holism advocated by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by the Pittsburgh school. It is not only a view that I find theoretically attractive but I also admire it for its fecund engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, as I will argue, Abū Nas̩ r Muḥammad al-Fārābī (Alfarabi).
Journal of Islamic Studies, 2018
Review of Ghamari-Tabrizi's book on Foucault's writings on the Iranian revolution.
The Maghreb Review, 2015
This article examines medieval Abrahamic theories of prophecy in the light of the new approach to... more This article examines medieval Abrahamic theories of prophecy in the light of the new approach to ancient philosophy championed by Pierre Hadot. Hadot contended that ancient philosophy was a way of life, and I argue that it continued to be so in the medieval Jewish and Islamic forms of Peripateticism. The latter contributed to the diversification of philosophical ways of life (advocated by the ancients) by adapting philosophy and Abrahamic prophecy. I also argue that the later European Peripatetics, led by Thomas Aquinas, destabilize their predecessors’ hard-won adaptation of philosophy and religion and contribute to the shaping of modern philosophy as an academic enterprise (along with the associated marginalization of philosophy as a way of life).
Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions, 2009
Admittedly, I accepted the invitation to join the Scriptural Reasoning and Research Group (S... more Admittedly, I accepted the invitation to join the Scriptural Reasoning and Research Group (SRR) primarily for a selfish reason: This was a great opportunity to get educated in the principal texts of the Abrahamic religions and to deepen my understanding of their relevance for the philosophical tradition.
What was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this project, an aspect not immediately transparent in the essays in this volume} is the excitement and the insight that scholars and practitioners of Abrahamic religions brought to each other's traditions. In our gatherings, we formed groups of scholars from (and of) different religions and discussed for hours each other's scriptures and medieval commentaries. In the end} we wrote on our own traditions} but this writing is founded on an interfaith dialogue that can be gleaned by the discerning reader from the various essays in this volume.
My essay is, therefore, educated by my interactions and conversations with the members of the Scriptural Reasoning and Research Group. My focus has been on the significance of results in philosophical ethics for the interpretation of the Qur'an in light of Medieval Islamic philosophical commentaries and strategies of understanding, and I hope the reader is patient with the sometimes awkward alignment of these various discourses. The thread that binds them together is the thought that the interpretation of scripture is an exegesis of the soul, a self-constitution and orientation by means of divine inspiration.
The Classical Bulletin, 2007
I begin this essay with a consideration of G.W.F. Hegel's claim that Zoroastrian spirituality is ... more I begin this essay with a consideration of G.W.F. Hegel's claim that Zoroastrian spirituality is pantheistic. Hegel justifies this claim by attributing to Zoroastrianism the view that light is both divine and natural. I defend Zoroastrian Persian thought against the charge of pantheism by introducing a phenomenological analysis regarding the divinity of light that has its beginnings in Abū ‘Alī Hussain ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) but gets developed by other Persian Muslim thinkers, notably Abū Hāmid Muhammad Ghazzālī (Ghazali). I then show that this analysis is compatible with the descriptions of the divine rank of light in Zoroastrianism.
Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on …, Jan 1, 2006
New Nietzsche Studies, 1999
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Books & Reviews of my Books by Mohammad Azadpur
This discourse has two main objectives: (1) providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s epistemology that avoids reading him as a precursor to British empiricists or as a full-fledged emanatist and (2) bringing light to the importance of Avicenna’s account of experience to relevant contemporary Anglo-American discussions in epistemology and metaphysics. These two objectives are interconnected. Anglo-American philosophy provides the framework for a novel reading of Avicenna on knowledge and reality, and the latter, in turn, contributes to adjusting some aspects of the former.
Advancing the Avicennian perspective on contemporary analytic discourse, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in comparative and analytic epistemology and metaphysics as well as Islamic philosophy.
This work is a critique of the modern receptions of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy and a justification of the importance of Islamic Peripateticism for modern philosophy. Islamic Peripatetics are represented by Abū Nasr Muhammad al-Fārābi (Alfarabi) as the primary architect of this philosophical project and Abū ‘Alī Hussain Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), as the one in whose work the project came to fruition. These Peripatetics are in alliance with their Greek predecessors in their understanding of philosophy as a practice of spiritual exercises. However, they differ from the Greeks in the importance assigned to prophecy. The Islamic philosophical account of the cultivation of the soul to the point of prophecy unfolds new vistas of intellectual and imaginative experience and allows the philosopher an exceptional dignity and freedom.
