In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Explaining Away the Greek Gods in IslamJohn WalbridgeOf the angels newly fallen from heaven, Milton tells us:Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names...Men took... Devils to adore for Deities: Then were they known to men by various Names, And various Idols through the Heathen World.Among the devils worshipped as gods among the ancients were the Olympians:Th’ Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held Gods, (...) yet confest later then Heav’n and Earth Thir boasted parents; Titan Heavn’s first born With his enormous brood, and birthright seis’d By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove His own and Rhea’s Son like measure found; So Jove usurping reign’d: these first in Creet And Ida known, thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus rul’d the middle Air Thir highest Heav’n; or on the Delphian Cliff, Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds Of Doric Land....Paradise Lost, I: 364–65, 372–75, 508–19 [End Page 389]Milton’s assertion that the Greek gods were demons goes back to the centuries in which those ancient gods slowly yielded to the new and jealous triune God of the Christians. Augustine in The City of God does not deny the reality of the old gods but identifies them as dead heroes or as demons. The power of the old gods was still manifest to the Christians of antiquity; it was their moral worth, not their existence, that was to be challenged.Such an interpretation is not found in Muslim accounts of the Greek gods. For all practical purposes Greek polytheism was entirely dead by the time Islam came onto the scene. Indeed, even Arabian polytheism, though still vigorous when Muhammad began his prophetic career, died out within three decades of the proclamation of Islam. Pious Muslims might be offended by the icons in Christian churches, but the temples of the Greek gods were gone these three centuries or more, their statues broken up and their stones stolen to build churches. The other forms of polytheism with which Islam came into contact—Zoroastrianism (the most important), Buddhism, Hinduism, and gnostic religions like Manichaeism and Harranian Sabianism—could rightly be understood as forms of monotheism (or dualism). Only the occasional idol temple in some out-of-the-way place—the shrine of the god Zun or Zur in Zamindawar in Afghanistan, 1 for example—might illustrate pure idol worship, but such institutions were soon destroyed and posed little intellectual challenge. Thus, by the time highly intellectual forms of Islam came into being in the eighth and ninth centuries, there was no real idol-worshipping paganism to oppose. Despite the uncompromising monotheism of Islam, polytheism aroused little emotion for the generations of Muslims born after the passing of the Prophet’s companions. Shirk, polytheism, went on to have a rich history in Islamic thought, but it was idols of the soul, not idols carved from stone and wood, that stirred the imaginations and fears of serious Muslims.The Muslim contact with Greek polytheism was thus not with living pagans but with literary allusions in Greek philosophical and scientific texts. In late antiquity philosophy had been the last bastion of paganism, a fortress whose outworks may have been stormed perhaps but whose citadel still held out, manned by doughty and commited fighters like Proclus and Simplicius. But the fortress had at last fallen, and even the ancient philosophers had finally been brought to the baptismal font.The fact that they knew little more than the names of Greek gods was another factor preventing Muslim scholars from taking alarm at Greek polytheism. The obvious first question to ask when we examine what Muslims thought of the Greek gods is what they might have known about them. How indeed do we know about Greek religion? Mostly we know mythology from literature: Hesiod, Homer, Greek drama, and manuals of literature and rhetoric. None of [End Page 390] these sources were available to Muslims. The translators were not interested in literature, which they knew resisted translation, so even Homer appears in Arabic sources as a sage, one of a number of authors of wise sayings... (shrink)

Suhrawardi, a Twelfth-Century Muslim Neo-Stoic? JOHN WALBRIDGE EUROPEANS FIRST BECAME AWARE OF ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY through texts trans- lated into Latin in the Middle Ages, the youngest of which were the works of the Spanish philosopher Averroes, dating from the second half of the twelfth century. The latest eastern Islamic philosophical texts known to Europeans dated from almost a century earlier. Western orientalists later became familiar with the original Arabic texts of works of the major authors previously known in (...) Latin translation -- Fftrabi, Avicenna, Ghazfdi, Averroes, and others -- along with works of other Islamic philosophers of the same period. While it was known that there continued to be philosophers in the Islamic world after 12oo, it was assumed that their works reflected the general "decline" of the Islamic world and that the authors known to Europeans represented the "classical" Islamic philosophical tradition. The later tradition of Islamic phi- losophy tended to be ignored or dismissed with references to "epitomes" and "supercommentaries. ''' In fact, it can be argued that the historical reality is exactly the opposite, that it is precisely the part of the Islamic philosophical tradition not known to the I am presently working on a collection of Arabic texts relating to Stoicism, including scientific as well as philosophical material. I would.. (shrink)

Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi's life spanned the last two thirds of the seventh/thirteenth centuries. A student of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, he was involved in the revival of Peripatetic philosophy and science that occurred at Maraghah under his influence. He was significant as a transitional figure, combining Suhrawardi's Illuminative philosophy with the revived Avicennism of his teacher. His commentary on Suhrawardi's Philosophy of Illumination was the main vehicle through which this work was studied by later Iranian philosophers. He was also associated with (...) Ibn Arabi's most important student, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. ;Suhrawardi's Philosophy of Illumination contained a new "Science of Light", expressed largely in symbols, intended to provide a reformed basis for physics and metaphysics. Qutb al-Din frequently translated these views into Peripatetic terminology so as to make the relationships between the two systems clearer. Qutb al-Din's Pearly Crown is a popular account of philosophy, incorporating and elaborating much of Suhrawardi's philosophy but omitting or disguising the most controversial and esoteric aspects--especially those related to the World of Image, the Afterlife, and reincarnation. ;Qutb al-Din developed further the notion of the "World of Image." This "fourth world" served both philosophical and religious purposes. His ideas on reincarnation and the cyclical nature of time were especially distinctive and were developed beyond the views found in The Philosophy of Illumination. ;Also included in this dissertation are an annotated bibliography of Qutb al-Din's works and their known manuscripts and an edition and translation of his "Epistle Ascertaining the Reality of the World of Image" {Risalah fi Tahqiq )Alam al-Mithal}. (shrink)

This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far (...) shallower forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Provides an account of Islamic philosopher Suhrawardi’s revival of Neoplatonism.

An expert on the thought of medieval Islamic philosopher Suhrawardi argues that philosophers have romanticized this work as a revival of “oriental” wisdom.

In the late twelfth century the mystical philosopher Suhrawardi developed a metaphysics based on metaphysical light that combined the Islamic Neoplatonism of Avicenna with ideas and symbols drawn from Islamic mysticism, classical Platonism, and Iranian mythology. This book analyzes how Qutb al-Din Shirazi, an Iranian scientist and philosopher of the thirteenth century and a leading exponent of Suhrawardi's thought, understood Suhrawardi's metaphysics of light and how he applied it in his own writings. Also discussed are Shirazi's own views on such (...) subjects as the nature of existence, reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, and the spiritual universe known as the "World of Image." The book contains several appendices, including a detailed bibliography of Shirazi's writings and the text and translation of Shirazi's essay on the World of Image. (shrink)

I should, I suppose, begin by taking some personal responsibility for this controversy. When my late friend Hossein Ziai and I published our edition and translation of Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (hereafter Philosophy of Illumination), we chose “innate” as our rendering of fiṭrī. I don’t remember discussing the rendering, and we did not bother to mention it in the glossary. Hossein had used this rendering in his first book, Knowledge and Illumination, stating that “innate ideas serve as the grounds for knowledge.”1 (...) Others, however, have rendered the term and its source, fiṭra, as “nature,” “natural spirit,”2 or “innate disposition.”3So what does fiṭra mean? Al-Tahānawī, in his dictionary of Islamic technical .. (shrink)

The question of the self and person in Islamic philosophy can be considered from several different perspectives. The term “philosophy,” falsafa, in Islam refers solely to the Greek tradition of thought represented by such thinkers as al‐Fārābī, Avicen‐ na, and Averroës. Even some of those who unquestionably belong to this tradition – Suhrawardī and Mullā ṣadrā, for example – tend to avoid the term “falsafa” in favor of the Arabic synonym “ḥikma” (lit. wisdom). There are other Islamic intellectual traditions that (...) are unquestionably philosophic in one sense or another or that have important implications even for thinkers working strictly within the Graeco‐ Islamic tradition of falsafa. The most basic tradition of thought about the self and person is Quranic Islam, which sets the fundamental terms of reference for moral and religious thought about the person in the Islamic world. (The Quran is always considered by Muslims to be the word of God, not of Muhammad.) The rich tradition of Islamic legal thought about the person may be considered an extension of Quranic thought on the subject. For convenience, in the present article this tradition will be referred to as “Quranic” or “Islamic,” but it must be remembered that thinkers of other traditions in the Islamic world also considered themselves to be “Quranic” and “Islamic,” though perhaps in different senses. The second tradition that I will discuss is Graeco‐Islamic philosophy, which I will refer to as “philosophy.” This represents the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, combined in various proportions and sometimes with conspicuous elements of Neoplatonism and Neopythagoreanism. The third tradition is Sufism, Islamic mysticism, which developed important and influential ideas about the self and person. (shrink)

