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30Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World (edited book)De Gruyter. 2019.This book brings together the study of two great disciplines of the Islamic world: law and philosophy. In both sunni and shiite Islam, it became the norm for scholars to acquire a high level of expertise in the legal tradition. Thus some of the greatest names in the history of Aristotelianism were trained jurists, like Averroes, or commented on the status and nature of law, like al-Fārābī. While such authors sought to put law in its place relative to the philosophical disciplines, others critici…Read more
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58I—Memory from Plato to DamasciusAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1): 161-184. 2019.Taking its cue from a passage in which the late pagan Neoplatonist Damascius criticizes his predecessor Proclus, this paper explores the way that ancient philosophers understood the soul’s access to its own tacit contents through the power of memory. Late ancient discussions of this issue respond to a range of passages in Plato and to Aristotle’s On Memory. After a survey of this material it is shown that for Damascius, but not Proclus, memory requires a distinction between the subject and objec…Read more
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21M. Ullmann: Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen des 9. Jahrhunderts. Pp. 904. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2002. Cased, €175. ISBN: 3-447-04584-1 (review)The Classical Review 54 (1): 252-252. 2004.
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8Interroga virtutes naturales: Nature in Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical PowerVivarium 57 (1-2): 22-50. 2019.Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power, a polemical work arguing for the political supremacy of the pope, claims that the papacy holds a ‘plenitude of power’ and has direct or indirect authority over all aspects of human life. This paper shows how Giles uses themes from natural philosophy in developing his argument. He compares cosmic and human ordering and draws an analogy between the relations of soul to body and of Church to state. He also understands the pope’s power to be ‘universal’ in na…Read more
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4Health: A History (edited book)Oup Usa. 2018.This book brings together contributions by historians of philosophy and medicine to trace the concept of health from ancient Greece and China, through the Islamic world, down to modern thinkers like Descartes and Freud. Major themes include the parallel between mental and physical health and the difficulty of defining health.
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68Dialectical Methiod in Alexander of Aphrodisias' Treaties on Fate and ProvidenceOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 54. 2018.This article offers an analysis of the argumentative method of two treatises by Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Fate and On Providence, the latter of which is preserved only in Arabic translation. It is argued that both texts use techniques from Aristotelian dialectic, albeit in different ways, with On Fate adhering to methods outlined in Aristotle's Topics whereas On Providence uses the ‘aporetic’ method familiar from texts such as MetaphysicsΒ. This represents a revision of a previous study of A…Read more
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90The simplicity of self-knowledge after AvicennaArabic Sciences and Philosophy 28 (2): 257-277. 2018.Alongside his much-discussed theory that humans are permanently, if only tacitly, self-aware, Avicenna proposed that in actively conscious self-knowers the subject and object of thought are identical. He applies to both humans and God the slogan that the self-knower is “intellect, intellecting, and object of intellection (‘aql, ‘āqil, ma‘qūl)”. This paper examines reactions to this idea in the Islamic East from the 12th-13th centuries. A wide range of philosophers such as Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdā…Read more
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24Animals: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.This volume traces the history of animals in philosophy, from antiquity down to contemporary times. Negative attitudes towards animals, as found in Aristotle and Descartes, turn out to be more nuanced than usually supposed, while remarkable discussions of animal welfare appear in late antiquity, India, the Islamic world, and Kant.
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50Fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī on placeArabic Sciences and Philosophy 27 (2): 205-236. 2017.The twelfth century philosopher-theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī is well known for his critique of Avicennan metaphysics. In this paper, I examine his critique of Avicenna's physics, and in particular his rejection of the Avicennan and Aristotelian theory of place as the inner boundary of a containing body. Instead, Fakhr al-Dīn defends a definition of place as self-subsisting extension, an idea explicitly rejected by Aristotle and Avicenna after him. Especially in his late work, theMaṭālib, Fakh…Read more
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53Abū Ma'šar, al-Kindī and the Philosophical Defense of AstrologyRecherches de Theologie Et Philosophie Medievales 69 (2): 245-270. 2002.This paper explores the philosophical aspects of the "Great Introduction" of Abū Ma'šar, one of the great figures of Arabic astrology and an associate of al-Kindī, the great 9th century philosopher. I argue that the following points of philosophical interest may be found in this text: 1. Astrology is described as a "master science" along the lines proposed by Aristotle, i.e. it provides principles for lower sciences. Also he supplies arguments to ground astrology on methodological grounds, such …Read more
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Platonic pleasures in Epicurus and al-RāzīIn Peter Adamson (ed.), In the age of al-Fārābī: Arabic philosophy in the fourth-tenth century, Nino Aragno. pp. 71--97. 2008.
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Creighton UniversityUndergraduate
Omaha, Nebraska, United States of America