Islam, Sufism, Philosophy Courses
(Fall 2018) AAS/PHI 472/572 Topics in Asian Philosophy: Islamic Thought in Asia
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Designed for upper-division students, this course presents in-depth study of a specific topic in an Asian philosophical tradition. Students are expected to demonstrate knowledge through mastery of native terms and concepts from that tradition. May be repeated as the topic changes.
Course Topic:
Love for wisdom, philo-sophia, was prominent among Muslim scholars in pre-modern times. Achieving wisdom demands a thorough understanding of the nature of the lover, which is to say that it requires a vision of human nature in the context of the entirety of reality. In order to bring out the manner in which Islamic thinkers dealt with the lover of wisdom, we will focus on Abd al-Rahman Jami (d.1492), one of the most influential philosophers, poets, and theologians of the past five hundred years. He was the foremost exponent of the school of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) in the Persianate lands of Islam (that is, from the Balkans through Central Asia and India into China and Indonesia). We will be looking specifically at his commentary on The Flashes, a short treatise on the metaphysics of love by Fakhr al-Din Iraqi (d.1289).
(Fall 2017) AAS/RLS 380 Islamic Classics: Philosophical Psychology
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A study in depth of Islamic texts in translation. Selections may be made from the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Law, and from one or more of the major intellectual schools, such as Kalam (scholastic theology), Peripatetic philosophy, illuminationist theosophy, Sufism, and the “transcendent theosophy” of the School of Isfahan. May be repeated as the topic changes.
Course Topic
Muslim philosophers undertook the task of describing reality as a whole—the Origin of all things, the world out there, and the domain of the human self—in order to map out the path of escaping from ignorance and achieving perfection. In contrast to the Sufis, who engaged in a similar quest, the philosophers explicitly praised and followed Greek wisdom, which they saw as a spiritual discipline of universal application. The main body of this course will consist of readings from the philosophical literature focusing on the nature of the human self and its need to achieve ethical and spiritual transformation in order to reach true happiness. Among the authors we will study, not necessarily in this order, are the following: Plotinus (from the 9th century Arabic translation known as “The Theology of Aristotle”), Muhammad ibn Zakariyyâ Râzî (Rhazes), Ibn Sînâ (Avicenna), al-Ghazâlî (Algazel), Afdal al-Dîn Kâshânî, Mullâ Sadrâ.
(Spring 2017) AAS/PHI 472/572 Topics in Asian Philosophy: Ibn Arabi
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Designed for upper-division students, this course presents in-depth study of a specific topic in an Asian philosophical tradition. Students are expected to demonstrate knowledge through mastery of native terms and concepts from that tradition. May be repeated as the topic changes.
Course Topic:
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) can be considered the greatest mystical philosopher and theologian of the Islamic tradition. Born in Islamic Spain in 1156, he experienced a transformative vision of Unity in late childhood. He dedicated his life to expressing the fruits of that vision in the received language of learning, especially jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and Sufism. His huge corpus of highly sophisticated and controversial writings has challenged scholars ever since, playing a decisive role in mainstream Islamic thought until recent times. The course will focus on his understanding of the most basic human issues, such as the nature of reality, the possibilities of understanding, the purpose of human existence, and the destiny of the human self.
(Spring 2008) CLT 608 Cross-Cultural Contexts: Creative Imagination in Islamic Thought
In 1958 the phenomenologist Henry Corbin published L’Imagination créatrice dans le Soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabi. With this and several other seminal studies of Muslim philosophers and mystics, Corbin argued persuasively that imaginal (not “imaginary”) reality played a central role in the more sophisticated Muslim understandings of the world and the soul. He also demonstrated that the perception of the real presence of this third, intermediary realm, halfway between spirit and body, or mind and matter, prevented the sort of philosophical moves that led to Cartesian dualism and its consequences in the West. With Corbin in the background, we will look at a selection of translated writings from some of the more important theoreticians and poets of Islamic civilization. Participants in the seminar will be expected to write four essays, under the general rubric of “imagination,” investigating whether or not the distance provided by the cultural otherness of Islam can throw light on contemporary intellectual and existential issues.