Peter Adamson

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452 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2019 last heard Dec 2019

Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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New Books in Philosophy · Peter Adamson, "Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 3" (Oxford UP, 2019) · 16 Dec 2019 podcast

And so the European idea that philosophy in the Islamic world ended around

is actually a self-inflicted delusion caused by the timing of their own translation movement.

Which is something hardly anybody understands, actually.

So I'm hoping to get that across in the book.

Sure.

Uh well, so maybe uh the first thing to say is kind of background for this is that there's another way in which my book is trying to broaden the scope of um what we think of as relevant for this story, because so far we've been talking mostly about Aristotelian philosophers like Avicenna, Veroes, Kendi, and so on.

Uh so people who are directly engaged with Greek texts, but I make a big deal in the book about the fact that um Islamic theology, kalam, can be thought of as a philosophical tradition in its own right, or at least some aspects of it are very philosophical, and you have to cover them in a history of philosophy in the Islamic world, not only because they provide interesting context for the uncontroversial

philos cases of philosophers like Avicenna, but also because they're philosophically interesting.

So for example, you have debates about free will or divine attributes or atomism or causation in Kalam.

that are very different from what you find among these philosophs, these uh Hellenizing philosophers.

And the reason I mention this now in answer to your question is that that is really a context for understanding Jewish philosophy.

So Jewish philosophy

Um in Arabic.

And also Judeo Arabic, so Arabic written in Hebrew letters and then later in Hebrew.

Um that those texts respond to both Aristotelian philosophy and calam, Islamic theology.

And one of the two figures you just mentioned, Sa'idiagan, is a perfect example.

So he's a pretty early figure.

He's in the formative period.

He's like roughly around the same time as Al Farabi, for example.

So we're talking here about like the third or fourth generation of people to do philosophy af uh during and after the translation movement.

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