It is perhaps undisputed that certain forms of Islamic philosophy stress the connection between spiritual practice and philosophical discourse, but Islamic Peripatetics are often understood as philosophical rationalists pure and simple. In order to establish this form of Peripateticism as inextricably bound to the practice of spiritual exercises, I draw from Pierre Hadot’s insightful readings of Greek philosophy. To put it rather briefly, Hadot advances the view that, for the Greeks, philosophy – Aristotelian and otherwise – was primarily the practice of spiritual exercises aimed at the transformation of the self and the acquisition of wisdom. I accept this account, which seems to fly in the face of the modernist understanding of philosophy – past and present – as abstract rational discourse, and interpret it as privileging ethics in the thought of the ancients and assigning it a foundational role vis-à-vis the other so-called “fields” of philosophy. I then place the Islamic Peripatetics, the inheritors of the Greek philosophical tradition, within this interpretative framework. I submit that the Peripatetic philosophers are in alliance with the Greeks in their commitment to the practice of spiritual exercises for the transformation of the self and its orientation towards the things themselves.
I relate this conception of philosophy to an Aristotelian account of ethical expertise as involving a kind of knowledge, in order to overcome the modernist’s divide between mind and world. In this view, virtue involves a sensitivity to the ethical requirements imposed by the situation. But this is not a naïve realism, because the virtuous judgments, as the active exercises of our relevant concepts, are answerable to a world that is experienced by means of a passive operation of those concepts. This refined realism contains important consequences for modern ethical theory as well as the crisis-ridden foundationalist epistemology (and its opponents who deny the rational bearing of the world on the mind). In this relation, I explore Heidegger phenomenology – through the readings of Islamic philosophy set forth by his disciple, Henry Corbin – for a pertinent account (inspired by Aristotle) of the mind that is always already in unmediated contact with things in the world, but requires the practice of philosophy to scour the obfuscations clouding its awareness. I argue that a more refined version of Heidegger’s view is available in the texts of the Islamic Peripatetics.
In their concern with philosophy as the practice of spiritual exercises and a metaphysics that does not eschew access to things themselves, Islamic Peripatetics draw from Greek philosophy. However, to repeat, they differ from their Greek predecessors and their modern successors in the importance they assign to the power of prophecy. This is how they bring the Greek philosophical tradition into contact with the Islamic tradition. Prophecy bridges the divide between the human and the divine, the rational and the super-rational; it is what Muhsin Mahdi refers to as the unity of the rational and the poetic and the imaginative. Prophecy has legal, ethical, intellectual, and imaginative dimensions, and the treatment of each of these dimensions enriches the philosophical tradition inherited by these thinkers.
Islamic Peripatetics give a psychological account of the various dimensions of prophecy, drawing on the Peripatetic accounts of the faculties of practical and theoretical intellect, and the imagination. In this work, I discuss each dimension of prophecy in relation to the relevant psychological faculties and the notion of philosophy as fundamentally transformative. In this connection, I bring out a heretofore unappreciated aspect of the Peripatetic account of prophecy which is a philosophical appropriation of the Islamic art of interpreting (ta’wīl) the figurative dimension of the Qur’an. Beginning with Avicenna, a significant moment in the Peripatetic cultivation of the soul involves the use of sacred poetry and philosophical symbolism. In my analysis, I relate this aspect of Islamic Peripateticism to the modern European philosophical exploration of the faculty of the imagination and the analytic of the concept of the sublime. I maintain that Islamic philosophers, following Avicenna, develop a transformative way of engaging the sublime that bypasses the Kantian paradox (imagining the unimaginable) without historicizing the sublime (pace Hegel). For the Islamic Peripatetics, the hermeneutical engagement of the sublime liberates the interpreter from the grip of the mundane and, in refining her feelings of pleasure and awe, culminates in an experience of the unconditional good.
