Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 120 - The Straight Path - Philosophy in the Islamic World.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Keynes College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Straight Path, Philosophy and Islam. Like a policeman following a silverware thief with a hole in his pocket, we have reached a fork in the road. The last episodes have brought us to the end of antiquity and to three traditions that were, at least at first, largely independent of one another. First, there is Byzantine philosophy, which we left with Maximus Confessor. Greek speakers in the Eastern Empire did not get a memo from some headquarters telling them that antiquity was over and that they had to stop philosophizing. To the contrary, scholars in the medieval Byzantine period simply carried on what had been business as usual in late antiquity. They commented on Aristotle. They applied the tools of Hellenic thought to expound Christian doctrine. They copied out manuscripts in Greek, which is why so much ancient philosophy survives today in its original language. Meanwhile, in most of the former Western Empire, Latin became the sole language of philosophy and knowledge of Greek became rare. As a result, the figures we looked at most recently, Augustine, the Latin Platonists, and Boethius, were indispensable sources in this part of the world. Most of Aristotle, and nearly all of Plato, were inaccessible in Latin for several centuries. We will reach these Byzantine and Latin traditions in due course, but first I'm going to take us down a third road, one that you need to travel from right to left, philosophy in Arabic. It unfolded in the lands dominated by a new faith that called itself the straight path, Islam. We have already tiptoed up to the beginning of this road too. I mentioned the Muslim conquests when talking about Maximus Confessor and alluded to developments in Syria in the episode about Christian asceticism. The Syriac language is about to make a brief but important appearance in our story. So far though, we haven't looked at a single thinker who wrote in or even spoke Arabic. That's about to change as we embark on a lengthy examination of philosophy in the Islamic world. This will of course mean talking about philosophers who were Muslims, and about the impact of Islam itself on philosophy, but it will also mean looking at Christian and Jewish thinkers who lived in Muslim lands. Christians played a major role in the early development of philosophy in Arabic. They served as translators, and some of the leading early exegetes of Aristotle in Arabic were Christians. Meanwhile, Jewish philosophy, between the 9th and 13th centuries, took place almost entirely within the territories dominated by Islam. Nowadays, scholarship on philosophy written in the Islamic world generally deals with these two faith traditions separately, but a more revealing approach is to look at the whole history of philosophy in the Islamic world in chronological order. This will allow us to situate Jewish philosophy in its immediate context, a context that, as often as not, was determined by developments in Islamic intellectual history. For instance, we'll soon be discussing early developments in Islamic theology which will provide us with the necessary background for understanding the great early Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon. An even more prominent example is Maimonides. He was one of the two greatest exponents of philosophy in the Iberian peninsula, or Andalusia, in the 12th century. The other was a Muslim, a Varroes. Thus, the coming episodes are about philosophy as it developed in the lands under Muslim political dominion, but I won't only be covering Muslim philosophers. In all, the story of philosophy in the Islamic world will be occupying us for about a year's worth of podcasts. Before we begin though, let me explain why I'm following this strand first rather than the Greek Byzantine or Latin medieval traditions. For one thing, we need to cover philosophy in Arabic before looking at philosophy in Latin. A shift in medieval Latin philosophy began in the 12th century as a result of ideas flowing from the Islamic world. Muslims like Abiseneh and Averroes, and Jews like Maimonides, exerted great influence on Christians like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The Greek Byzantine tradition, meanwhile, is a bit more autonomous. My plan is to make it the last thread of our medieval tapestry, so that it will be fresh in our minds as useful background for the Renaissance. And there is another reason to do philosophy in the Islamic world first, I just can't wait. Most of my own research has dealt with figures from this tradition, and now I'm going to get a chance to tell you about the philosophers I know best. If you're half as excited as I am, you'll be impatient too, so let's start. But where to start? Or rather, when? Well, if you're a bit fuzzy on the chronology of Islam, I suggest you try to remember the following date, 622 AD. This is the year in which the Prophet Muhammad led his followers