Shihäb al-Din al-Suhrawardi was born around 1154, probably in northwestern Iran. Spurred by a dream in which Aristotle appeared to him, he rejected the Avicennan Peripatetic philosophy of his youth and undertook the task of reviving the philosophical tradition of the "Ancients." Suhruwardi's philosophy grants an epistemological role to immediate and atemporal intuition. It is explicitly anti-Peripatetic and is identified with the pre-Aristotelian sages, particularly Plato. The subject of his _hikmat al-Ishraq_—now available for the first time in English—is the "science (...) of lights," a science that Suhrawardi first learned through mystical exercises reinforced later by logical proofs and confirmed by what he saw as the parallel experiences of the Ancients. It was completed on 15 September 1186; and at sunset that evening, in the western sky, the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets came together in a magnificent conjunction in the constellation of Libra. The stars soon turned against Suhrawardi, however, who was reluctantly put to death by the son of Saladin, the sultan of Egypt, in 1191. (shrink)

Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi... is not exactly a household name, even for those involved with the history of Islamic science or Islamic thought in general. He was born around 1270 C.E. in Nishapur, at that time a major city in northeastern Iran, and died around 1330. He was probably a Shi'ite, though not aggressively so, to judge from his writings. Like most medieval Islamic scholars, he wrote in several fields. Works of his survive on astronomy, Qur'an commentary, and rhetoric, but this (...) understates his breadth, since his works on astronomy also drew on philosophy, other branches of science, and astrology, while the Qur'an commentary tapped the whole range of religious and secular sciences. His particular fame, such as it was, was based on two of his works on astronomy that were used as textbooks and his Qur'an commentary. (shrink)

The late Professor Hossein Ziai's interests focused on the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) tradition. Dedicated to his memory, this volume deals with the post-Avicennan philosophical tradition in Iran, and in particular the Illuminationist school and later philosophers, such as those associated with the School of Isfahan, who were fundamentally influenced by it. The focus of various chapters is on translations, editions, and close expositions of rationalist works in areas such as epistemology, logic and metaphysics rather than mysticism more generally, and also on (...) specific texts rather than themes or studies of individual philosophers. The purpose of the volume is to introduce new texts into the modern canon of Islamic and Iranian philosophy. Various texts in this volume have not been previously translated nor have they been the subject of significant Western scholarship. (shrink)

Here I shall focus on Suhrawardi’s use and conception of ‘fiṭrī’, translated as ‘innate’ by Hossein Ziai (1990), Hossein Ziai and John Walbridge (Suhrawardi 1999), and Mehdi Aminrazavi (1997, 2003),1 and will try to make some points in passing regarding Cartesian innate ideas in relation to Suhrawardi’s fiṭrīāt. I will try to explain my understanding of Suhrawardi’s i‛tibārāt ‛aqliyya (beings of reason) and their relationship to fiṭrīāt. As a relevant issue, I will touch on Suhrawardi’s distinction between objective (...) and intellectual attributes. Considering Platonic forms as the godparents of Suhrawardi’s ‘innate’ ideas, I will end by justifying this question: Is Suhrawardi a Platonist?Let’s begin with Descartes. .. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

What psychological and philosophical significance should we attach to recent efforts at computer simulations of human cognitive capacities? In answering this question, I find it useful to distinguish what I will call "strong" AI from "weak" or "cautious" AI. According to weak AI, the principal value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion. (...) But according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to. (shrink)

Normative requirements are often overlooked, but they are central features of the normative world. Rationality is often thought to consist in acting for reasons, but following normative requirements is also a major part of rationality. In particular, correct reasoning – both theoretical and practical – is governed by normative requirements rather than by reasons. This article explains the nature of normative requirements, and gives examples of their importance. It also describes mistakes that philosophers have made as a result of confusing (...) normative requirements with reasons. (shrink)

