[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE] PETER ADAMSON: OK. Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming. And thank you for
the invitation. When someone from Google says
that your publications are countless, it really
means something. [LAUGHTER] Actually, I wanted to say that
I'm very grateful to Google, not only for inviting me
but because you give me my best way of
impressing people when I am trying to blow their
minds about my podcast, which is, I tell them about it. And they say, where
can I find it? And I say, just google the
phrase "history of philosophy" and after Wikipedia,
I'll be the first hit. And they're all like, no way. I also sometimes try
to impress people by telling them how many
times it's been downloaded. But I think if I
told you the number, it probably wouldn't
impress you. So I won't bother. OK. So I was asked to come
speak about this book. This is a little
slide I like to call "Shameless Self-Promotion." So I published this
last year, I guess. And it's a very
short introduction to "Philosophy in
the Islamic World" that was published by
Oxford University Press. And nowadays, when I'm
asked what areas I work on, I usually say late-ancient
philosophy and philosophy in the Islamic world. And that's a little
bit of a mouthful. And in fact, when I was
talking to the editors at OUP about what to call the
book, they said, well, can't we just call it
"Islamic Philosophy?" That would be a lot easier
and maybe easier to sell. And I said, no, we can't. And I want to first
of all explain why. So why is it called that? Why is it called philosophy
in the Islamic world? There's really been a
kind of debate about what to call this topic,
Arabic philosophy or Islamic philosophy. Islamic philosophy is
kind of the obvious thing to call it because most
of the philosophers who leap to mind from this
tradition, to the extent that any philosophers at all
leap to mind, are Muslim. And also, a big role
in this tradition is, of course,
played by the context of the Quranic revelation. So a lot of the thinkers
in the tradition are, in fact, sort of
using philosophical ideas to interpret the
Quran or respond to ideas from the Quran. But I think actually, in a
way, although that's true and I wouldn't for
a moment deny it, it maybe prejudges
the tradition as one that's primarily about
responding to the Quran so that we assume that any
philosopher who was working in the Islamic world
would necessarily have been mostly interested
in using philosophy to, for example, prove
that God exists, or prove that
revelation is possible, or prove that Muhammad
was really a prophet and that the things
he said are true. There are certainly thinkers
who were very interested in that project and were
even primarily motivated by doing that. But that doesn't apply
to all philosophers who worked in the Islamic world. And especially it doesn't
apply to philosophers who worked in the Islamic
world who weren't Muslim. And in fact, it
turns out that there were quite a few of these. So just to give some examples,
the people who originally translated Greek philosophical
works into Arabic, and I'll say more about
that in just a moment, were mostly Christians because
they were either from Syria or of Syrian extraction. This is what's going to pass
for ripped-from-the-headlines relevance at my talk--
they were from Syria. And the reason why
they were the ones you could turn to
for translating Greek works into Arabic is that
there was a living tradition in Syrian Christian monasteries
of working with Greek texts and translating them
into Syriac, which is another Semitic language,
and thus, a lot closer to Arabic than Greek was. So they played an important
role in the transmission of Greek philosophy
into the Islamic worlds. And then after that, you
have more Christians who engage with these translations. So a good example is a
group that we sometimes call the Baghdad Aristotelians
who lived in the 10th century. And they were
Christians and known in this metropolis, the
center of the Islamic empire of Baghdad, as experts in
Aristotelian philosophy. Another example, and maybe
a more prominent example, in a way, is that a lot of
important Jewish philosophers have lived in the
Islamic world, including the most famous and important
ever Jewish philosopher, unless you count
Spinoza, which-- topic of a whole other
talk, with Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher. But even perhaps more
famous than Spinoza is Maimonides, who lived
in the 12th century, was born in Islamic
Spain, and when conditions became unfavorable
for Jews, moved to Cairo. So when I wrote the
VSI, and in general when I do research on
this area, I always try to make a big
deal about the fact that if you're going
to study philosophy from this cultural
context, you have to realize that some of them
were Christians and Jews. And you shouldn't,
therefore, call the topic Islamic philosophy. That would just be
kind of bizarre, right? In fact, it would be
more appropriate to call medieval European philosophy
Christian philosophy, than to call this
Islamic philosophy, because in medieval
Christian Europe almost all thinkers were,
in fact, Christians. But we don't do that, so I don't
call it Islamic philosophy. Sometimes people have suggested
calling it Arabic philosophy. And this is in part to
highlight something I just said, which is that philosophy
in the Islamic world more or less kicks off with
the Greek-Arabic Translation Movement in the 9th century. And since a lot of
you are engineers, I should mention that this
isn't just about philosophy. The Translation Movement also
renders many works of science, and even engineering,
into Arabic, so you have works
by Ptolemy, Euclid, and other mathematicians who
are translated into Arabic. They translated not
necessarily everything they could get their hands
on, but an astonishing amount, to the point that, for
example, Aristotle, who for them, just
as in medieval Europe was the most
important philosopher, they could read pretty
much all the Aristotle we can read, but in Arabic. Sometimes you might hear-- if you kind of know anything
about the importance of philosophy in
the Islamic world, one of the things
you might know is that Europeans got their
