Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 171 - Golden Ages - The Later Eastern Traditions.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Golden Ages, the Later Eastern Traditions. Last year, the biologist and atheist provocateur Richard Dawkins posted the following comment on the social media website Twitter, quote, All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though. If Dawkins was trying to unleash anger and controversy, he certainly succeeded. Furious reactions focused on the first sentence, the part about the Nobel Prize. But I was more struck by the second sentence. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though. That's a standard caveat you'll hear from people who want to criticize Islam as a religion or Muslim culture, but who are enlightened enough to realize that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, like in the Middle Ages, Muslims were capable of scientific discovery, fabulous works of art, and in short, all the things we expect from a great civilization. Of course, we are here in the realm of political and religious polemic rather than sober and careful history. But behind this, what have the Muslims done for us lately question is a serious historical puzzle. The puzzle would go something like this. From the 7th to 12th centuries, which I suppose is what people like Dawkins mean by the Middle Ages, the Muslims conquered a vast empire, produced scientists and mathematicians like Ibn al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi and philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes. Sadly, starting in the 13th century or so, we have a situation of terminal decline, both politically and intellectually. The Muslims are pushed back and then pushed out completely in Spain. In the Eastern heartlands, the Abbasid Caliphate ends with the murder of the last caliph by the invading Mongols. Philosophy and science are forgotten, with Averroes the last to engage seriously with the ideas of the Greeks. So it's a good thing that just in time, the Latin world wakes from its medieval slumber. Following the translation of the precious works of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and others into Latin, medieval Christian Europe surges into its own golden age, with scholastics like Aquinas and Scotus gracing 13th century Christendom. Rather than offering you an explanation of this decline, in this and the coming episodes I'm going to tell you that there is no decline to explain. To the contrary, a good case can be made that the very period in which philosophy and science supposedly died in the East was actually part of a golden age of philosophy in the Islamic world. This was proposed by Dimitri Gutas, who put the end of his golden age in about 1350, a full century after the height of the Mongol invasion. And, as Gutas pointed out, things did not end there either. By the 14th century we are already seeing the rise of the Ottomans in Anatolia. Along with the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals of India, the Ottomans will be one of three great Muslim powers of the 15th to 19th centuries. All three of these dominions made contributions to the history of philosophy and science. This is not to say that Muslim culture went from strength to strength in the entire period from the fall of the Abbasids down to the time of colonialism. The Mongols did cause enormous destruction and chaos in some areas. But even this often led to the movement of ideas within the Islamic lands, as philosophically minded scholars moved at speed to escape the Mongol depredations, bringing their ideas with them. Furthermore, the Mongols were capable of building, not just tearing down. After the pillaging was over, Mongol princes had to settle down and rule, at which point they were known to sponsor science and serve as patrons for philosophers just as the Abbasids, Buyids, and Seljuks had done before them. Patronage relations will also feature when we look at the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. So court culture continues to be a factor in the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. Equally important will be madrasa culture. We saw already that educational institutions, set up as charitable foundations, were a major feature of the Seljuk period with the vizier Nizam al-Mulk giving his name to the network of Nizamiyah madrasas, which employed, among others, the theologian al-Ghazali. These schools did focus on the Islamic sciences like Quran interpretation, the study of the sayings of the prophet or hadith, and so on. But they also taught logic, always a gateway drug leading to the intoxications of metaphysics. I'll be devoting a whole episode to later innovations in logic, something in part made possible by the madrasa system. There's a parallel here that is hard to resist. As the madrasas were becoming an ever more dominant part of the intellectual scene in the Islamic world, the universities were rising in Latin Christendom. It is presumably no coincidence that in both settings we see the development of something that could fairly be called scholasticism. Like their Latin-writing Christian contemporaries, Muslim philosopher-theologians in the East were producing enormously sophisticated treatises full of finely drawn distinctions always depending on their mastery of logic. Also as in late medieval Christendom, the commentary emerges as a primary vehicle for philosophy. So instead of imagining the Islamic world in decline while Europe surges forward towards the Renaissance, we can actually discern a parallel development