Conceptions of Nature in Perso-Islamic Early Modernity: Theories of Causality and Graeco-Arabic Philosophy in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Context

The fifteenth-century Ottoman world was a dynamic seedbed of philosophical and theological debates, a period marked by numerous adjudications (sing. muḥākama) produced by certain celebrated scholars called the "verifiers" (sing. muḥaqqiq), who synthesized different domains of knowledge, including theology, philosophy, or Sufism. Focusing on two important adjudications written on the famed twelfth-century theologian Abū Ḥamīd al-Ghazālī's (d. 505/1111) The Incoherence of the Philosophers, this presentation will concern the theories of causality purported by two prominent fifteenth-century Ottoman scholars, Ḫocazāde Muṣliḥuddīn (d. 893/1488) and cAlā' al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 887/1482), who arbitrated among classical Graeco-Arabic philosophy (falsafa) and philosophical theology (kalām). Among the two, Ḫocazāde especially developed a unique position by incorporating synthetic elements from Graeco-Arabic philosophy based on the works of Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037), whose works were thought to be ignored by the Ottoman scholarship according to modern scholarship

more details: griffin.orlando@duke.edu