(2.1) PRECIS OF REASON UNBOUND
Mohammad Azadpur
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/158/135>
(2.2) SOME THOUGHTS ON TRANSCENDENCE AND THE "VETULA"
Therese Scarpelli Cory
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/159/136>
(2.3) SPIRITUALITY IN THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS OF ISLAM
Nader El-Bizri
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/160/137>
(2.4) SOME THOUGHTS ON IDENTITY OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
Bo Mou
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/161/138>
(2.5) THOUGHT-SPACES, SPIRITUAL PRACTICES AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF TA'WIL
Sarah Pessin
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/162/139>
(2.6) REPLIES TO CORY, EL-BIZRI, MOU AND PESSIN
Mohammad Azadpur
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/163/140>
Papers & Book Reviews by Mohammad Azadpur
http://www.javidankherad.ir/article_119448.html?lang=en
Abstract: The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of the mental by tracing it to linguistic intentionality. So in order to avoid the problematic claim that a physical phenomenon can in virtue of its own physical structure mean exactly one thing, they adopt a form of holism. Nevertheless, contemporary philosophers are attracted to a naturalist story about the emergence of the logical space. In this work, I am interested in the naturalism and the holism advocated by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by the Pittsburgh school. It is not only a view that I find theoretically attractive but I also admire it for its fecund engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, as I will argue, Abū Nas̩ r Muḥammad al-Fārābī (Alfarabi).
What was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this project, an aspect not immediately transparent in the essays in this volume} is the excitement and the insight that scholars and practitioners of Abrahamic religions brought to each other's traditions. In our gatherings, we formed groups of scholars from (and of) different religions and discussed for hours each other's scriptures and medieval commentaries. In the end} we wrote on our own traditions} but this writing is founded on an interfaith dialogue that can be gleaned by the discerning reader from the various essays in this volume.
My essay is, therefore, educated by my interactions and conversations with the members of the Scriptural Reasoning and Research Group. My focus has been on the significance of results in philosophical ethics for the interpretation of the Qur'an in light of Medieval Islamic philosophical commentaries and strategies of understanding, and I hope the reader is patient with the sometimes awkward alignment of these various discourses. The thread that binds them together is the thought that the interpretation of scripture is an exegesis of the soul, a self-constitution and orientation by means of divine inspiration.
This discourse has two main objectives: (1) providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s epistemology that avoids reading him as a precursor to British empiricists or as a full-fledged emanatist and (2) bringing light to the importance of Avicenna’s account of experience to relevant contemporary Anglo-American discussions in epistemology and metaphysics. These two objectives are interconnected. Anglo-American philosophy provides the framework for a novel reading of Avicenna on knowledge and reality, and the latter, in turn, contributes to adjusting some aspects of the former.
Advancing the Avicennian perspective on contemporary analytic discourse, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in comparative and analytic epistemology and metaphysics as well as Islamic philosophy.
This work is a critique of the modern receptions of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy and a justification of the importance of Islamic Peripateticism for modern philosophy. Islamic Peripatetics are represented by Abū Nasr Muhammad al-Fārābi (Alfarabi) as the primary architect of this philosophical project and Abū ‘Alī Hussain Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), as the one in whose work the project came to fruition. These Peripatetics are in alliance with their Greek predecessors in their understanding of philosophy as a practice of spiritual exercises. However, they differ from the Greeks in the importance assigned to prophecy. The Islamic philosophical account of the cultivation of the soul to the point of prophecy unfolds new vistas of intellectual and imaginative experience and allows the philosopher an exceptional dignity and freedom.
It is perhaps undisputed that certain forms of Islamic philosophy stress the connection between spiritual practice and philosophical discourse, but Islamic Peripatetics are often understood as philosophical rationalists pure and simple. In order to establish this form of Peripateticism as inextricably bound to the practice of spiritual exercises, I draw from Pierre Hadot’s insightful readings of Greek philosophy. To put it rather briefly, Hadot advances the view that, for the Greeks, philosophy – Aristotelian and otherwise – was primarily the practice of spiritual exercises aimed at the transformation of the self and the acquisition of wisdom. I accept this account, which seems to fly in the face of the modernist understanding of philosophy – past and present – as abstract rational discourse, and interpret it as privileging ethics in the thought of the ancients and assigning it a foundational role vis-à-vis the other so-called “fields” of philosophy. I then place the Islamic Peripatetics, the inheritors of the Greek philosophical tradition, within this interpretative framework. I submit that the Peripatetic philosophers are in alliance with the Greeks in their commitment to the practice of spiritual exercises for the transformation of the self and its orientation towards the things themselves.
I relate this conception of philosophy to an Aristotelian account of ethical expertise as involving a kind of knowledge, in order to overcome the modernist’s divide between mind and world. In this view, virtue involves a sensitivity to the ethical requirements imposed by the situation. But this is not a naïve realism, because the virtuous judgments, as the active exercises of our relevant concepts, are answerable to a world that is experienced by means of a passive operation of those concepts. This refined realism contains important consequences for modern ethical theory as well as the crisis-ridden foundationalist epistemology (and its opponents who deny the rational bearing of the world on the mind). In this relation, I explore Heidegger phenomenology – through the readings of Islamic philosophy set forth by his disciple, Henry Corbin – for a pertinent account (inspired by Aristotle) of the mind that is always already in unmediated contact with things in the world, but requires the practice of philosophy to scour the obfuscations clouding its awareness. I argue that a more refined version of Heidegger’s view is available in the texts of the Islamic Peripatetics.
In their concern with philosophy as the practice of spiritual exercises and a metaphysics that does not eschew access to things themselves, Islamic Peripatetics draw from Greek philosophy. However, to repeat, they differ from their Greek predecessors and their modern successors in the importance they assign to the power of prophecy. This is how they bring the Greek philosophical tradition into contact with the Islamic tradition. Prophecy bridges the divide between the human and the divine, the rational and the super-rational; it is what Muhsin Mahdi refers to as the unity of the rational and the poetic and the imaginative. Prophecy has legal, ethical, intellectual, and imaginative dimensions, and the treatment of each of these dimensions enriches the philosophical tradition inherited by these thinkers.
Islamic Peripatetics give a psychological account of the various dimensions of prophecy, drawing on the Peripatetic accounts of the faculties of practical and theoretical intellect, and the imagination. In this work, I discuss each dimension of prophecy in relation to the relevant psychological faculties and the notion of philosophy as fundamentally transformative. In this connection, I bring out a heretofore unappreciated aspect of the Peripatetic account of prophecy which is a philosophical appropriation of the Islamic art of interpreting (ta’wīl) the figurative dimension of the Qur’an. Beginning with Avicenna, a significant moment in the Peripatetic cultivation of the soul involves the use of sacred poetry and philosophical symbolism. In my analysis, I relate this aspect of Islamic Peripateticism to the modern European philosophical exploration of the faculty of the imagination and the analytic of the concept of the sublime. I maintain that Islamic philosophers, following Avicenna, develop a transformative way of engaging the sublime that bypasses the Kantian paradox (imagining the unimaginable) without historicizing the sublime (pace Hegel). For the Islamic Peripatetics, the hermeneutical engagement of the sublime liberates the interpreter from the grip of the mundane and, in refining her feelings of pleasure and awe, culminates in an experience of the unconditional good.
(2.1) PRECIS OF REASON UNBOUND
Mohammad Azadpur
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/158/135>
(2.2) SOME THOUGHTS ON TRANSCENDENCE AND THE "VETULA"
Therese Scarpelli Cory
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/159/136>
(2.3) SPIRITUALITY IN THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS OF ISLAM
Nader El-Bizri
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/160/137>
(2.4) SOME THOUGHTS ON IDENTITY OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
Bo Mou
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/161/138>
(2.5) THOUGHT-SPACES, SPIRITUAL PRACTICES AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF TA'WIL
Sarah Pessin
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/162/139>
(2.6) REPLIES TO CORY, EL-BIZRI, MOU AND PESSIN
Mohammad Azadpur
<http://www.comparativephilosophy.org/index.php/ComparativePhilosophy/article/view/163/140>
http://www.javidankherad.ir/article_119448.html?lang=en
Abstract: The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of the mental by tracing it to linguistic intentionality. So in order to avoid the problematic claim that a physical phenomenon can in virtue of its own physical structure mean exactly one thing, they adopt a form of holism. Nevertheless, contemporary philosophers are attracted to a naturalist story about the emergence of the logical space. In this work, I am interested in the naturalism and the holism advocated by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by the Pittsburgh school. It is not only a view that I find theoretically attractive but I also admire it for its fecund engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, as I will argue, Abū Nas̩ r Muḥammad al-Fārābī (Alfarabi).
What was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this project, an aspect not immediately transparent in the essays in this volume} is the excitement and the insight that scholars and practitioners of Abrahamic religions brought to each other's traditions. In our gatherings, we formed groups of scholars from (and of) different religions and discussed for hours each other's scriptures and medieval commentaries. In the end} we wrote on our own traditions} but this writing is founded on an interfaith dialogue that can be gleaned by the discerning reader from the various essays in this volume.
My essay is, therefore, educated by my interactions and conversations with the members of the Scriptural Reasoning and Research Group. My focus has been on the significance of results in philosophical ethics for the interpretation of the Qur'an in light of Medieval Islamic philosophical commentaries and strategies of understanding, and I hope the reader is patient with the sometimes awkward alignment of these various discourses. The thread that binds them together is the thought that the interpretation of scripture is an exegesis of the soul, a self-constitution and orientation by means of divine inspiration.