in the two realms. The difference is that in Europe, scholastic philosophy and commentary responded above all to Aristotle. In the Islamic heartlands, from Syria to Central Asia, Aristotle had by now been displaced by Avicenna. I've already mentioned this numerous times, and in the episodes to come we're going to see Avicenna dominate the philosophical landscape in the way I have promised. The most original philosophical minds were often religious scholars, theologians and jurists. They will express their originality by attacking, adapting, and adopting the ideas of Avicenna, a phenomenon I suggest calling Avicennian scholasticism. It would however be too simple to think in terms of just one Avicennian tradition in these later centuries. Better, although even this is a bit of a simplification, would be to think of four branches sprouting and intertwining from the 12th century onwards, with all four responding to Avicenna. The seeds of three of these branches were planted in the formative period. The first branch grows out of Islamic theology or kalam, especially among the Asharites. A massively influential theologian who lived into the early 13th century, dying in the year 1210, was Fakhr ad-Din Ahrazi. He is an outstanding example of the scholastic tendency I just described, his lengthy works full of deft dialectical maneuvering as he negotiates between classic Asharite positions and the ideas of Avicenna. Among Ahrazi's major works is a commentary on Avicenna. Along with other works by Ahrazi, it will provoke further commentaries by like-minded Asharite philosopher-theologians and their intellectual rivals. Among those rivals, one stands out in particular, Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. He is such a complicated figure that it is difficult to see him as growing from just one branch of the tradition, but for at least part of his career At-Tuzi espoused Ismaili Shi'ism, and he will not be the only Shiite thinker in these later centuries. This is the second branch I have in mind, philosophy among Shiites, of both the Ismaili and Twelver varieties. When we get to the Safavid period, we are going to see numerous thinkers doing their philosophy within the framework of Twelver Shi'ism, which was upheld by the Safavid dynasty. Among these was Mullah Saadra, the most famous Muslim philosopher after the 12th century. Saadra lived in Safavid Persia in the 17th century and is noteworthy for the way he draws together nearly all the strands of philosophy in the Islamic world up to his time. He is not only a Shiite, and one whose philosophy is deeply engaged with Avicenna, he also stands at the intersection of our third and fourth branches Sufism and Illuminationism. With Sufism we again know where we stand, since we have already investigated the great Ibn Adabi and seen how philosophy and mysticism came together in his voluminous writings. I emphasized how influential he would be in the later Eastern tradition, and this is something else we are going to explore in episodes to come. It will be especially fun to talk about the great Persian Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Aroomi, who lived about the same time as the aforementioned Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. In fact, they died within one year of each other, as did another Sufi philosopher named Saadr ad-Din Akunawi. It is really Akunawi who can be credited with fusing the Sufism of Ibn Adabi to the metaphysical system of Avicenna. Sufism will remain important still later, exerting influence not only on Safavid thinkers like Mullah Sadra, but also in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. That leaves the fourth branch, which is something new, Illuminationism. This is the brainchild of another great figure of the 12th century named Suhrabadi. He put forward his philosophy using the richly evocative language of light and shadow, and called his style of thought Isharaki, usually translated as Illuminationist. For Suhrabadi, God is the light of lights, and emanates forth further immaterial lights whose brilliance falls upon the shadowy world of bodies, which are described as dark barriers to illumination. Suhrabadi is drawing here on ideas from Neoplatonic and Sufi sources, but insists that his main inspiration comes from Plato and other ancient thinkers of Greece, Persia, and India. Nonetheless, as we'll see Suhrabadi does not really depart from the pattern of his age when philosophizing meant thinking about Avicenna. He is highly critical of Avicenna to be sure, but his metaphysics of light is developed in the shadow of Avicenna's system, with his light of lights serving as a particularly brilliant adaptation of the Avicennan idea of God as the necessary existent. This sort of philosophical theology will continue to be a main theme for us as we look at the later period. Many of the thinkers we'll be examining were, after all, card-carrying members of a kalam school, most often the Asherites. Logic too will come up frequently, since as I've said it was a basic part of a scholarly education. There will also be contributions in psychology, with critical discussions of Avicenna's theory of soul, and there will be ethics, notably in a highly influential treatise by Atouzi written for one of his Ismaili patrons. Great strides will be made in the sciences as well. Atouzi was only one of many outstanding mathematicians and astronomers of the later Muslim world. A group of philosophers, theologians, and mathematicians gathered round his person and the observatory he led at Maragha in the mid to late 13th century. Astronomy