Tradition
Persian
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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 replies262 views -
Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?
I draw picture books and the occasional manga. 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…
Started by Rin Matsuda6 replies176 views -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong, and every year a student writes "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…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies268 views -
The West’s picture of ‘Indian philosophy’ is Vedanta-shaped, and it has hidden everyone else
I teach physics and spend weekends with a rationalist association in Karnataka villages, so you can 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…
Started by Arvind Poojary6 replies282 views -
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 Haddad6 replies240 views -
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. I'm a physicist and I hear versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening at…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies192 views -
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 replies189 views -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
I catalogue manuscripts in Alexandria, and I spend a lot of my time with 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…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies182 views -
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 replies174 views -
Reading group: Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998)
I'm a university librarian in Alexandria, and the question I'm asked most by students 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.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies193 views -
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 replies196 views -
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 replies232 views -
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 Leung Chi-ho5 replies218 views -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
I'm an architect in Shiraz, and I spend a lot of time in the old gardens here. 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…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies274 views -
Reading Rumi as love poetry without the path is reading something he did not write
I am an architect in Shiraz, and I grew up 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…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies182 views -
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 replies240 views -
Metaphysics is about what grounds what, not about what exists
I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu. 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…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu5 replies158 views -
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 replies220 views -
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 replies176 views -
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 replies234 views -
Wujūd, brahman, dao: are these even answers to the same question?
I'm an architect in Shiraz, and 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…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies254 views -
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 replies140 views -
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 replies236 views -
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 replies117 views -
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 replies3 views -
Rumi
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī was a Persian-language poet, jurist and Sufi master, born in the region of Balkh in Khorasan, whose family settled in Konya…
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Suhrawardi
Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi was a Persian philosopher, born in Suhraward in northwest Iran, who founded the Illuminationist (Ishraqi) school. Criticising parts of Avicenna's…
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Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī
Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī was a Persian polymath, philosopher, theologian and astronomer, born in Tus in Khorasan. He worked for years in the Ismaili strongholds…
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Mulla Sadra
Persian philosopher of the Safavid period, trained in Isfahan under Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha'i, who founded the school known as the Transcendent Philosophy…
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Not a warehouse: what the Baghdad translators actually did
The usual story says Arabic scholars kept Greek philosophy safe until Europe was ready for it; the translators themselves were doing something far more interesting.
Started by Layla Haddad0 replies138 views