away from the city of Mecca to the definitively named Medina. The word Madina just means city. The Islamic calendar is dated beginning from this event. You might see years of that calendar labeled with AH, which stands for the Latin phrase Ano Hegire, that is, the year of the Hijra, which is Arabic for emigration. So if you take an AD year and subtract 622, you'll be in the general ballpark of the corresponding AH date, albeit not exactly right, because the Islamic calendar is lunar, so that one of its years doesn't have quite the same length as one year in a solar calendar. Why in any case was this event so important that it merited being taken as the starting point of a new calendar? Because it marked the beginning of a distinct Muslim society. From this beginning would grow a great empire. Within just a few generations, the religion of Islam had spread with spectacular speed across not just the Arabian peninsula, but to the west across northern Africa and ultimately into Iberia, and to the east, through Iraq, and then further still into Persia and Central Asia. With Islam spread the Arabic language. The Quran is of course in the language spoken by Muhammad, and several verses call attention to this fact. God says to Muhammad such things as, we have made it for you an Arabic Quran. The very name of the holy book draws our attention to the importance of language in this new faith. Quran means recitation, and the first word that the prophet heard from the angel Gabriel, who delivered God's message to him, was the command ikra, recite. We saw in our examination of late Christian thought that it quickly became acceptable to read the Bible in languages other than the original, especially the Greek Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament that claimed divine inspiration. Not so with the Quran, which gave Arabic the divine seal of approval when it was given to Muhammad, the seal of the prophets. In much of the Islamic world, Arabic became and remained the primary language. Even in places that held on to their local tongue, like Persia, Arabic became an important and even dominant language for writing literature, including philosophy. This is why philosophers from Persia and Central Asia, including no less a thinker than Avicenna, wrote in Arabic, which was not necessarily their native language. Members of other faiths wrote in Arabic for the same reason. The Christian exegetes of Aristotle I mentioned wrote Arabic commentaries on Arabic translations of the Organon and the Physics. The two Jewish authors I described a moment ago, Saadia and Maimonides, also wrote in Arabic. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to equate philosophy in the Islamic world with philosophy in Arabic. That's largely true for the earlier period, but Maimonides wrote in Hebrew as well, and this became even more common among Jewish thinkers in the generations after him. A third important language for philosophy in the Islamic world was Persian. Users of this language already resisted the hegemony of Arabic, as Islam spread into the Persian realms. As I say, even in these areas, Arabic established itself as the main language for philosophy, but Avicenna, for instance, did use Persian for one of his treatises. Later on, we have a great deal of philosophy written in Persian, for instance in the Safavid period in Iran, in the 16th to 18th centuries. What I've said so far explains why I'm using the somewhat cumbersome phrase philosophy in the Islamic world, rather than speaking of Islamic philosophy or Arabic philosophy. You'll see both phrases used, and I have been known to use them myself, but speaking of Islamic philosophy excludes the Christians and Jews who, I want to insist, are an important part of our story, and Arabic philosophy wouldn't cover texts in other languages. By the way, please don't confuse the words Arabic and Arab. Arabic refers to a language, not the people among whom Islam first began. Actually, very few of the philosophers we'll be looking at were Arabs, yet almost all of them wrote mostly, or even exclusively, in Arabic. My point, anyway, is that I'm shooting for as broad a conception of this tradition as possible, one that includes philosophers from three religions writing in several languages and working in lands ranging from modern-day Spain to modern-day Afghanistan. I realize this story is already rather complicated, so I'm going to make up for it by offering you a simple chronology for what we're going to be looking at. There are two significant periods of philosophy in the Islamic world, before Avicenna and after Avicenna. He lived from the late 10th to the early 11th century. I suggest calling the time until then the formative period of philosophy in the Islamic world. During this formative period, the main concern of philosophers was the translation and interpretation of Greek philosophical texts, especially Aristotle. As we'll be seeing, formative period philosophers like al-Kindi and al-Farabi championed these texts and insisted that they contain truths of paramount importance for any reader, whether pagan, Christian, or