Philosophy in the Islamic World

This working group promotes the study of philosophy in the Islamic world at Yale. We understand the subject of philosophy in the Islamic world in its linguistic context and historical sense. Linguistically, we consider thinkers writing in Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and other languages used in the Islamic world East and West. We take philosophy as broadly as it was construed historically. Topics of interest include metaphysical poetics; the history of logic; the natural and theological sciences; the commentary tradition on Aristotle and Avicenna; the theoretical theology of Ibn ʿArabī, Mulla Sadra, and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī; Sufism; kalām; the modern reception and development of philosophy in its political, theological, and academic contexts; and others.

The working group thus addresses itself equally to philosophers, Arabists, and Islamicists as well as to students and scholars of Classics and Medieval, Renaissance, and Jewish studies. We invite fellow graduate students here and in the East Coast region to present works in progress, dissertation chapters, conference papers, and other writing to receive feedback from their peers; we also organize lecture series based on various themes in the field of philosophy in the Islamic world. Speakers are asked to present original texts in English translation, so that knowledge of Arabic is not required to follow the presentation and participate in the discussion.