Download or read book Philosophy as a Way of Life written by Michael Chase and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-05 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy as a Way of Life This unique collection of essays on the late Pierre Hadot’s revolutionary methodological approach to studying and practicing philosophy explores Hadot’s primary conviction that philosophy itself goes beyond solving puzzles and analyzing abstract arguments. Hadot believed that philosophy is a key part of humanity’s search for happiness, that it can transform our perception of the world, and thus can alter our very mode of being. His argument that the goal of philosophy is to shift our focus away from our habitual obsession with individuality, and to embrace universality and objectivity, has resonated with thinkers across the Academy – and outside it. Offering genuinely interdisciplinary analysis of Hadot’s work and philosophical practice, this volume includes papers written from a gamut of philosophical, historical, and geographical perspectives. Articles address issues in the history of philosophy from Pythagoras to Descartes, by way of Islamic thought, thus corresponding to Hadot’s view of the importance of philologically based analysis of ancient texts and historical contexts. Others study the presence of ideas related to, or influenced by, Hadot in contemporary thought, from Wittgenstein to Leonard Nelson, analytic philosophy, and French postmodernism. The result is a wide-ranging publication pointing to an additional “third way” alongside the traditional approaches of Continental and analytic philosophy, one that expands our horizons with secular spiritual exercises designed to enable us to be in a fuller, more authentic way.

Download or read book The Qur an in Christian Muslim Dialogue written by Corrie Block and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an analysis of Christian-Muslim dialogue across four centuries, this book highlights those voices of ecumenical tone which have more often used the Qur’an for drawing the two faiths together rather than pushing them apart, and amplifies the voice of the Qur’an itself. Finding that there is tremendous ecumenical ground between Christianity and Islam in the voices of their own scholars, this book ranges from a period of declining ecumenism during the first three centuries of Islam, to a period of resurging ecumenism during the most recent century until now. Among the ecumenical voices in the Christian-Muslim dialogue, this book points out that the Qur’an itself is possibly the strongest of those voices. These findings are cause for, and evidence of, hope for the Christian–Muslim relationship: that although agreement may never be reached, dialogue has led at times to very real mutual understanding and appreciation of the religious other. Providing a tool for those pursuing understanding and mutual appreciation between the Islamic and Christian faiths, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Islam, the Qur’an and the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

Download or read book Das Transzendentale bei Ibn S n written by Tiana Koutzarova and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-05-20 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following al-Fārābī’s approach, Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) undertakes a new foundation of the First Philosophy based on his own critical systematisation of the Aristotelian theory of science, yielding the result that metaphysics is only possible as a transcendental science, i.e. that not only the subject-matter of metaphysics and its properties but also the arguments by which the first principles of knowledge are defended must be transcendental. This book provides the first systematic reconstruction of Ibn Sīnā’s concept of metaphysics, and, given the considerable influence his achievement had on the Islamic tradition as well as on scholastic philosophers, it is relevant to the study of the history of metaphysics, Islamic theology (kalām), and Arabic philosophy.

Download or read book Mulla Sadra s Transcendent Philosophy written by Muhammad Kamal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sadradin Shirazi (1571-1640), known also as Mulla Sadra, spoke of the primacy of Being and promoted a new ontology, founding a new epistemology. Mulla Sadra's ontology is an important philosophical turn and contribution to the understanding of the development of Muslim philosophy and thought. This comprehensive study of Mulla Sadra's philosophical thought explores his departure from tradition; his turn to the doctrine of the primacy of Being; the dynamic characteristics of Being and the concept of substantial change; comparisons with Heidegger's fundamental ontology; and the influence of Mulla Sadra's ontology on subsequent Muslim philosophy. Of particular value to students of philosophy, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, philosophy of religion, and general readers who seek to understand Muslim philosophy, this book explores the significance of the doctrine of Mulla Sadra and its impact on subsequent debates in the Muslim world.

Download or read book Islamic Ethics written by Mariam al-Attar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores philosophical ethics in Arabo-Islamic thought. Examining the meaning, origin and development of "Divine Command Theory", it underscores the philosophical bases of religious fundamentalism that hinder social development and hamper dialogue between different cultures and nations. Challenging traditional stereotypes of Islam, the book refutes contemporary claims that Islam is a defining case of ethical voluntarism, and that the prominent theory in Islamic ethical thought is Divine Command Theory. The author argues that, in fact, early Arab-Islamic scholars articulated moral theories: theories of value and theories of obligation. She traces the development of Arabo-Islamic ethics from the early Islamic theological and political debates between the Kharijites and the Murji’ites, shedding new light on the moral theory of Abd al-Jabbar al-Mu’tazili and the effects of this moral theory on post-Mu’tazilite ethical thought. Highlighting important aspects in the development of Islamic thought, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Islamic moral thought and ethics, Islamic law, and religious fundamentalism.

Download or read book Kitab Al qabasat written by Muḥammad Bāqir ibn Muḥammad Dāmād and published by Alhoda UK. This book was released on 2009 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Including Selections from Sayyed Ahmad 'Alawi's Sharoh Kitaab al-Qabasaat."