will feature again in the scientific achievements made after the Eastern Muslim lands were divided amongst the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Those Muslims, they did do great things in the Middle Ages, and then they kept on doing them. And not just Muslims either. In our look at the formative period, and especially Andalusia, Christians and Jews have contributed to the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, and that will continue to be the case in the coming episodes, even if the vast majority of thinkers we'll consider are going to be Muslim. Amidst these other developments, the two deepest philosophical issues from the 12th century onwards have to do with metaphysics and epistemology. On the metaphysical side, Avicenna's proposed distinction between existence and essence will spark a long-running argument about the nature of being, which incidentally will provide us with further striking parallels to Latin scholasticism. In epistemology, we've already seen that in the wake of Avicenna, theologians like Alghazali were preoccupied with the question of certainty. Were the arguments of the philosophers, in other words Avicenna, really watertight? Did they offer demonstration, or just make a plausible case for their conclusions, if that? What was a preoccupation in Alghazali will become something like an obsession for theologians like Arazi and Atuzzi. Ever more attention is paid to philosophical method, and attitudes towards philosophical argument become ever more stringent. The result will be a tendency towards skepticism, and emphasis on the limits of philosophy as various thinkers conclude that human reason is simply incapable of producing arguments that rise to the standard expected by Avicenna and his heirs. In this sense, the later Eastern tradition picks up where we left off in the formative period, with critics of philosophy following the lead of Alghazali. A good example here is Ashahrastani, another Asharite theologian and in fact a successor of Alghazali's as a teacher at the Nizamiya madrasa in Baghdad. Ashahrastani is best known for compiling a work surveying the ideas of various groups within the Islamic world, including not only the philosophers, but also religious factions, the kalam schools, and so on. But he also composed a withering attack on Avicenna. Its title compares what he is doing to a wrestling match with the universe. In five sections, Asharastani grapples with Avicenna over the nature of God and the creation of the universe. Each section begins with a summary of Avicenna's position and ends with a statement of Asharastani's own view. But the best bits are the middles of the sections, where he exposes contradictions in Avicenna's system and devises objections against him. On the issue of existence, which I just mentioned, Asharastani presciently anticipates a later debate that will ask whether God and created things exist in the same sense. Asharastani thinks that Avicenna gets himself into all sorts of trouble here by supposing that God exists in something like the same way as created things. For instance, God would be revealed as multiple rather than truly one, since he would need to be distinguished from other things that exist by adding the characteristic of necessity to him. In other words, if God is the necessary existent, as Avicenna claims, then God will consist of two things, existence and necessity. So we should just give up on this whole project and say that God's existence has nothing in common with created existence at all. That way, we won't need to introduce some feature like necessity to distinguish God from other things that might compromise his simplicity. Asharastani also takes issue with Avicenna's notorious idea that God knows everything universally by knowing him as their cause. The proposal has numerous difficulties, argues Asharastani. Again, it would compromise divine unity. When Avicenna says that God knows himself, that gives us not one, but three things, God as the thing that is thinking, God's act of thinking, and God as the object that is thought. Inevitably, this reminds Asharastani of the Christians, who likewise said that God is three things in one. The comparison is not, of course, meant to be a flattering one. Then there's this idea that God creates things just by thinking about them. It's unclear, complains Asharastani, whether God first thinks about each thing and then creates it, or whether he has to create it in order to know about it. Neither of those options looks particularly good for Avicenna. Or still, if God creates things by thinking about them, then does that mean he creates himself when he thinks about himself? Asharastani nicely represents the opposition provoked by Avicenna among theologians. There was sustained attack from the Asharite point of view, with al-Ghazali and Asharastani paving the way for the more intricate and positive engagement with Avicenna that we'll find in Fakhradin al-Razi. But the Asharites were not alone in their annoyance. Perhaps no one in the 12th and 13th centuries was more infuriated by Avicenna than Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi. There's no deeper disappointment than the one felt by a former admirer, and this was the situation of Abd al-Latif. In the teenage years of his remarkably eventful life, he studied at that same Baghdad madrasa where al-Ghazali and Asharastani had served as teachers. He went through the standard curriculum of study for a religious scholar, learning by heart, works on grammar, law, and hadith. This practice of rote memorization sounds