hands on people like Aristotle through the Islamic world. So the idea would
be Greek philosophy was translated into Arabic in
the 9th and 10th centuries. And then the Arabic versions
were translated into Latin around 1200. And as you'll see, that's going
to be an important feature of the tradition that
I'm going to talk about later on, the translation
into Latin around 1200. And so the thought would
be, oh, well, the reason we can read Aristotle is because
his works were translated into Arabic and then
from there into Latin in a kind of medieval
version of Chinese whispers. That's actually not true
because if you think about it, we have Aristotle in Greek. We don't have to read
him in Arabic and Latin. So actually, we get
Plato and Aristotle from the Byzantine Empire,
which was basically the remnants of
the Roman Empire. After it had collapsed in the
West, it survived in the East. And they still have-- there are manuscripts
of Plato and Aristotle that still exist today. That's how we can
read them in Greek. But although it's not true
that the Greek is completely lost for these guys,
there are some ancient philosophical and
scientific works that are only preserved in Arabic. And it is certainly
true that for a while in the medieval Christian
world, their primary access to ancient philosophy was
through the Arabic tradition. And they used
Muslim philosophers as commentators and guides
to understanding figures like Aristotle. OK. So this whole fact
that Arabic plays a crucial role in the
transmission of knowledge, both science and philosophy,
from the ancient worlds of ancient Greece
and then the Roman Empire into the Islamic
world, that's certainly true. And so an advantage of calling
this field Arabic philosophy is precisely that. I actually am the co-editor
of an earlier book called "The Cambridge Companion
to Arabic Philosophy," which I would now call-- I wish I had called,
actually, "The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy
in the Islamic World." But this is what
we were thinking when we called it that. We were thinking it's
either Islamic or Arabic. And we don't want
to call it Islamic, so we have to call it Arabic. And this seemed like a
good rationale for it. But as we actually already
admitted in the introduction to that book, this is
actually quite misleading. So maybe the most
misleading thing about it is that it suggests that all
philosophical and scientific literature in the Islamic
world was written in Arabic, which just isn't true. Actually, especially as you
go on into the later period, and I'll be saying more
about that in a moment, a lot of philosophical
literature from the Islamic world
is written in Persian. And there are other
languages, too, where they write philosophy,
so, for example, Syriac, which I've already mentioned. So I'm actually not very happy
with Arabic philosophy anymore either. Arabic philosophy has
one other problem, which is that whenever
you say Arabic philosophy, people then come up to you
and very self-righteously say, oh, but you do know that most
of them weren't Arabs, right? Which is true, actually. So a lot of the major figures
from the Islamic world were not ethnically Arabs
but were from Central Asia, including Avicenna
who, as we'll see, is the most important
figure in philosophy of the Islamic world. But I just think
that this just shows that people don't know English
because, in my opinion, Arabic is a language. People aren't Arabic. People are Arab. I don't know what you
all think about this. But to me, as a sort
of native speaker, that's what Arabic an Arab mean. So this is to me, it's
sort of a fallacious reason not to call it
Arabic philosophy. But it's really annoying to keep
getting people who keep saying, well, you know that
they weren't all Arabs. So I just don't really
want to deal with it. There was actually
another phrase, which is a sort of
term of art which has been developed within the
field of Islamic studies, which is the so-called Islamicate. Islamicate would mean
the geographical regions under Muslim dominion, and
that's really what I mean. So I would call it
Islamicate philosophy if I thought people
wouldn't know what the heck I was talking about. But I take it that-- I mean, if this
had been called-- you notice how I keep
getting back to this slide. As an American, I
am a born marketer. I mean, imagine if it was
called Islamicate philosophy. You'd have no idea what
it was about, right? Like, what is that
supposed to mean? So I don't say Islamicate. I say philosophy in
the Islamic world. OK. Now, this is a
little slide I like to call "Shameless
Self-Promotion, Part II." If you actually look at
the bottom of the slide, that's where you get-- if you google "history
of philosophy." So I've been running
a podcast since 2010 whose aim is, as it says
at the top of the books, to cover the entire
history of philosophy without any gaps in 20-
to 25-minute episodes. So it starts with
the Pre-Socratics, the earliest Greek philosophers,
and it goes until I get hit by a bus or meet some other-- or I get to now. So some people say,
well, what will you do, like, when you run
out of history of philosophy? And I say, well, I can
just, like, cover whatever was just published that week. It comes out once a
week every Sunday. And as we already heard, it's
up to Episode 273, I think. There's also about 40
episodes on Indian philosophy, which I've been doing
with Jonardon Ganeri. So one of the important
features of the project is to cover philosophy
in other cultures and also to cover philosophy
in a way that doesn't just mean talking about the
major figures of philosophy. So this is kind of introduction
into this wider project. Oh, and maybe I should explain,
the relevance to the very short introduction is that, in a way,
the very short introduction is kind of like an
introduction to the material that I cover much more
in-depth in this book because this book is about five
times as long as the other one because it's without any gaps. OK. So what does it mean to do
the history of philosophy without any gaps? Well, if you sort of think about
what the history of philosophy means-- so none of you are philosophers
or professional philosophers. But you've all heard of
