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This book investigates Ibn Taymiyya's approach to some of the core ethical and theological questions of the classical period of Islam and, in doing so, sheds new light on his intellectual identity.
With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics.
Wonder has been celebrated as the quintessential passion of childhood. From the earliest stages of our intellectual history, it has been acclaimed as the driving force of inquiry and the prime passion of thought. Yet for an emotion acknowledged so widely for the multiple roles it plays in our lives, wonder has led a singularly shadowy existence in recent reflections. Philosophers have largely passed it over in silence; emotion theorists have shunned it as a case that sits awkwardly within their analytical frameworks. So what is wonder, and why does it matter? In this book, Sophia Vasalou sketches a "grammar" of wonder that pursues the complexities of wonder as an emotional experience that has carved colorful tracks through our language and our intellectual history, not only in philosophy and science but also in art and religious experience. A richer grammar of wonder and broader window into its past can give us the tools we need for thinking more insightfully about wonder, and for reflecting on the place it should occupy within our emotional lives.
Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral trut...
Sophia Vasalou investigates the 'virtues of greatness' in the Islamic world. Examining the virtue of magnanimity in ancient philosophical ethics and the 'greatness of spirit' in the Arabic tradition, she traces the genealogy of these ideals, explores the influences that shaped them, and highlights the contemporary relevance of these ideals.
Al-Ghazālī and the Idea of Moral Beauty rethinks the relationship between the good and the beautiful by considering the work of eleventh-century Muslim theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). A giant of Islamic intellectual history, al-Ghazālī is celebrated for his achievements in a wide range of disciplines. One of his greatest intellectual contributions lies in the sphere of ethics, where he presided over an ambitious attempt to integrate philosophical and scriptural ideas into a seamless ethical vision. The connection between ethics and aesthetics turns out to be a signature feature of this account. Virtue is one of the forms of beauty, and human beings are naturally disposed...
Questions and answers from two great philosophers Why is laughter contagious? Why do mountains exist? Why do we long for the past, even if it is scarred by suffering? Spanning a vast array of subjects that range from the philosophical to the theological, from the philological to the scientific, The Philosopher Responds is the record of a set of questions put by the litterateur Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to the philosopher and historian Abu 'Ali Miskawayh. Both figures were foremost contributors to the remarkable flowering of cultural and intellectual life that took place in the Islamic world during the reign of the Buyid dynasty in the fourth/tenth century. The correspondence between al-Tawhidi a...
Wonder has often occupied a place of unique importance across a variety of human practices and intellectual activities. At different times and historical periods, it has been hailed as the beginning of philosophy and as the end that philosophy should aspire to pursue; as the motive force of scientific quests and their fruit; as the aim of art and the means art uses to accomplish its aims; and as the religious experience par excellence and the hallmark of a deeper spiritual life. Yet despite the special relationship it has borne to many of our most highly valued intellectual and spiritual practices, wonder remains a neglected and understudied notion. This volume aims to redress this neglect, ...
Devoting especial attention to questions of rationality, scriptural fidelity, and the construction of 'orthodoxy', this volume introduces key Muslim theories of revelation, creation, ethics, scriptural interpretation, law, mysticism, and eschatology. The treatment is firmly set in the historical, social and political context in which Islam's distinctive understanding of God evolved.
In The Measure of Greatness, thirteen scholars explore the various philosophical and theological approaches to the virtue of magnanimity, or greatness of soul, in ancient, medieval, and modern thought.