tiresome to us, but Abd al-Latif swore by it, commenting that if you really know a book, it should make no difference whether you lose your physical copy of it. Incidentally, this recalls a story told by al-Ghazali. As a young man he was mugged for his books, and then mocked by the thief for not having memorized them. As Abd al-Latif went on with his studies, he traveled widely, visiting Mosul, Cairo, and Damascus. His own account of his journeys makes him sound like a late 12th century version of Woody Allen's character Zelig, or Forrest Gump. He meets everybody, at one point encountering Maimonides of all people, in Cairo, and at another point becoming a member of Saladin's entourage. For most of this time, Abd al-Latif was of the view that everything worth knowing could be found in the works of Avicenna, but more serious study of the ancients convinced him otherwise. The true philosophers lived simple ascetic lives, unlike the wine-drinking, supposedly sexually voracious Avicenna. In a sign that Abd al-Latif is no follower of al-Ghazali's, he adds that the ethical burden of philosophy is actually heavier than that placed on us by the religious law. Like his near-contemporary Averroes far to the west, Abd al-Latif came to the view that one should go beyond Avicenna into the past, studying the wisdom of the ancients and their more faithful Muslim interpreters like al-Farabi. It's for this reason that Abd al-Latif wrote a paraphrase on one book of the Aristotelian metaphysics, a rare expression of interest in Aristotle in the Islamic East after his works had been otherwise eclipsed by Avicenna. But this was more flash in the pan than the dawning of a new era of Aristotelian scholarship. Not until the Safavid period will we witness a true resurgence of interest in the philosophical works that had been translated from Greek into Arabic under the Abbasids. A more typical thinker for this earlier transitional period would be a man like Abd al-Adin al-Kashani, known as Baba Abd al. About a generation younger than Abd al-Latif, Baba Abd al was not a remarkably original thinker, but he was a harbinger of things to come in some respects. For one thing, he combines philosophy with Sufism, much like his contemporary Sukhravadi and any number of philosophical mystics to come in later centuries. For another, he writes in Persian rather than Arabic. This choice will become common only later in the wake of the more influential At-Tuzi who helped to integrate Avicenna's Arabic philosophical terminology into the Persian tongue. Baba Abd al. anticipates this linguistic shift, even translating a few philosophical works from Arabic into Persian. In his own philosophical writings meanwhile, Baba Abd al. tackles topics from logic to psychology to ethics to humankind's relation to God, drawing variously on Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, and Avicenna. Philosophy of this period, spanning from the death of Al-Ghazali in that easy to remember year 1111, to the Mongol invasions of the middle 13th century reminds me to some extent of the 10th century under the Buyids. It's a time of variety in the history of philosophy. In the 10th century, there was the professionalized Aristotelianism of the Baghdad school, the open-minded Platonism of the Kindian tradition, the sophisticated Kalam of quarreling Moatazilites and Asharites. For about a century, there were a lot of directions philosophy could have gone. Avicenna put an end to that, serving as a one-man filter through which philosophical ideas would have to pass to the later Eastern tradition. Now though, things are again growing more diverse. Avicenna always plays a role somehow. Some scholars like Ashah Rastani and Abd al-Atif al-Baghdadi struggle against him with all their might and decry his pernicious influence both intellectual and moral. Others, like Fakhradin Arazi, are more temperate critics, borrowing as much as they reject. Avicenna provoked synthesis, as with Sufism, and creative adaptation, as in Suhraradi's New Illuminationist philosophy. Philosophy was once again branching in different directions, and this time no single thinker was going to intervene to prune it back to a single stock. So, with all this going on, why is it widely thought that philosophy in the Islamic world goes into steep and terminal decline after Ghazali and Iverroes? The answer is simple. The later Eastern thinkers had little or no influence on European philosophy, so European historians of philosophy have until recently paid them little or no attention. The narrative of decline and the notion that Muslim philosophy and science ended in the Middle Ages make for bad history. It's the kind of history that involves thinking something never existed simply because you haven't looked for it. We, of course, are not going to make that mistake and are going to take a good long look at the Eastern thinkers I've mentioned in this episode and many more besides. In fact, I'll be starting not with Suhraradi, Arazi, or At-Tuzi, but with another man from Baghdad, not to be confused with Abd al-Atif. This was Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, who like his contemporaries worked within the framework laid down by Avicenna, but was unafraid to criticize him. Not unlike Husdai Crescas in the Jewish tradition, whom we saw developing new ideas in physics by attacking Maimonides, Abul Barakat's disagreements with Avicenna's physics led him to some novel and startlingly modern ideas. So, join me as I begin to fulfill these Eastern promises, starting with Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.