Muslim. Yet these same thinkers pondered the question of how the Hellenic philosophical heritage could be reconciled with the teachings of Islam, and whether it might offer answers to questions being posed by contemporary Muslim theologians. This dynamic went beyond the confines of the Islamic faith, as Jewish and Christian authors staged their own appropriation of Aristotle and Neoplatonism. Not unlike Philo of Alexandria and the Christian Fathers in the ancient world, they used philosophy to explain the descriptions of God in the Old Testament, or expound the doctrine of the Trinity. Then Avicenna came along and changed everything. He was a philosopher of considerable self-confidence, which is a polite way of saying that he was immensely arrogant. But to be honest, he merited his high opinion of himself. Drawing together themes from Aristotle, from Platonism, and from Islamic theology, he forged something new. His self-consciously original works had something to contribute on nearly every major area of philosophy, from logic to physics to metaphysics, and he also found time to become the single most influential medical author of any medieval tradition. After Avicenna, philosophy in the eastern heartlands of the Islamic empire was consumed with the task of responding to him, instead of to Aristotle. The very language of philosophy became distinctively Avicennan, even in authors who opposed his ideas strenuously. A centuries-long process saw his terminology and ideas woven into the fabric of Islamic theology and into the mystical tradition of the Sufis. Among the most seminal figures of the post-Avicennan generations, Sukhravarti, founded yet another tradition within this tradition, illuminationism. It can best be understood as an intricate critique and reworking of Avicenna, much as Avicenna had offered a critique and reworking of Aristotle. But in the 11th century, news traveled slow, and texts often failed to travel at all. That is one reason we see a mostly autonomous tradition arising on the far western fringe of the Islamic empire in Andalusia. If you take Jewish and Muslim philosophy together, as I am going to do, then you notice that a big chunk of philosophy's history in the Islamic world happened in the 11th to 12th centuries on the Iberian peninsula. This time and place featured not only the aforementioned philosophical giants, the Jew Maimonides and the Muslim Averroes, but numerous other figures from both religions. This was in fact the high point for philosophical activity by Jews in the Islamic world. Andalusian philosophy was influenced by Avicenna, but much less so than philosophy in the East. Here, it was still possible for thinkers of both faiths to adopt broadly Aristotelian or Neoplatonic systems of thought, and even to complain that this confounded Avicenna was ruining everything and that right-minded philosophers should return to Aristotle. That pretty much sums up the attitude of Averroes. Meanwhile, the greatest mind in the history of philosophical Sufism, which became such a force in the eastern Islamic world, was Ibn Arabi, and he too hailed from Andalusia. To take account of all this, once we get past Avicenna, I'm going to devote a series of episodes to Andalusian philosophy before returning to the eastern tradition and following it all the way to the time we think of as early modernity. Ultimately, we will see the Islamic world fractured into three great empires, the Ottomans, the Safavids in Persia, and the Mughal Empire in India. All three empires offered something to the history of philosophy, though I should warn you that when we reach that late period, we will be entering territory that has barely been touched by modern scholarship. So that's a historical sketch of the journey ahead—a formative period of engagement with both Greek philosophy and Islamic theology, a decisive intervention by Avicenna, the greatest philosopher of the Islamic world, and then another forking path leading on the one hand west to Muslim Spain and the continued use of Hellenic materials, on the other hand east, with Avicenna having become the new king of the road. As for the philosophical issues that will be occupying our attention during this voyage, some of them have to do with where we have already been. For instance, both Muslim and Jewish philosophers will have a great deal to say about whether or not the universe is eternal. Not only will they remind us of the late ancient dispute between John Philoponus and upholders of eternity like Aristotle and Proclus, they will actually be drawing directly on these very arguments, since Philoponus's anti-eternity polemic was available to read in Arabic. Appropriately enough, therefore, the eternity debate didn't really stop after late antiquity, but went on and on. An equally long-running issue was the problem of how to understand Aristotle's remarks on the human intellect in the third book of his work, On the Soul. This is a particularly prominent case of the continuity of the Greek and Arabic traditions of commentary on Aristotle. But of course, philosophy in the Islamic world wouldn't