some philosophers, right? And if you conjure in your mind
who is a philosopher-- everyone sort of think of a philosopher. Don't think of me. Think of just a kind
of generic philosopher. So you're all thinking
of a man probably. You're thinking of a white guy. You're probably even thinking
of an older white guy with a beard, right? So you're basically
thinking of someone who looks like God on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right? And to be fair, there have
been plenty of white guys with beards who
were philosophers. And in fact, if
you start thinking who are some famous
philosophers, like if I spent the rest of the time
of this talk asking you to name philosophers,
I'm sure you would all come up
with plenty of names. So you might come up with Plato,
Aristotle, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes,
Kant, Leibniz, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, right? These are all names that are
presumably known to all of you. If not, you can google them. A little google humor. And of course, these are
all, like, huge figures in the history of philosophy. And when I get to them, I
give them extra coverage. So for example,
Plato and Aristotle got something like
15 episodes apiece. And when I get to Kant,
god knows how many episodes it will take me to cover him. Actually, I'm already sort of
getting night sweats wondering how I'm possibly going to
adequately deal with Kant when I get to him in the podcast. But especially because
I work in sort of more-- lesser known, let's say-- areas of history of philosophy,
it's important to me to try to communicate the idea
that the history of philosophy is not just these
brilliant people who turn up every few centuries
and, apparently, sometimes after a long period of nothing. So if you think
about the list I just gave you, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, that's literally
almost 2,000 years that I jumped over there because
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are 5th and 4th century BCE. And Thomas Aquinas is-- anybody? AUDIENCE: 12th? PETER ADAMSON:
13-- oh, so close. 13th century AD, right,
so he died in the 1270s. And if we played this
game again and I said, OK, name me some
philosophers who lived between
Aristotle and Aquinas, it would be a very
short discussion probably unless you've been
listening to my podcasts, because I've done
hundreds of episodes on what happened in that gap. OK? And if you think about that-- I mean, let's just
step back and talk about that a little bit more. That's more than half of the
history of philosophy, I mean, chronologically. Of course, the closer we
get to the current day, the more text there
is that survives. So we have much more
from the 17th century than we have from
the 12th century. But we have a lot of
information about philosophy, pretty much in an
unbroken line stemming from the most ancient
of the ancient Greeks all the way up to now. And of course, it's
not one single line, because it's actually
multiple lines moving from multiple cultures and
sometimes independently. So Islamic philosophy,
or philosophy in the Islamic world,
as I was saying before, draws from Greek philosophy. But there's also
philosophy in ancient India and ancient China,
which is basically independent of Greek
philosophy, although that's sometimes disputed. But it's primarily
independent, even if there's some filtering
of ideas back and forth. And there's also philosophical
tradition of Africa, of South America,
et cetera, which never gets covered in courses
on the history of philosophy. So I'm trying to cover all
of this in the podcast. I've already done philosophy
in the Islamic worlds. And I'm now doing
Indian philosophy with a co-author named Jonardon
Genari, next year with someone named Chike Jeffers,
who works in Canada. I'll be starting to cover
African philosophy, including the philosophical movements
in the African Diaspora. And I'm hoping to do
Chinese philosophy after that, and then who knows. So one other thing I should
mention about not having any historical gaps
is that, as I said, when you imagine a
famous philosopher, you imagine a woman-- sorry. You imagine a man, right? But there have been plenty
of female philosophers. And to me one of the most
important kind of implications of the project is, alongside
covering philosophy from other cultures, you
cover female philosophers. And you don't cover them
because you're being politically correct or something. You cover them
because they're there. And you're covering the
entire history of philosophy, and why would you
skip them, right? So I have, especially
in the Medieval Period I've been able already
to give a lot of coverage to individual female
thinkers, like Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of
Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, who's there on the
left, Christine de Pizan, who's there on the right who I haven't
gotten to yet but I will. So I think that's
Christine de Pizan. So that's a real
advantage, I think, of the project and
the way I'm doing it. OK. So for the rest of the time, I
want to sort of narrow in now on philosophy in the Islamic
world and tell you about three, kind of, implications of doing
it this way on this topic. So of course, in a sense,
like, covering philosophy in the Islamic
world already at all is sort of filling a gap because
there are arguably no truly famous philosophers
from the Islamic world, famous in the sense that
Descartes and Plato are famous. So almost everyone has heard
of Descartes and Plato. Very few people have
heard of more than one or two Muslim philosophers. If you've heard of
anyone, you might have heard of Avicenna or Averroes. Avicenna lived from the
10th to the 11th century. He died in 1037. Averroes lived in 12th
century Islamic Spain and is the most important
medieval commentator on Aristotle. And Averroes is an
interesting figure because he's bound up
with a kind of narrative that you will often
hear about philosophy in the Islamic world,
which is that it flourishes with Greek-Arabic
translation movements, and then it ends around the
end of the 12th century. And it maybe even ends at a
very specific-- it actually ends on one day, namely, the
