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 he uses Aristotelian um ideas.

So for example, he talks about ideas from Ar Aristotle's logic, but actually he's more influenced by a school of Islamic theology called Wat Tazalism.

And we probably don't have time to get into all the details, but for example, he has a very kind of um restrictive view about divine attributes where he wants to emphasize God's transcendence and simplicity over the reality of multiple attributes.

He follows the Mohatazila when it comes to the teaching on human free will and so on.

So with him, you have a kind of combination of ideas from Kalam and ideal ideas from Aristotelian philosophy, such as you also find in a lot of Muslim thinkers, but uh maybe surprisingly the dominant influence there is actually from the Islamic theological tradition, not the philosophical tradition that comes through the translation movement.

And then of course he's also drawing on a lot of Jewish

Um ideas.

Here um it's relevant to m point to the contrast you um mentioned briefly, which is between Qaraite and rabbinical Judaism.

So basically the difference there is that Qaraite Jews don't uh accept the validity of the oral rabbinical tradition that culminates in the Mishnah and Talmuds.

Um and rabbinical Jews do.

So Sadia Gaon and then Maimonides, who you also mentioned, they're great champions of rabbinic Jud Judaism.

And it's interesting to notice that even though Sa'adia and Maimonides are in some respects comparable figures, so they're both trying to kind of use philosophical and theological ideas which are to some extent are borrowed from the Islamic wider cultural context in order to help Jews understand their own religion better.

the center of gravity is very different.

So with Sa'adia, it's much more uh a case of influence from Kalam, whereas in Maimonides is much more a case of influence from Aristotle.

And that's why I said earlier that to understand Maimonides, you have to understand the project of someone like Al-Farabi, who is like a hardcore Muslim Aristotelian.

So if you understand that that was like an available intellectual project that Maimonides would have known about, then you can kind of see what he's doing.

So what he's doing is trying to show you how Aristotelian philosophy relates to Judaism.

And he's trying to read the Torah in line with certain philosophical strictures.

Um, but he's also aware of Islamic kalam, so Islamic theology, and he refers to that as well.

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