This book is the one to put into the hands of those who have been over-impressed by Austin 's critics....[Warnock's] brilliant editing puts everybody who is concerned with philosophical problems in his debt.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

This study provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of the meaning of Locke's political thought. John Dunn restores Locke's ideas to their exact context, and so stresses the historical question of what Locke in the Two Treatises of Government was intending to claim. By adopting this approach, he reveals the predominantly theological character of all Locke's thinking about politics and provides a convincing analysis of the development of Locke's thought. In a polemical concluding section, John Dunn argues that liberal and (...) Marxist interpretations of Locke's politics have failed to grasp his meaning. Locke emerges as not merely a contributor to the development of English constitutional thought, or as a reflector of socio-economic change in seventeenth-century England, but as essentially a Calvinist natural theologian. (shrink)

John Hyman explores central problems in philosophy of action and the theory of knowledge, and connects these areas of enquiry in a new way. His approach to the dimensions of human action culminates in an original analysis of the relation between knowledge and rational behaviour, which provides the foundation for a new theory of knowledge itself.

This is a selection of essays on moral responsibility that represent the major components of John Martin Fischer's overall approach to freedom of the will and moral responsibility. The collection exhibits the overall structure of Fischer's view and shows how the various elements fit together to form a comprehensive framework for analyzing free will and moral responsibility. The topics include deliberation and practical reasoning, freedom of the will, freedom of action, various notions of control, and moral accountability. The essays (...) seek to provide a foundation for our practices of holding each other (and ourselves) morally and legally accountable for our behavior. A crucial move is the distinction between two kinds of control. According to Fischer, "regulative control" involves freedom to choose and do otherwise ("alternative possibilities"), whereas "guidance control" does not. Fischer contends that guidance control is all the freedom we need to be morally responsible agents. Further, he contends that such control is fully compatible with causal determinism. Additionally, Fischer argues that we do not need genuine access to alternative possibilities in order for there to be a legitimate point to practical reasoning. Fischer's overall framework contains an argument for the contention that guidance control, and not regulative control, is associated with moral responsibility, a sketch of a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility (that ties together responsibility for actions, omissions, consequences, and character), and an account of the value of moral responsibility. On this account, the value of exhibiting freedom (of the relevant sort) and thus being morally responsible for one's behavior is a species of the value of artistic self-expression. (shrink)

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare's finesse to Oscar Wilde's wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim's Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of (...) the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most important, controversial, and suggestive works of moral philosophy ever written. Mill defends the view that all human action should produce the greatest happiness overall, and that happiness itself is to be understood as consisting in "higher" and "lower" pleasures. This volume uses the 1871 edition of the text, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime. The text is preceded by a comprehensive introduction assessing Mill's philosophy and the alternatives to (...) utilitarianism, and discussing some of the specific issues Mill raises in Utilitarianism. (shrink)

"A modern classic. Dewey's lectures have lost none of their vigor...The historical approach, which underlay the central argument, is beautifully exemplified in his treatments of the origin of philosophy."-- Philosophy and Phenomenological Research "It was with this book that Dewey fully launched his campaign for experimental philosophy."-- The New Republic Written by an eminent philosopher shortly after the shattering effects of World War I, this volume offers an insightful introduction to the concept of pragmatic humanism. Dewey presents persuasive arguments against (...) traditional philosophical constructs, suggesting their basis in self-justification. He proposes, instead, an examination of core values in terms of their ultimate effects on the self and others. This experimental philosophy was received with both outrage and acclaim for daring to mingle ethics and science. Delivered in 1919 as a series of lectures, Dewey's landmark work appears here in an enlarged edition that features an informative introduction by the author, written more than 25 years after the book's initial publication. (shrink)

I argue against the orthodox view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification. The view under criticism is: if p is propositionally justified for S in virtue of S's having reason R, and S believes p on the basis of R, then S's belief that p is doxastically justified. I then propose and evaluate alternative accounts of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, and conclude that we should explain propositional justification in terms of doxastic justification. If correct, this (...) proposal would constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the sources of epistemic justification. (shrink)