day that Averroes has died. And he died in 1198, right at
the end of the 12th century. So if you think about it, this
is, in a way, a very convenient narrative because
the thought would be, oh, well, philosophy
was invented in Greece. Actually, it already existed
in China and India before that. But let's leave that aside-- and maybe Egypt as well. But let's leave that aside. So it begins in Greece. The Roman Empire collapses. Oh, no, philosophy is dead. Oh, no, it's not, because the
Muslims come along and save it and translate it into Arabic. And then, having fulfilled
their historical destiny by carrying the
torch of philosophy for three or four
centuries, they then pass it on to the medieval Christians
who translate it into Latin, and then you get Thomas Aquinas,
scholasticism, the Renaissance, and et cetera. So one of the things I
want to say and emphasize a lot in both the podcast and
the very short introduction is that this is just not true
and that this whole story about philosophy basically
ending around 1200 in the Islamic world,
is a kind of myth. Let me just check the time. So that's one thing
I want to say. Another thing I want to sort
of narrow in on a bit more is to say more about the
Christian philosophers I was mentioning before, just as
an example of what I was saying earlier, which is
that this is kind of an ecumenical
historical phenomenon. It's not only the
story of Muslims using philosophy to
understand the Quran. And the last thing I
want to do, just briefly, is say something about
Islamic theology, which is a kind of test case for
my approach of including absolutely everything
you might want to include in the history of philosophy. OK. So first, something
about philosophy of the later Islamic world. Here's a map which
shows the three-- actually, not all of, but most
of the-- because the Ottoman Empire is cut off there-- but the three later empires
in the Islamic world. So these are the
empires that exist around the time of
early modern Europe, so around the time
of the Enlightenment, or the late Renaissance
and Enlightenment. So, like, Descartes,
Leibniz, that period, this is what the Islamic
world looks like, and moving up into the
17th, 18th centuries. And if you look at
that map, you can see that it's pretty
damn big, right? Incidentally, for
those who don't know, the clash between
Sunni and Shiite Islam today is traceable to
some extent, to the fact that the Ottoman Empire--
the green bit is Sunni, and the Safavid Empire, the red,
pink, orange bit, is Shiite. So when the Safavids
came to power in Iran, they sort of turned
Iran Shiite or made sure that Iran
would stay Shiite. And it still is today. And Muslims also had
control over much of India. And there were philosophers
in all three of these areas. Notice that we're way past
the 12th century here. Here's a selective list
of some philosophers who lived after 1200. OK. Fakhr al-Din al Razi didn't
live much after 1200. But I put him on
because he's a really important and interesting
figure in the history of philosophical theology that
I'll be talking about later on. Razi and Tusi are both
commentators on Avicenna. The Ibn Khaldun, you might
have heard of, actually. He's a very famous
theorist of history and wrote this amazing history
of the Islamic world, where he prefaces it with
an explanation of how civilizations rise and fall. The School of Shiraz,
which exists just before the rise of
the Safavids in Iran, was kind of a group of
Avicenna philosophers who argued about the
interpretation of his works. Mulla Sadra is an important
later mystic philosopher who lives in the Safavid empire. Katib Celebi is an important
Ottoman philosopher. Dara Shikoh is a
really amazing guy. He lived in Mughal, India. And he was a prince who was
assassinated, or actually had been put on trial and killed
by his brothers to get him out of the line of succession. And he was a kind of
scholar who was fascinated with ancient Indian thought. So he translated the
Upanishads and wrote a book called "The Confluence
of the Two Oceans," where he argued that the
teachings of the Quran, as sort of filtered
through Sufism, and the teachings of the
ancient Indian scriptures, like the Upanishads, actually
amounted to the same teachings. So he's quite interesting. Khayrabadi is
another later Mughal, or Indian, rather, philosopher. And then I put on
Mohammed Abduh, who is an interesting
turn-of-the-century philosopher and mention Fatema Mernissi
because she is one of the more interesting female thinkers
in the last century. One of the problems
I actually ran into when I was doing
philosophy in the Islamic world is that I really
wanted to cover-- as I said before, I wanted
to cover female thinkers in the Islamic world. And it's not a very
good picture there. So you find some
interesting female thinkers over the last 150 years or so. Prior to that, there are
quite a few female scholars in the Islamic
world but not anyone who you could really
designate as a philosopher as far as I know. But if anyone has
a counter-example, I would love to hear it. OK. So the point of
that was just to-- sorry. Before I leave this-- so
the point of that was just, I mean, in a way,
I can just show you that this narrative of
decline is wrong by saying, well, here are some people
that the narrative leaves out. Maybe I should say
that there is actually a-- because you might be
sitting there thinking, well, hang on a second. If these people
all exist, then why is it that when we pick up,
like, Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy? Or actually, pretty
much almost any textbook on the history of
philosophy, if it bothers to mention philosophy
in the Islamic world at all, it says, well, it
ends around 1200. Why do we get that idea if-- what's with all these people? So how did this happen? And the answer goes
back to something I said earlier, which is
the Arabic-Latin Translation Movement. So remember, I said that
happened around 1200. It was mostly in Spain where
the Islamic and Christian worlds were confronting one another. And it actually even
involved collaboration between Christian, Muslim,
and Jewish scholars who would sort of team
up to translate things from Arabic into Latin. And the effect of that was to
