Personhood in Islamic Phil

Catalog description

Reflection on personhood in Arab-Islamic philosophy is informed, broadly, by two different sources: the Quran, and Quranic Islam more generally, in which personhood is approached via legal, moral, and religious concepts; and falsafa, or Greek (and, in particular, Platonic, Aristotelian, and neo-Platonic) philosophy, where the operative concepts are rather scientific: metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological. This course examines the many ways in which thinkers in the Arab-Islamic tradition, informed by these sources, have considered the existence and nature of persons, both divine and human. Much of the course will focus on the high classical period (9th to 12th c. CE), though we will also cover some significant post-classical, modern, and contemporary thought. Broad topics to be addressed include the existence and attributes of God, the order of the cosmos and the place of human persons within it, human nature, as well as the proper ethical ordering of human life and of the political state. We will discuss these ideas as they operate within the Islamic world and also how they interact with the broader Western philosophical tradition.