Tradition
Persian
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Reading group: Suhrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, introduction and Part One
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi (1154–1191) was executed in Aleppo, still young, after falling foul of the authorities. His Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-Ishraq), completed in 1186, founded a school that shaped Persian philosophy for centuries, Mulla Sadra included. The first part is a…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
Rumi and Spinoza: are they describing the same God?
People sometimes say Rumi and Spinoza are describing the same reality. Everything in God, God in everything, the self dissolving into a larger whole. But Rumi's God is a beloved who longs for us and whom we long for, the reed flute…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Mystical experience can count as evidence for what it reveals
William Alston, in Perceiving God (1991), argued that mystical experience is a form of perception, and that beliefs formed through it are prima facie justified in the same way perceptual beliefs are. Richard Swinburne's "principle of credulity" says that if it seems…
Started by Reza Tehrani7 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
What does “primacy of existence” (asalat al-wujud) mean in plain terms?
I've read that Mulla Sadra's central doctrine is the primacy or "fundamentality" of existence over essence. I've also read that this is the opposite of a view held by Suhrawardi, or Mir Damad, or both. I understand the words but not the…
Started by Reza Tehrani3 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: is everything changing at the level of substance?
For Aristotle, motion happens in a few categories only: quantity (growth), quality (a leaf turning red), and place. Substance doesn't move; it's the stable subject of change. When one substance becomes another, that's generation and corruption, not motion. Mulla Sadra disagreed. His…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps. In Japanese aesthetics there's ma,…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. Anyone who spends time around physicists hears versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening.…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies -
Why does mathematics invented for its own sake keep turning up in physics?
Every year a student asks me what the point of complex numbers is. I tell them that for a long time mathematicians themselves treated them as a formal convenience, a trick for solving cubic equations, and that today quantum mechanics cannot be…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Knowledge by presence: does Suhrawardi show why experience resists description?
I edit films in Tehran, which means my working day is spent deciding what time and space should feel like to someone else. The one thing I cannot edit is what it feels like to be me watching the cut. Suhrawardi, the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam5 replies -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
The question I'm asked most by students at the library is some version of "why did the Abbasids translate the Greeks?" The usual answers are curiosity, or the generosity of an enlightened caliph, or the House of Wisdom. Dimitri Gutas's short book…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies -
Bullough’s fog at sea, seen from an edit suite in Tehran
Edward Bullough's 1912 essay on "psychical distance" begins with a fog at sea. For the passengers it is mostly misery and anxiety: delays, danger, the foghorn. But if you can set the practical side aside, the fog becomes strange and beautiful: the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
If I know myself “by presence”, why am I so bad at knowing my own motives? Suhrawardi meets psychology
In my psychology courses, self-knowledge is treated as a model the brain builds of itself, and a fairly unreliable one. People misreport their own motives all the time. So I was surprised to find, in a book about Persian philosophy, the claim…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I keep returning to Mullā Ṣadrā. I've been looking at a comparative table of traditions' answers to "what is real?", and the Islamic row says: created being, contingent, distinct from a necessary existent. The key term is wujūd. That's fair for much…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness
I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
Every year someone in my reading group says "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth centuries and carried to…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else
You can probably guess where I stand on most metaphysics. But this isn't an attack on Vedānta. It's a complaint about how Indian philosophy got packaged. The thesis: what reaches Western readers as "Indian philosophy", or worse "Eastern philosophy", is overwhelmingly Vedāntic…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies -
Mulla Sadra’s substantial motion: what if things change in their very substance?
I am an architect in Shiraz, and Mulla Sadra, who was born here, keeps pulling me back to questions about being. This one has been on my mind since I started reading about persistence. In Aristotle's framework, which Ibn Sina refined, a…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I grew up in Shiraz hearing the Masnavi read aloud. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from its reed-bed, longing to return, is perhaps the most famous passage in Persian. Abroad, Rumi is one of the best-selling poets in the…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
What does Ibn Sina mean by a thing that is “possible in itself, necessary through another”?
I am an architect, not a trained philosopher, so forgive me if this is basic. In reading about Ibn Sina I keep meeting a three-way division: the Necessary Existent in itself, things possible in themselves, and things that are possible in themselves…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
For most of the last century analytic metaphysics followed Quine: the job of ontology is to say what exists, and existence is settled by what our best theories quantify over. Recently a neo-Aristotelian movement has pushed back. Jonathan Schaffer put it bluntly…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies