Peter Adamson
speaker
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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But as we've already said, actually that role is played by Avicenna, who's very, very much not a Sufi mystic.
Where he's I mean, he has a few things to say about Sufism, but clearly
He's not a Sufi.
Um, and actually
A better way of thinking about it is that there is a sort of strand within later Eastern Islamic thought, which is philosophical Sufism, where they combine ideas from Avicenna with ideas from Ibn Adi, but that's only one strand.
So on the one hand that's a another manifestation of Avicenna's influence, and on the other hand it's not like the only game in town in later centuries.
Sure.
Okay.
Well, just to touch first on this question of whether there's a decline.
Um, I think uh here we really need to think about um what we expect from this tradition in terms of philosophy.
So as we've already said, the idea that people are going to do philosophy as commentary on Aristotle and
deep engagement with Greek ideas generally, it's true that that declines after the twelfth century, right?
But not because philosophy is gone, it's because philosophy has changed its character by becoming Avicenin.
And there are proponents of Avicenna, there are critics of Avicenna.
The critics of Avicenna attack him from a wide variety of angles.
So sometimes he's attacked from on Sufi grounds.
On sometimes he's attacked, but uh on the grounds of calam positions.
And so you get a very complicated situation, but Avicenna tends to be in the middle of all of that.
And just in terms of quantity, I mean, uh there there are literally hundreds of philosophers or philosophical theologians in these later centuries.
There are thousands of works, many of which um are not edited yet, never mind studied in European languages.
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