translate not just Greek works, like Aristotle, but also
works by Muslim philosophers, like Avicenna and Averroes. So the death of philosophy
in the Islamic world to some extent is
an illusion created by the date of that
translation movement, because what it meant
was that anyone who lived after that, or too
far East to be translated around 1200 in Spain, was
just unknown in Europe. And because they were
unknown in Europe, they played no
role in influencing people like Aquinas,
and more generally medieval scholasticism. And that further meant that in
the 19th and 20th century when modern-day scholars
turned their attention to look at philosophy
in the Islamic world, they thought, well,
what we need to do is study Avicenna and Averroes. They read them in the
Medieval Latin translation, or they even learned Arabic
and read them in the original. But they weren't
interested in looking at later thinkers who
had no impacts on Europe, like these people. So in a way, the
tradition splits. And until very
recently, most scholars have only been
interested in the kind of line of Islamic
philosophy that gets received in the Medieval West. OK. So Christian
philosophers, like I said, one of the most important
roles of Christians in the philosophical
tradition I've been describing is the translation of works
from Greek into Arabic. And I just wanted to
mention a few examples. So there's this guy named Hunayn
ibn Ishaq who was from Iraq. And his son was named
Ishaq ibn Hunayn. Ibn means "son of." And it's actually-- this sort
of confusing naming practice is quite common, unfortunately. And they're a very
interesting couple of guys. So Hunayn was raised
to be able to speak classical Greek in his family. So he tells a story about
being told to recite Homer as a child to impress visitors
to their home, which I'm sure worked. And he was a specialist
in medical literature. He translated the works of the
late ancient medical authority Galen from Greek into Arabic,
or from Greek into Syriac And then he would often have an
assistant translate the Syriac into Arabic because
that's easier. And his son, Ishaq ibn
Hunayn, was probably the greatest translator
of Aristotle into Arabic. So they're a one-family
factory for rendering Greek works of philosophy
and science into Arabic. And they were both Christians. There were other Christians
around the same time who collaborate with Muslims,
with the Muslims basically paying them and also telling
them what they want translated. One of the interesting
things to look at is what things they
translate and how early. So for example, one of
the choices they make is that, early
on, they translate works that will help them engage
in dialectical disputation. And the idea here
seems to be that they don't want the Christians
to be the only people who know how to make good
arguments, because then they'll lose in the public
debates over whether Islam is better than Christianity. So ironically,
they pay Christians to translate books
to give them the kind of argumentative weapons
to argue with Christians. And a good example
of this, actually, is Yahya ibn 'Adi, who is
a really fascinating figure for whom we have a lot of works,
including a bunch of works that were only just discovered
in a manuscript that's held in Tehran just a few years ago. And I've been involved in
editing and translating a few of these treatises. He's really interesting because
he's a Christian philosopher who lives in Baghdad, but he had
Muslim colleagues who were also members of the same school. And we have an exchange between
him and a Jewish philosopher, where the Jewish
scholar asked him questions about Aristotle and
Yahya ibn 'Adi writes back and explains the answer. So it's a really good example
of the way that philosophy was a freeway interchange
between the three Abrahamic faiths in
the Islamic world. Another thing I just
wanted to mention briefly, although I mentioned
it in passing before, is that this language of
Syriac which is, as I said, another Semitic
language, was not only an intermediary
text for translating from Greek into Arabic,
but was actually used to write philosophy. So there's another post-1200
thinker, Bar Hebraeus who actually wrote in Syriac. And as I already
mentioned, a lot of important Jewish philosophers
lived in the Islamic world I've already mentioned
Maimonides, that's Maimonides. Earlier on in the
10th century, there is a philosopher Saadia
Goan, who lived in Iraq. And one reason I
want to mention him is that, when you
read his works, he's commenting on
the Hebrew Bible from a philosophical,
theological point of view. And some of the ideas he's using
are taken from the Greek-Arabic translation movements. But other ideas come
from this tradition, and this is the last
thing I want to tell you. Still on time. So kalam. Kalam is an Arabic
word meaning "word." So it's the Arabic for "word." And it is usually used to refer
to an intellectual tradition in the Islamic world,
which is sometimes translated as rational
theology or Islamic theology. But it may be important to
say that Kalam doesn't have anything to do etymologically
with the word theology, which actually is a Greek
word originally, whereas the Greek the Arabic
word for philosophy is falsafa. So it's derived directly from
the Greek word for philosophy. And I would say there's a quiet
debate going on in my field, this is the kind of thing we
argue about at conferences. It's also fascinating. I'm sure you're really jealous
about these wonderful arguments we have over coffee. So there's a debate going
on about whether the study of philosophy in
the Islamic world should include this
material, because there's a whole separate intellectual
tradition, this kalam tradition, where
what they're doing is giving rational elucidations,
arguments, and interpretations of the Koran and other
Islamic materials. So one way to
think about this is that it's very
much like the fact that, in medieval Latin Europe,
a lot of the philosophers do theology. So for example, the most
famous work of Thomas Aquinas, who I've mentioned
numerous times, is the Summa
Theologica, the summary or the summa of theology,
and he was a theologian. There was in the
medieval university, there was actually a faculty
called the theology faculty, and most of the important
