British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 200626 April 2006 AbstractsDr Khaled El-RouayhebArabic Logic in the Postclassical Age & the Idea of Cultural DeclineAccording to an assumption that is still widely shared, the career of Arabic logic came to an end in the twelfth or thirteenth century. This view has never been founded on a careful and dispassionate study of later work, but in a host of other “armchair” assumptions: That Islamic civilization declined as a whole after the thirteenth century; that Islamic orthodoxy came to reject the “rational sciences”; and that commentaries and super-commentaries on earlier works can only mean pedantic explication of earlier doctrine. Studying the postclassical period of Arabic logic should lead us to reconsider these assumptions. It may also invite us to reflect on certain presumptions about how to write the history of philosophy. Dr Khaled El-Rouayheb is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His current research is on the history of Arabic logic between 1200 and 1800. He is also interested more broadly in the intellectual life of this “post-classical” period of Arabic-Islamic civilisation. His publications include Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and a number of articles: “Sunni Islamic Scholars on the Status of Logic, 1500-1800” Islamic Law & Society (2004); “Was There a Revival of Logical Studies in Eighteenth-Century Egypt?” Die Welt des Islams (2005); “Opening the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab-Islamic Florescence of the Seventeenth Century” International Journal of Middle East Studies (2006).
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