The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy provides the advanced student or scholar a set of introductions to each of the world's major non-European philosophical traditions. It offers the non-specialist a way in to unfamiliar philosophical texts and methods and the opportunity to explore non-European philosophical terrain and to connect her work in one tradition to philosophical ideas or texts from another. Sections on Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, East Asian Philosophy, African Philosophy, and Recent Trends in Global Philosophy are each edited by an expert in the field. Each section includes a general introduction and a set of authoritative articles written by leading scholars, designed to provide the non-specialist a broad overview of a major topic or figure. This volume is an invaluable aid to those who would like to pursue philosophy in a global context, and to those who are committed to moving beyond Eurocentrism in academic philosophy.

Ibn Babawayh - also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq - was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vanishing of the twelfth imam, al-Saduq represents a pivotal moment in Twelver hadith literature, as this Shi'i community adjusted to a world without a visible imam and guide, a world wherein the imams could only be accessed through the text of their remembered words and deeds. George Warner's study of al-Saduq's work examines the formation of Shi'i hadith literature in light of these unique dynamics, as well as giving a portrait of an important but little-studied early Twelver thinker. Though almost all of al-Saduq's writings are collections of hadith, Warner's approach pays careful attention to how these texts are selected and presented to explore what they can reveal about their compiler, offering insight into al-Saduq's ideas and suggesting new possibilities for the wider study of hadith.

The Anthropology of Islamic Law shows how hermeneutic theory and practice theory can be brought together to analyze cultural, legal, and religious traditions. These ideas are developed through an analysis of the Islamic legal tradition, which examines both Islamic legal doctrine and religious education. The book combines anthropology and Islamicist history, using ethnography and in-depth analysis of Arabic religious texts. The book focuses on higher religious learning in contemporary Egypt, examining its intellectual, ethical, and pedagogical dimensions. Data is drawn from fieldwork inside al-Azhar University, Cairo University's Dar al-Ulum, and the network of traditional study circles associated with the al-Azhar mosque. Together these sites constitute the most important venue for the transmission of religious learning in the contemporary Muslim world. The book gives special attention to contemporary Egypt, and also provides a broader analysis relevant to Islamic legal doctrine and religious education throughout history.

M. Hakan Yavuz offers an insightful and wide-ranging study of the Gulen Movement, one of the most imaginative developments in contemporary Islam. Founded in Turkey by the Muslim thinker Fethullah Gulen, the Gulen Movement aims to disseminate a ''moderate'' interpretation of Islam through faith-based education. Its activities have fundamentally altered religious and political discourse in Turkey in recent decades, and its schools and other institutions have been established throughout Central Asia and the Balkans, as well as western Europe and North America. Consequently, its goals and modus operandi have come under increasing scrutiny around the world.
Yavuz introduces readers to the movement, its leader, its philosophies, and its practical applications. After recounting Gulen's personal history, he analyzes Gulen's theological outlook, the structure of the movement, its educational premise and promise, its financial structure, and its contributions (particularly to debates in the Turkish public sphere), its scientific outlook, and its role in interfaith dialogue. Towards an Islamic Enlightenment shows the many facets of the movement, arguing that it is marked by an identity paradox: despite its tremendous contribution to the introduction of a moderate, peaceful, and modern Islamic outlook-so different from the Iranian or Saudi forms of radical and political Islam-the Gulen Movement is at once liberal and communitarian, provoking both hope and fear in its works and influence.

This is the first study to compare the philosophical systems of secular scientific philosopher Mario Bunge (1919-2020), and Moroccan Islamic philosopher Taha Abd al-Rahman (b.1945). In their efforts to establish the philosophical underpinnings of an ideal modernity these two great thinkers speak to the same elements of the human condition, despite their opposing secular and religious worldviews. While the differences between Bunge's critical-realist epistemology and materialist ontology on the one hand, and Taha's spiritualist ontology and revelational-mystical epistemology on the other, are fundamental, there is remarkable common ground between their scientific and Islamic versions of humanism. Both call for an ethics of prosperity combined with social justice, and both criticize postmodernism and religious conservatism. The aspiration of this book is to serve as a model for future dialogue between holders of Western and Islamic worldviews, in mutual pursuit of modernity's best-case scenario.

This book offers a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the Kitab al-Madhal, which opens Avicenna's (d. 1037) most comprehensive summa of Peripatetic philosophy, namely the Kitab al-Sifa'. For the first time, the text is established together with a stemma codicum showing the genealogical relations among 34 manuscripts, the twelfth-century Latin translation, and the literal quotations by Avicenna's first and second-generation students. In this book, Avicenna's reappraisal of Porphyry's Isagoge is examined from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. The key-features of Avicenna's theory of predicables are analyzed in the General Introduction and in the Commentary both in their own right and against the background of the Greek and Arabic exegetical tradition. Readers shall find in this book the first systematic study of the Madhal which, in addition to being the only logical work of the Sifa' ever transmitted in its entirety both in Arabic and in Latin, is crucial for understanding Avicenna's conception of universal predicables at the crossroads between logic and metaphysics.