deserve a year's worth of podcasts if it offered nothing but rehashed debates and puzzles from the ancient world. One of the reasons this new tradition is going to be so, well, new, creative in both its uses of and departures from the Greek inheritance is the religion of Islam itself. We've already seen how paganism and Christianity in late antiquity, as well as Judaism in the case of Philo of Alexandria were powerful spurs to philosophical innovation, we'll now see that the same is true of Islam. To start thinking about why we can do no better than to begin with the shahada, or Muslim profession of faith, there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. In the first half of that sentence, we have the core Muslim theological commitment to monotheism. Tawhid, the Arabic word for oneness, is at the core of both the Islamic faith and of Islamic philosophy. The prophet Muhammad clearly taught the centrality of tawhid not only with his words, but also with his actions, as when he entered the holy shrine of the Kaaba in his home city of Mecca and emptied it of the pagan idols that stood there. Monotheism gave Muslims something in common with members of other faiths, notably Christians and Jews, but also Zoroastrians, who were still numerous in the lands that fell under the sway of this new faith. Yet, God's oneness could also be the basis for interreligious dispute. In particular, from a Muslim point of view, the Christians' admirable acceptance of that oneness was rather undermined when they went on to insist that God is also a trinity. Accordingly, we're going to see Muslim philosophers using the tools of their trade to attack the Trinitarian doctrine, but we're also going to find Christians writing in Arabic to respond to these attacks and also to defend their own particular conception of the trinity against rival Christian views. It's not only the tradition of debate over the trinity that continues from late antiquity, but also the emphasis on the oneness of God. When Greek sources came to be translated into Arabic, Muslim readers immediately detected resonances between the Muslim doctrine of tawhid and certain halatic ideas. In particular, it looked tempting to find agreement with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, who likewise taught that the first cause of all things was a transcendent one. More potentially problematic, for both interfaith agreement and the appropriation of the philosophical tradition, was the second half of the Shahada, and Muhammad is his prophet. Muslims recognized Jesus and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as genuine messengers from God, albeit that they of course denied the Christian claim that Jesus was the incarnation of God. But Christians and Jews were, naturally enough, not going to return the favor and admit that Muhammad was the final prophet that God would send to mankind. The Quran itself identifies Christians and Jews, among other groups, as peoples of the book, communities favored by God with a revelation. But the Quran itself was a book whose accepted by Muslims alone. As for philosophy, there soon arose the difficulty of how, and indeed whether, prophecy could be explained within rational theories of knowledge. What was the mechanism by which Muhammad and the other prophets had come to possess a wisdom beyond other humans? Did this wisdom go beyond any understanding that can be achieved through human resources? How do prophecy, and knowledge more generally, serve to legitimize the political power wielded by leaders like Muhammad? And, not to put too fine a point on it, but once God has sent numerous messengers with divinely revealed books to bring us to the truth, do we really need Aristotle and Plotinus too? Actually, Muslim belief provoked philosophical reflection even before the Greek philosophers were transmitted into Arabic. We can see this by looking at the earliest representatives of the tradition known as ilm al-kalam. This phrase literally means of the word, perhaps because the theologians were trying to understand God's word, but the phrase, usually shortened simply to kalam, is typically translated more loosely as rational theology. Kalam was indisputably theological in character, consisting mostly of disputes over the correct understanding of Islamic revelation, albeit that these disputes often appealed to rational intuition and argument. For this reason, kalam is often sharply contrasted to philosophy. Indeed, philosophers who wrote in Arabic themselves drew this contrast with figures like Al-Farabi and Averroes comparing the dialectical debates of kalam unfavorably to the demonstrative knowledge offered by Aristotelian philosophy. Yet, kalam is going to play an important part in our story, not only because it exercised a huge influence on philosophers, on Jewish thinkers as well as Muslims, but also because kalam is itself full of philosophically interesting positions and arguments. But don't take my word for it, join me next time as I look at the early theologians known as the Murtazilites, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.