“As
the various translation projects got underway in Spain and in Southern Europe,
it became obvious that Christian as well as Jewish philosophy had much to gain
and to question by the enormous sophistication of Islamic philosophy,”
Taliaferro tells the Tehran Times.
Following
is the text of the interview with Professor Taliaferro:
How
much do western scholars know Islamic philosophy and philosophers? If answer is
little, why?
Western
scholars of the history of ideas would have to be knowledgeable about some of
the great Islamic philosophers, including Avicenna or, in Arabic, Ibn Sina,
Averoes or Ibn Rushd, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, and probably Al-Kindi and
Suhrawardi.
There
were massive translation projects in the 12th but especially the 13th century
that made numerous Islamic philosophical texts available in Latin to
philosophers in the west, and we can see their influence in western concepts of
God, arguments for God's existence, the soul, causation, and more.
Muslim
philosophers also challenged western beliefs, about for example the Christian
understanding of God as triune while the awareness of the riches of Islamic
philosophy is more common among historians of ideas, some philosophers, such as
William Craig, have employed cosmological arguments traced back to primary
Islamic sources to argue for the existence of God.
Probably
the reason why more mainstream philosophers do not engage with Islamic
philosophy is partly explained by the fact that a great deal of philosophers
today in Europe and America are not primarily concerned with the historical
roots of the ideas they discuss. Also the exchange between contemporary Islamic
philosophers and western philosophers is not assisted by the entrenched
secularism in western academics and the difficulties, in today's political
climate, of arranging meetings, free and open exchanges among scholars.
Maybe
one other explanation as to why there is not more widespread engagement with
Islamic philosophy today, is that some philosophers are reluctant to claim
expertise in areas where they do not read the primary languages.
In
philosophy graduate schools it is far more common to expect students to know
Latin, Greek, German, French rather than Arabic or Persian. Still, there is a
rise of work in English on Islamic philosophy as witnessed by the Routledge Companion
to Islamic Philosophy and the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy.
Are
there any institutes in the west and especially in the US that focus on Islamic
philosophy?
Yes,
all the great western universities have been sites for fruitful philosophical
work on Islam. There is the Oxford
Centre for Islamic Studies at the Oxford, there is the Centre of Islamic
Studies at Cambridge University, at Harvard University there is the Prince
Alwaleed Bin Talal Institute for Islamic Studies there is Islamic Studies at
Yale University, Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School,
and much, much more.
Which
fields of Islamic philosophy are taught in the US?
If
you are at a university with a serious commitment to the history of ideas, you
would rightly expect to have courses that show how deeply Islamic philosophy
influenced the west, and embodies work that is valuable for its own sake. The
ground covered would include theism, naturalism, the analysis and critique of
Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, the soul, causation, the role and nature of
science, virtue theory.
What
was the impact of Islamic philosopher on western philosophy especially in the
middle age?
Huge.
As the various translation projects got underway in Spain and in Southern
Europe, it became obvious that Christian as well as Jewish philosophy had much
to gain and to question by the enormous sophistication of Islamic philosophy.
The
encounter between western and Islamic philosophy in the middle ages was perhaps
the most momentous engagements of intellectual cultures in the history of
ideas.
Agreed,
that the advent in the west of Jewish, then Christian philosophy meeting up
with Greco-Roman philosophy was titanic, and the encounter in the Enlightenment
between western philosophy and Chinese and Indian philosophy was massive. But
in the exchange between Islam and the west the encounter was of special
significance because it was an encounter between philosophers who had a shared
background in Plato, Aristotle, and to some extent Plotinus, they also carried
out philosophy in the context of cultures which shared strong positions on the
significance of divine revelation and different views on the relationship
between faith and reason.
What
is your suggestion for introducing the better of the Islamic philosophy in the
west?
I
hope you will forgive me, but I highly recommend as a starting point a book
that Chad Meister and I commissioned: Islam: A Philosophical Investigation by a
young, rising philosopher, Imran Aijaz, who teaches now in the United States at
the University of Michigan. I believe that his book, just published, is a great
venue for all those interested in engaging Islamic philosophy today, enhancing
the communication between Islam and the west.
Source:
MEHR News Agency