The Sociology of Philosophies

Christian teacher of medicine (137 in Figure 8.2) from Baghdad (who thus probably constituted a network connection to Yahya ibn- ...

plunging into describing the levels of emanation that make up the cosmos, he builds a foundation of systematic definitions and p ...

sations of heresy. Ibn Sina was in a position to stand back and survey the whole development, and then systematically set forth ...

during al-Ghazali’s youth. Al-Qushayri (188 in Figure 8.2), a Nishapur theo- logian from al-Ghazali’s own AshÀarite lineage, had ...

by using the highest techniques of argumentation. In The Incoherence of Philosophy he examines the proofs of the major propositi ...

Al-Ghazali is the focus point at which all the trends of the time gathered. We see the disappearing basis for philosophy and the ...

FIGURE 8.3. MYSTICS, SCIENTISTS, AND LOGICIANS, 1100–1400 ...

in the 10 generations from 1065 to 1400, founded at a nearly regular beat one generation after another.^19 These orders were spr ...

ÀAttar at Nishapur; and in the next generation (and another part of the same network) Rumi. Their poetic style is at the opposit ...

are not abstraction or ideals; light is not a metaphor but the visible spectrum of brightness and color which literally produces ...

The last important outbursts of philosophical creativity came from critics of this syncretizing establishment. Ibn Taymiyah at D ...

just before 1200—from the rest of Islamic philosophy. Influences flowed from the east to this western end of the Islamic world, ...

totle was seen through the lens of Neoplatonism. In Christian Europe he had been known since the time of Boethius (530 c.e.) mai ...

cized Plato’s doctrine of self-subsistent Forms, his own work is a critical synthesis incorporating Form as one of four causes, ...

of the Neoplatonic Aristotle. It was not only the Muslims until 1150, and the Christians prior to the upsurge of Averroism at Pa ...

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three great monotheistic religions. Each has a universalistic core, mixed with particul ...

were court advisers, sometimes viziers and military officials, active in diplo- macy and warfare against the Christian states of ...

began to move along its own lines (see Figure 8.4). At first the Rabbanites alone were active in Spain. The Jewish philosophers ...

Muslim philosophers. Neoplatonism, aside from Isaac Israeli never prominent among the Jews of the east, now came to the fore as ...

language, which is accepted by both Christians and Muslims as the basis of their own religions (Sirat, 1985: 86–87, 97–131; Husi ...