medieval Latin philosophers were actually theologians,
professionally theologians. So my attitude about
this, effectively, is, well, if we're willing
to count people like Aquinas and other medieval
theologians as philosophers, then we should count
these guys, too. And in fact, I have
a thought experiment I'd like people to
entertain, which is imagine that they
hadn't translated Aristotle into Arabic. So you wouldn't have people
like Avicenna or Averroes, who are primarily
inspired by Aristotle. All you would have had is
this, this kalam stuff. Well, what would happen now
when historians of philosophy turn to the Islamic world and
looked for stuff to study? They would just
treat this as part of the history of philosophy. Completely
unproblematic, really, just as we treat medieval
Christian theology as part of the history of philosophy. But instead, what we get is
that, in part because there was this distinction in the
Islamic world itself between falsafa, philosophy,
and kalam, theology, people tend to treat the
falsafa part, the part that's inspired by Aristotle,
as the real philosophy, and this stuff
not as philosophy. But I think this
is just another way of missing a bunch
of philosophically interesting material. And so this whole
project that I have of trying to fill in the gaps
of the history or philosophy, to me, means that you should
take things like kalam seriously as a part of
the history of philosophy. Also, by the way,
things like Sufism, which I also covered in
this series, and even things like the physical sciences,
like theories of optics, theories of physical
motion, and so on and even the history of
mathematics, I try to cover that in the
podcast series as well. And a little bit in the
very short introduction. OK, so just to wrap up,
what's the point of all this? So as you might have
been able to tell by now, I'm really a history
of philosophy nerd. And in fact, the reason I
do the podcasts, in a way, is just curiosity about
the history of philosophy. And for me, the point
of it is to tell the history of philosophy
as one continuous story, so a narrative that doesn't
miss anything out. But someone might say, well, I'm
not really interested in that. It's not like normal
history, where you need to know each
thing that happens. What we should care about is
the big ideas, the greatest figures, and what they said. So I'm perfectly happy
to be told about Kant, but I don't want to
be told about all of the other random little
German figures that Kant was reading and responding to
because they're probably quite boring. And to be honest, it's at
least tacitly the attitude that most historians
of philosophy have, if only because of lack
of time and energy. But I think this is a mistake,
and there are several reasons I think it's a mistake. One is that if you do genuinely
want to understand someone like Plato or
Aquinas or Kant, you had better know what
they were responding to. And Kant isn't responding to the
last most famous philosopher. He's responding to his
contemporaries, people in the previous generation,
dozens and dozens of authors who are now forgotten. And of course, that's
true for everyone in the history of philosophy. It's a lot like
the history of art. So if you go to museums,
there's the really famous people like Picasso. But then in the same
galleries, there's paintings by people you
haven't necessarily heard of, and you can see that
Picasso's in dialogue with these less famous people. It's the same thing in
the history of philosophy. But in addition to
that, it's just not true that the really interesting
philosophical ideas only turn up in the most famous authors. They have a better hit rate. There's more interesting
ideas per page, maybe, or they just have a larger
total number of great ideas. And that's why we think
they're so awesome. But actually, a
lot of supposedly minor or lesser-known figures
are just as interesting, like Avicenna, for instance. And even more minor figures
may have a brilliant argument or idea somewhere in there. Otherwise, rather
derivative and turgid works. So I think if what you're
interested in is finding good philosophy, you should look
everywhere where it might be. And you should
take it wherever it comes, even if it's in
a work that's primarily not a philosophical work,
like a theological work or a mystical work. And the other thing which I
haven't said very much about, but if you want, we can
talk about it in the Q&A, is, well, how does
all of this relate to what's going on in the
contemporary Islamic world? I'm not an expert on
contemporary Islamic culture or politics. But even I can see that it's
intuitive and obvious in a way that, if philosophy
in the Islamic world had ended in 1200, it would
be of very minimal relevance for what's going on
now, because that was-- I'm not very good at
math, you're probably all very good at math, but
it was a long time ago. Whereas if we take
seriously the idea that philosophy
and Islamic world is a continuous
tradition that does survive the death of Averroes
and go on century after century into empires like the Ottoman
and [? Seljuk ?] Empire, whose political structures
still, in a way, structure the contemporary
political scene in the Islamic
world, then that's a big step in the
direction of seeing how these historical
traditions affect the world we're living in today. OK, thanks very much. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER 1: Thank you very much. We do have time for questions. Please wait for the microphone. AUDIENCE: Hello. Nice. Very interesting talk. And we have been talking
more about the interaction with the West and
the Arabic world. And so what about the
similar kind of interaction that happened to the east,
to India, Persia, or China? We know that, through the
art, through the mathematics, a lot of interaction
has happened. So what about on the
philosophical side? Is there, more
specifically, is there anything that the
Indian philosophy, whether it has been
influenced by Arabic in a major Islamic world
philosophy in some major way? And reverse also. PETER ADAMSON: Right, OK. AUDIENCE: Having heard about
anything like that in the past? PETER ADAMSON: So what
