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

So this is uh they're both really good examples, Saadia and Maimonides, of the point I made at the beginning, which is that you you kind of need to locate Jewish philosophy within the context of the Islamic culture, which are

Of course, is the dominant political and social culture within which they operate.

Okay, well Ibn Arabi is an under the scene thinker, so I cover him in the Under the Scene part of the book.

He's roughly contemporary with the Veroese.

In fact, he they supposedly met, but he's not an Aristotelian commentator, to put it mildly.

He's uh Sufi, and he doesn't invent Sufism.

So there are earlier Sufis like Rabi al-Adawiyah or Al-Halaj, but he's probably the first or the the the most striking case of.

someone using a lot of philosophical theories in order to expound Sufism.

And obviously there's a lot you can say about this Ibn Arabi's work is extremely vast, but maybe the most um interesting thing to say about it is that he uh is very interested in that question that I was just talking about um in the context of Sadia, namely

Um, how do we understand God as a pure unity?

And how do we understand the various ways that God is described in Revelation or the words we use about God?

So uh uh for example, it says in the Quran both that God is wise and knowing, and that he's powerful.

So that sounds kind of uncontentious fr from an either Jewish or Muslim point of view, but now you could think about, well, if God is supposed to be a a purely simple unity, then

Are we don't we have three things here?

So we have God and his wisdom and his power?

are his wisdom and power somehow the same thing as each other?

But then how can wisdom be the same thing as power?

That doesn't make any sense.

Um are they both the same thing as God?

That seems kind of strange.

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