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The seminar will be held with Professor Dr. Lukas Mühlethaler (FU Berlin.)
We will meet at the Freie Universität, room to be determined. Please contact the instructors (stephen.menn@ancient-philosophy.de , lukas.muehlethaler@fu-berlin.de) for room information.
Reading and discussion of selected chapters, in Arabic, from the philosophical magnum opus, the Kitāb al-Muʿtabar, of Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, a 12th-century Jewish philosopher and a startlingly original thinker with deep influence on the subsequent history of Arabic philosophy. He is, notably, the first philosopher in the broadly Western tradition to explicitly defend epistemological direct realism. Trained both as a philosopher and as a medical doctor, Abū l-Barakāt explores the major problems of his era in logic, physics (including psychology), and metaphysics. Starting by observing the disagreements between Galen, Avicenna, and other philosophers, he goes through each of their topics, discusses their disputes, and reaches his own often unique stances. As a Jew, Abū l-Barakāt also authored a philosophical commentary on Ecclesiastes, but he appears to have converted to Islam later in life.
We will focus on comprehending Abū l-Barakāt’s philosophical arguments, his reactions to previous philosophers, particularly Avicenna, and his broader objectives within the text. Key topics include his efforts to mediate between Aristotelian and Galenic views, his critique of traditional faculty-psychology, his arguments for direct realism, and his defense of God’s knowledge of individual entities. We may also read related passages in earlier philosophers (especially Avicenna) that Abū l-Barakāt references and engages with, and/or later philosophers who further developed his ideas, such as Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī or Suhrawardī.
This seminar will not work as a first course in ancient/medieval Aristotelian/Galenic philosophy: Abū l-Barakāt is an internal critic of the tradition and not an introduction to it. If you are unsure whether you have sufficient background, please contact the instructors. We will spend most of each class working through Abū l-Barakāt’s Arabic text together, trying to figure out what each sentence means, how they work together in an argument, and why he might want to argue that way. To take the seminar for credit toward a degree at the HU or FU, you must be willing and able to translate classical Arabic in class. But people with strong backgrounds in ancient or medieval philosophy, who do not have Arabic but are willing to listen to people arguing about a classical Arabic text, and can make useful comments about what might be going on in it philosophically, are welcome to contact the instructors to see if we can find a way for you to participate. The normal language of the seminar will be English, but if someone feels more comfortable translating an Arabic text into German than into English, that is not a problem. |