Download or read book The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition written by Shahid Rahman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: the demise of the logical positivism programme. The answers given to these qu- tions have deepened the already existing gap between philosophy and the history and practice of science. While the positivists argued for a spontaneous, steady and continuous growth of scientific knowledge the post-positivists make a strong case for a fundamental discontinuity in the development of science which can only be explained by extrascientific factors. The political, social and cultural environment, the argument goes on, determine both the questions and the terms in which they should be answered. Accordingly, the sociological and historical interpretation - volves in fact two kinds of discontinuity which are closely related: the discontinuity of science as such and the discontinuity of the more inclusive political and social context of its development. More precisely it explains the discontinuity of the former by the discontinuity of the latter subordinating in effect the history of science to the wider political and social history. The underlying idea is that each historical and - cial context generates scientific and philosophical questions of its own. From this point of view the question surrounding the nature of knowledge and its development are entirely new topics typical of the twentieth-century social context reflecting both the level and the scale of the development of science.

Download or read book Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought written by Ziad Elmarsafy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would a devout Catholic, a committed Protestant, and a Maoist atheist devote their lives and work to the study of esoteric aspects of Islam? How are these aspects 'good to think with'? What are the theoretical and intellectual problems to which they provide solutions? These are the questions at the heart of Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought. The three French specialists of Islam described above form an intellectual and personal genealogy that structures the core of the text: Massignon taught Corbin, who taught Jambet in his turn. Each of them found in the esoteric a solution to otherwise insurmountable problems: desire for Massignon, certainty for Corbin, and resurrection/immortality for Jambet. Over the course of three long chapters focused on the life and work of each writer, the book maps the central place of esoteric Islam in the intellectual life of twentieth and twenty-first century France.

Download or read book Philosophy as a Way of Life written by Pierre Hadot and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1995-08-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a history of spiritual exercises from Socrates to early Christianity, an account of their decline in modern philosophy, and a discussion of the different conceptions of philosophy that have accompanied the trajectory and fate of the theory and practice of spiritual exercises. Hadot's book demonstrates the extent to which philosophy has been, and still is, above all else a way of seeing and of being in the world.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Mull adr adr al D n al Shir z written by Fazlur Rahman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1976-06-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mullā Ṣadrā Shirāzī emerges as an original philosopher who had a sure understanding of his Greek and Islamic predecessors. He is worthy of study by scholars concerned with the development of Islamic philosophy because of his attempt to reconcile various currents of Islamic philosophical thought, particularly the peripatetic tradition of Ibn ʿArabī. Modern existentialists will be interested in his basic concern with the reality of existence and the unreality of essences or general notions.

Download or read book Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics written by Sajjad H. Rizvi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mulla Sadra is one of the most important Islamic philosophers after Avicenna. In this exploration of his philosophy, Sajjad H. Rizvi examines the central doctrine of the modulation of being, and contextualises his work within the intellectual history of philosophical traditions in the Islamic East. Reading and critiquing the works of Mulla Sadra from an analytical perspective, this book pays particular attention to his text the Asfar, a work which, due to its complexity, is often overlooked. Looking at the concept of philosophy as a way of life and a therapeutic practice, this book explores the paradigm of the modulation of being in the philosophical method and metaphysics of Mulla Sadra and considers its different manifestations. Rizvi relates his philosophy to larger trends and provides a review of the field, charting and critiquing the discussion on the topic to date and exploring recent thought in this direction, to show how Sadrian thought was addressed well into the 19th and 20th centuries. This major contribution to the study of Mulla Sadra and the intellectual life of the Safavid period fills an important gap in the field of Sadra studies and Islamic philosophy, and is indispensable to students of philosophy, religion and Islamic studies, and Islamic philosophy in particular.

Download or read book Mull adr Sh r z written by Sajjad Hayder Rizvi and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mulla Sadra Shirazi is the first attempt in English to produce a thorough preparatory study of the intellectual biography of this famous Safavid thinker. Previous attempts by other thinkers have been marred by ideological prejudice and the lack of serious intellectual rigour. A properunderstanding of Islamic intellectual history requires the study of canonical thinkers, of which Mulla Sadra is certainly one in the philosophical tradition of Iran. The book eschews legends and theoretical constructs of bibliography in favour of a rigorous life that draws upon a wide range ofprimary sources, many of which are unpublished, and that demonstrate the significance and context of the intellectual contributions of Mulla Sadra. Mulla Sadra Shirazi is quite a traditional biography in that it seeks to locate the life of the thinker and his works in his historical and intellectualcontent. The course of ideas in Islam is an area of research that is of great interest at the moment; even the study of philosophy has flourished in recent years. Consistently, with recent works on other Islamic philosophers, this book sets the standard for approaching Islamic intellectual historyby insisting upon an historical and source-critical approach, allied with a keen philological, but also philosophical, appreciation of the intellectual life of a thinker. The life is based upon the most recent scholarship on Safavid history and draws widely upon primary sources in Arabic andPersian, including a number of works in manuscript. For students of Islamic thought in the early modern period and those with a particular interest in philosophy in Safavid Iran, this book should be the first point of reference. Mulla Sadra Shirazi will become the foundation for further researchboth on Mulla Sadra and his thought, as well as the thought and intellectual trends of his period.