This is an era when the Islamic World is making a range of attempts to redefine itself and to grapple with the challenges of modernity. Many schools of thought have emerged which seek to position modern Islam within the context of a rapidly changing contemporary world. Exploring and defining the relationship between religion and knowledge, Ismail Rafi Al-Faruqi, a distinguished 20th century Arab-American scholar of Islam, formulated ideas which have made substantial contributions to the Islam-and-modernity discourse. His review of the interaction between Islam and knowledge examines the philosophy behind this relationship, and the ways in which Islam can relate to our understanding of science, the arts, architecture, technology and other knowledge-based fields of enquiry. This book includes contributions from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, John Esposito, Charles Fletcher and others, and will prove an essential reference point for scholars of Islam and students of philosophy and comparative religion.

Ruth Glasner presents an illuminating reappraisal of Averroes' physics. Glasner is the first scholar to base her interpretation on the full range of Averroes' writings, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. She reveals that Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics - the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion - more than once. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics which Glasner calls 'Aristotelian atomism'. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars, and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, are shown not only to have originated with him, but to have been fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as 'the commentator' and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.

This book offers for the first time a comprehensive study of the reception and reworking of the Peripatetic theory of the soul in the Kitab al-Nafs (Book of the Soul) by Avicenna (d. 1037). This study seeks to frame Avicenna's science of the soul (or psychology) by focusing on three key concepts: subject, definition, and activity. The examination of these concepts will disclose the twofold consideration of the soul in Avicenna's psychology. Besides the 'general approach' to the soul of sublunary living beings, which is the formal principle of the body, Avicenna's psychology also exhibits a 'specific orientation' towards the soul in itself, i.e. the human rational soul that, considered in isolation from the body, is a self-subsistent substance, identical with the theoretical intellect and capable of surviving severance from the body. These two investigations demonstrate the coexistence in Avicenna's psychology of a more specific and less physical science (psychologia specialis) within a more general and overall physical one (psychologia generalis).

In this book the author argues that the Falasifa, the Philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age, are usefully interpreted through the prism of the contemporary, western ethics of belief. He contends that their position amounts to what he calls 'Moderate Evidentialism' - that only for the epistemic elite what one ought to believe is determined by one's evidence. The author makes the case that the Falasifa's position is well argued, ingeniously circumvents issues in the epistemology of testimony, and is well worth taking seriously in the contemporary debate. He reasons that this is especially the case since the position has salutary consequences for how to respond to the sceptic, and for how we are to conceive of extremist belief.

This book is an attempt to explain how, in the face of increasing religious authoritarianism in medieval Islamic civilization, some Muslim thinkers continued to pursue essentially humanistic, rational, and scientific discourses in the quest for knowledge, meaning, and values. Drawing on a wide range of Islamic writings, from love poetry to history to philosophical theology, Goodman shows that medieval Islam was open to individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism, even liberalism.

Persia is home to one of the few civilizations in the world that has had a continuous tradition of philosophical thought for over two and a half millennia. As Islamic theology developed in the Middle Ages, many of its schools interacted with existing Persian philosophical currents and evolved into a distinctive philosophical 'Kalam', or dogmatic theology. Among the definitive masters of both Shi'i and Sunni theologians were numerous Persians, chief among them Al-Ghazzali and Fakhr al-Din Al-Razi, who are prominently represented here. Important selections from both Shi'i and Sunni theological schools (including Mu'tazila and Ash'ariyya) are included in the volume, many of which have never before been available in translation in the West until now.

In tenth-century Baghdad, the Mu'tazila theologians believed good and evil could be distinguished through human reason, while in the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century, rationalism served to express both the connections and boundaries of Islam in a sphere of religious pluralism. Universality in Islamic Thought discusses specific applications of rationalism in Islamic thought - from the Mu'tazila of Iraq and the Hanafi school of Islamic Law to the Chishti mystics of Mughal India - to explore the boundaries, morality and utility of the universalist principle as conceived by Islamic scientists, scholars, theologians and mystics across half a millennium. Providing a long-overdue and groundbreaking study of rationalism in Islam, this is the first methodological examination of how rationalism served - or did not serve - as a bridge between Muslims and non-Muslims during one of the most vital periods of Islamic intellectual activity. Bringing together contributions from leading academics such as Wilferd Madelung and Carl W Ernst, this is essential reading for scholars and students of intellectual history and Islamic studies.