was the last part? The India-- AUDIENCE: In the reverse. How the Indian philosophy
affected or influenced or enhanced the Islamic
world philosophy. PETER ADAMSON: OK. Yeah, so actually one of the
questions I get most often, especially now that I'm doing
a podcast on Indian philosophy, is whether Indian philosophy was
influenced by Greek philosophy, or vice versa. And I tend to be a
skeptic about that because there is no
Sanskrit Greek translation movement, or vice versa. You've got a lot of
striking similarities. For example, just to take
one scientific example, there's a theory of the four
humors in ancient medicine. Blood, bile, the
two kinds of bile, and phlegm, which
constitute the human body. And there's a very similar
humoral theory in India, although it's not
the same humors, and there's five and not four. So it doesn't match up exactly,
but it makes you think. And we also have
very concrete cases where Greek astronomy
and astrology affects India, and vice versa. So that's clear. But I actually,
generally speaking, I don't personally
think that the influence of Indian philosophy
on Greek philosophy was strong, if it
was there at all. And the reverse, as far
as I can tell, nothing. With Islam, it's very different. So obviously, first of
all, the Islamic world is very different
from India and China because it's massively
engaged with Greek philosophy, as I've been saying. It is also engaged
with Indian culture. So I mentioned Dara Shikuh. He is really late, so
he's an interesting case. But there's also a contemporary
of Avicenna's named Al-Biruni, who in fact, wrote an
exchange of letters with Avicenna, like the
other one that I mentioned, where Biruni asks tricky
questions about science and philosophy, and Avicenna
has to try to answer. And Biruni wrote a
work called Al-Hind, meaning India, in which
he's basically interviewed-- he lives very near
India, and he's speaking to, basically,
prisoners of war or guests of the [INAUDIBLE] war lord. And he interviewed them
about their culture, and wrote this huge work about
Indian culture and religion. And it has some stuff about
philosophy in it as well. So that's an early case that's. So that would be 10th or 11th
century, so it's around 1100. No, sorry, it's around 1000 AD. And really, from
that point on, you have an interweaving of
Indian and Islamic culture. And of course, the Mughal
Empire is an Indian empire that's Islamic. So there's no doubt
that, once you get past the kind of formative
early period of Islam, you have a lot of interaction
between Islam and India. Prior to that,
it's more minimal. But you find very strong
influence, especially in the sciences, like
in astronomy again. So if you look into Islamic
astronomy and astrology, they make constant
reference to Indian theories of astronomy and astrology. They even talk about
the Indian world cycles and how long they
are and things like that. So there's plenty of
evidence for that, for the Islam-India exchange. SPEAKER 1: More questions? AUDIENCE: Hi there. One question that
you mentioned, just to expand a bit on the Africa
side, what is the connection, or is there a connection,
with Islamic works, especially with the
Library of Alexandria and the Tunisian
centers of influence when they were under the
Ottoman occupation, basically? PETER ADAMSON: Yeah, OK. So actually, just
as, for a while, philosophy in the
Islamic world is just part of Indian philosophy,
because the Mughal Empire's Indian. So the Ottoman Empire, to
a large extent, is African. I mean, not to a large extent. But part of it's African. And I mentioned at
least one thinker who's from Africa,
namely Ibn Khaldun. So often, people talk
about the Maghreb, the Western Islamic world,
which for a while, of course, included Spain. And you can think about
Islamic Spain, Northern Africa, all the way over to
Egypt as a cultural unit, which is the Western analog
to the Islamic heartlands in, basically, Iraq and
Iran, and then further into Central Asia. So on the one hand, that's
true for the Islamic world. But also hearing about late
antiquity, the Roman Empire, to a large extent,
is North African. By the way, one of my
favorite tips to give people is, if you're ever
playing 20 questions, you have this game where
you think of someone, they have to-- So usually, people
will try to narrow down who you are thinking of by
finding out where they're from. Pick Saint Augustine,
because Saint Augustine is from Northern
Africa, from Tunisia, and no one will ever get that. So if they think, OK, I'm trying
to think of an African person, they'll never come up
with Saint Augustine. Of course, now that
we've videoed this and put it on the Internet,
it's not nearly as good a tip. OK, and then you just mentioned
the Library of Alexandria. So that Alexandria is really
the last phase of philosophy in late antiquity. And when these guys translated
Greek philosophy into Arabic, they aren't only translating
things like Aristotle. They're translating the
commentaries written on Aristotle in Alexandria. So actually, both
in late antiquity, in the period of
the Roman Empire, and then also during
the Islamic empire, you have Northern Africa
completely involved culturally. And so it's very
unhelpful here to think as we normally do about Europe. Because actually what you've
got is a Mediterranean sphere, which includes the Byzantine
Empire in that period as well until it
falls to the Ottomans. And then you've
got another sphere, which is the Islamic
east, which actually is where most of the
action is philosophically, but not all of the action. So really, North
African philosophy is constantly involved. And in fact, one of the
things I've been talking to with my future
co-author Chike about is, how do we deal with the
fact that I already covered a bunch of African philosophy? Because we're going to start
by talking about ancient Egypt. But actually, I
already covered a bunch of African philosophers, like
these Alexandrian commentators and Augustine. So we're just going
to mention that and say go listen
to the old episode if you want to know about that. And then move on. But you're right that
that's completely integrated into everything
that I was just saying really. AUDIENCE: So what are
the different motives that actually drove these
