Sunday, February 4, 2018

The Ueberweg

In this age of handbooks, companions and encyclopaedias, the Ueberweg - or to give it its proper title Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie - is something quite different, a monument to slow, careful and 'objective' research. It is designed to be definitive, magisterial, authoritative and unbiased and to stand the test of time - and given the fact that we still do not have a good sense of the full course of the intellectual history of philosophy in the world of Islam, it will end up defining for a generation at least the outline of that story.

Four volumes are planned to cover the history of Islamic philosophy of which the first volume on the early period before Avicenna has appeared in German as well as in English translation. There will also be online versions that may well be more comprehensive and updated by the authors. 





The four volumes are:

1) 8th to 10th Century - already out 

2) 10th to 12th Century - this will cover the critical period of Avicenna and includes the various initial responses including Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī - currently in final stages of editing 

3) 13th to 18th Century - the high point of the post-classical period with a long (multi-authored) chapter on the 13th to the 15th century, a ground breaking piece on the history of logic by Khaled el-Rouayheb, philosophy in Shiraz from Jurjānī to Sammākī by Reza Pourjavady, myself on Safavid philosophy (Mīr Dāmād and his students, Mullā Ṣadrā and his students, Rajab ʿAlī Tabrīzī and his students, the Avicennian tradition, and the reception of Mullā Ṣadrā up to and including Mahdī Narāqī), Asad Ahmed and Renate Wursch on India, Sait Ozervali on Ottoman philosophy and so forth; this volume will probably not appear for around 5 years

4) 1800 to the present - this is the modern volume; I have a chapter on Avicennians and the critique of Mullā Ṣadrā in this volume - this is also in the editing stage

This will supplement and act as the foundation for students for some time to come adding to the existing resources that are critically important such as the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy, and the volume on Philosophy in the Islamic World  as part of Peter Adamson's the History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast transcripts. 





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