Download or read book Talking about God and Talking about Creation written by Rahim Acar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study compares Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ conceptions of God, theological language, the nature of creative action and the beginning of the universe. It emphasizes the connection between their positions regarding theological language and their discussions of creation.

Download or read book The Economy of Certainty written by Aron Zysow and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aron Zysow's 1984 Ph.D. dissertation, "The Economy of Certainty," remains the most important, compelling, and intellectually ambitious treatment of Islamic legal theory (usul al-fiqh) in Western scholarship to date. It continues to be widely read and cited, and remains unsurpassed in its incisive analysis of the most fundamental assumptions of Islamic legal thought. Zysow argues that the great dividing line in Islamic legal thought is between those legal theories that require certainty in every detail of the law and those that will admit probability. The latter were historically dominant and include the leading legal schools that have survived to our own day. Zahirism and, for much of its history, Twelver Shi'ism, are examples of the former. The well-known dispute regarding the legitimacy of juridical analogy is only one feature of this fundamental epistemological division, since probability can enter the law in the process of authenticating prophetic traditions and in the interpretation of the revealed texts, as well as through analogy. The notion of consensus in Islamic legal theory functioned to reintroduce some measure of certainty into the law by identifying one of the competing probable solutions as correct. Consequently consensus has only a reduced role, if any, in those systems that reject probability. Another, more radical, means of regaining certainty was the doctrine that regarded the legal reasoning of all qualified jurists on matters of probability as infallible. The development of legal theories of both types, that of Zahirism no less than that of Hanafism, was to a large extent shaped by theology and, most significantly, by Mu'tazilism, and subsequently by Ash'arism and Maturidism. Zysow's important work is published here in full, for the first time, with updated references and some further reflections by the author.

Download or read book Avicenna written by Jon McGinnis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin, played a considerable role in the development of both Eastern and Western philosophy and science. His contributions to the fields of logic, natural science, psychology, metaphysics, theology, and even medicine were vast. His work was to have a significant impact on Thomas Aquinas, among others, who explicitly and frequently drew upon the ideas of his Muslim predecessor. Avicenna also affected the thinking of the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazali, who asserted that if one could show the incoherence of Avicenna's thought, then one would have demonstrated the incoherence of philosophy in general. But Avicenna's influence is not confined to the medieval period. His logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are still taught in the Islamic world as living philosophy, and many contemporary Catholic and evangelical Christian philosophers continue to encounter his ideas through Aquinas's work. Using a small handful of novel insights, Avicenna not only was able to address a host of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic worlds, but also fundamentally changed the direction of philosophy, in the Islamic East as well as in Jewish and Christian milieus. Despite Avicenna's important place in the history of ideas, there has been no single volume that both recognizes the complete range of his intellectual activity and provides a rigorous analysis of his philosophical thinking. This book fills that need. In Avicenna Jon McGinnis provides a general introduction to the thinker's intellectual system and offers a careful philosophical analysis of major aspects of his work in clear prose that will be accessible to students as well as to specialists in Islamic studies, philosophy, and the history of science.

Download or read book An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-07-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only book to deal with classical Islamic cosmology as it was formulated by the Ikhwan al-S'afa al Biruni and Ibn Sina during the tenth and eleventh centuries. These figures influenced all the later centuries of Islamic history and in fact created the cosmological framework within which all later scientific activity in the Islamic world was carried out--the enduring image of the cosmos within which Muslims have lived during the past millennium. Nasr writes from within the Islamic tradition and demonstrates how, based on the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet, the figures treated in this work integrated elements drawn from various ancient schools of philosophy and the sciences. This book is unique in its treatment of classical Islamic cosmology as seen from within the Islamic world-view and provides a key for understanding of traditional Islamic thought.

Download or read book The Study Quran written by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 2048 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and accurate translation of the Quran that offers a rigorous analysis of its theological, metaphysical, historical, and geographical teachings and backgrounds, and includes extensive study notes, special introductions by experts in the field, and is edited by a top modern Islamic scholar, respected in both the West and the Islamic world. Drawn from a wide range of traditional Islamic commentaries, including Sunni and Shia sources, and from legal, theological, and mystical texts, The Study Quran conveys the enduring spiritual power of the Quran and offers a thorough scholarly understanding of this holy text. Beautifully packaged with a rich, attractive two-color layout, this magnificent volume includes essays by 15 contributors, maps, useful notes and annotations in an easy-to-read two-column format, a timeline of historical events, and helpful indices. With The Study Quran, both scholars and lay readers can explore the deeper spiritual meaning of the Quran, examine the grammar of difficult sections, and explore legal and ritual teachings, ethics, theology, sacred history, and the importance of various passages in Muslim life. With an introduction by its general editor, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, here is a nearly 2,000-page, continuous discussion of the entire Quran that provides a comprehensive picture of how this sacred work has been read by Muslims for over 1,400 years.