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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So there's a lot still to do here.
And it has to be said that um that this section of the book on the later Eastern tradition is the least
well grounded in like
thorough research by me or by anyone else, because as I say, there's thousands of books, uh, hundreds of authors, and I think probably it will take decades still for the scholarly community to really decide, you know, who are the most important figures, which are the most important books.
So um within all that there's a kind of further problem, which is that a group of scholars who have been very insistent on the value and importance of later Islamic thought have really come at it through the perspective that's given by the later Iranian tradition.
in part because that tradition still lives on in Iran today.
And here the most important thinker is Mullah Sadra, who's a figure of Saf the Safafid Iranian
period.
And Sadra
himself, um, sort of describes himself as an heir to this illuminationist tradition you mentioned, also to Avicenna and to Sufism.
So he's a kind of syncretic thinker who brings together these different
kind of strands of the Islamic intellectual heritage.
So just to explain briefly what Illuminationism is, um, the the word here in Arabic is Ishraki.
So uh this is a kind of word that was brought in by a figure named Sukhravarji, another yet another philosopher of the twelfth century, who's a post Avicenna philosopher who is reacting to Avicenna critically, but also taking over a lot of his ideas.
So you could actually think of Illumination.
as a kind of twist on Avicennan philosophy, which is very critical of Avicenna in some respects.
And um
If you read some of the scholarship from previous the past few decades, that is more open to the idea that later Islamic philosophy is really a thing.
then you go would often get the impression, oh well what happens is that after the twelfth century, everything is Sufism andor Illuminationism, because Surawadi has mystical elements in his own thought, and then you have people like Sadhra later on who are fusing Sufism with Avicenna and Surawadi.
But actually, um, even that is a kind of misleading way of presenting it, because it's not like all the philosophers and all the philosophically minded theologians in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries are followers of Sutravardi.
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