philosophers to actually go about their work? So for example, you
mentioned some doing it for the purpose of
debating religion, say, whereas others may do
it just purely academically, as it were? PETER ADAMSON: Yeah. Yeah, so of course, that
varies from thinker to thinker. One thing that seems
to have happened in both the Latin medieval
and medieval Islamic worlds is that you get a kind of
person who considers himself, and it's always a him, to be
a professional philosopher. So in the Latin
medieval context, it's not these theologians. I mentioned there's
a theology faculty. There's also something called
the arts faculty, where they taught students logic. And by the way, just
an interesting fact, the students are teenagers. A medieval university student
would have been starting off at 13 or 14, and they would
be taught Aristotelian logic. And then they would
move up and maybe become a master
at the university, either of arts or theology. And these arts guys
were not theologians, and were very clear that that's
not what they were doing. So for example, there's the
14th century philosopher named Jean Buridan who just
says, well, I'm an arts master. I do logic and physics. I do Aristotle. I'm a specialist in Aristotle. And this theology stuff is
above my pay grade right. And you have the same
kind of thing going on in the Islamic world. So especially someone
like Averroes, he was actually a
Muslim jurist as well. But in his
philosophical works, he very explicitly presents himself
as an expert on Aristotle, whose explaining Aristotle
is his intellectual mission is to recover and explain
the teachings of Aristotle, because he just thinks
Aristotle's the greatest thinker who has ever lived. And then when he comes to
think about how that relates to the Koran, he
says philosophers are the people in
the best position to interpret the Koran because
they already know what's true. Because they have
proofs and everyone else is just kind of
lost in the dark. And they should follow the
surface meaning of the Koran, but they shouldn't really
try to interpret it, because they'll just come up
with all kinds of wacky ideas. Whereas philosophers
actually know the truth, and so they can
sort of explain how the Koran is
expressing something they already know to be true. So that's a very radical
rationalist project. And it's unusual. Most philosophers have
a much more nuanced view about the relationship
between philosophy and their Abrahamic faith,
whichever of the three that it is. And they may or may
not admit that there are certain things you can know
through revelation that you wouldn't be able to
know through reason. But generally speaking,
this may surprise you, the philosophers in the Islamic
world in all three faiths tend to be more rationalist than
the ones in medieval Europe. So you very commonly
get the idea that you wind up with the
same truth through revelation or reason, and they agree. And there isn't really much
that revelation will tell you that you wouldn't already
have known through philosophy. I mean, maybe like how many
times a day you should pray or something, you wouldn't
be able to figure that out. But that God exists,
what God is like, what His relationship to the universe
is like, what our soul is like, what virtue is, [INAUDIBLE]. This is all something
they think they can get through the
Greek-inspired philosophical sources. SPEAKER 1: Yep. Over there. AUDIENCE: I'm
wondering if there are any Islamic world-based
researchers, philosophers that are writing about the
history of philosophy in the Islamic world. Because if you consider
yourself slightly Western, are there any biases that
you think you might have? PETER ADAMSON: No doubt. Yeah. Yes, definitely. And in fact, one of the
things. things-- so actually, if we go back to my lists. This guy, the fifth one
on the list, Mulla Sadra, is still seen in Iran as a very
major thinker who continues to be studied seriously. Not as a historical
figure, but as a serious source of
philosophical inspiration in Iran. Not so much in other parts
of the Islamic world. I mean, the situation
in the Islamic world is very complicated,
as you might imagine. There's a lot of different
cultures and countries with different university
systems and so on. But certainly, there
are many universities in the Islamic world where they
teach kalam and philosophy, maybe as two
separate disciplines, and they do do a
history of philosophy. However, of course,
they're also very interested in
European philosophy. So one of the things
that has happened since the late 19th century
is that European ideas, philosophical as well
as scientific ideas, obviously, have been-- I mean, actually, there's
a permanent engagement between the Islamic world
and European thought. But specifically, European
philosophy, like, say, Marxism, for example, has played a
major role in generating many of the political movements that
we've seen in the Islamic world over the last
century-and-a-half. And that continues
to be the case. So historians of
philosophy there obviously pay more attention to the
history of Islamic philosophy than we do. But they pay a lot of
attention to the history of European philosophy as well. Something I'm not
so sure about is whether you'd find very
many people there who say, oh, I'm just a historian,
which is my-- anyway, that's my bias is this pretense of
neutrality and like I'm a blank and I'm just telling
you what they thought, and I have no pre-suppositions
or philosophical biases of my own. Which, of course, can't be true. But by definition,
I can't tell you about the biases I
have I'm not aware of. So what I'm trying to do is be a
neutral, completely open-minded interpreter who is
interested in everything, and just wants to explain it
in as clear a way as possible. That's my goal. But obviously, I admit
that I can't possibly be attaining that, but that's
what I'm striving to do. And I'm not sure you'd find too
many thinkers, actually, here or there, who have that
purely historical approach. I mean, most historians
of philosophy wouldn't readily admit to
that in Europe, either. So it's an unusual stance. SPEAKER 1: We, unfortunately,
are out of time. Thank you very much, Peter. PETER ADAMSON:
Thanks for coming. [APPLAUSE] as
