Great Ideas of Philosophy

B. Very early, the Islamic commitment is to see to it that all political, naturalistic, and scientific writingsrecord respect for, and derive their intellectual inspiration from, the teachings of the Prophet. The Koran isthe sole authority on all that matters to the faithful, and to reject that authority is to be an infidel.C. We must note, however, that there was still an independent philosophical movement within Islam. In the10 th and 11 th centuries, we begin to see philosophy as a core interest of Islamic commentators. There is arecognition that fields of inquiry can be developed while holding theology constant.1. One of the first of the important Islamic philosophers, al-Farabi, will reveal the influence ofAristotelianism in claiming the authority of reason to be greater than that of revelation. His attempt toreconcile Aristotelian and Platonic thought records a deep respect for the philosophical originality andpower of the classical world.2. The celebrated Avicenna (980–1037) would find in Aristotle’s Metaphysics a philosophicaljustification for a universe ordered at the level of matter, an order continuing into spiritual and civiclife.D. Avicenna’s commentaries on Aristotle put Arab scholarship and Islamic thought at the center ofnaturalistic and scientific thinking. The importance of this can’t be underestimated, because it wasultimately the Islamic community that put the West back on the path toward an intellectually andscientifically powered course of discovery, using the tools of ancient Greek thought.IV. By the 11 th and 12 th centuries, the East and the West were divided into two intellectually warring camps, withtwo different conceptions of human nature and its purposes and two different conceptions of truth at the mostfundamental religious level. Each camp used classical philosophy as a means of validation.A. Here arises a wonderfully rich interpretative exercise as to what Aristotle really meant, what Plato reallymeant, whether something can be known as a result of prophetic insights or by experience or by reasonalone, and so on.B. At this point in both cultures, philosophical positions may come to be judged as heresies. Once we begin touse philosophy as a way of vindicating or verifying what is essentially a religious position, the wronginterpretation may qualify as an offense against the religion.C. It should come as no surprise that as the Christian church solidified its own position politically,economically, and socially, it found itself doing constant battle with heresies. Why is this sequence ofevents perhaps inevitable?1. A religion solidifies its position by developing an official canon. This now becomes a body ofknowledge that can be taught to the faithful, and the faithful are understood to be those who areprepared to be obedient to this teaching.2. But once positions become solidified and burdens are imposed on those who are not prepared to accepttheir validity, the philosophical program stalls.3. Thus, as the writers and thinkers in the Christian world begin to take on the challenges that come fromthe East and, as a result of those challenges, work out an ever clearer version of the canon, debatesbreak out within the Christian community.4. As we will see in a later lecture on the witch panics, certain forms of conduct now take on a new color.Disorders and diseases of a certain kind suggest mysterious, even sinister, causes. As mentionedearlier, this was not the case in the Islamic East.D. The tension between Islam and Christianity, coupled with the recovery of ancient Greek thought, wouldcause a fruitful resumption of the “long debate.”1. The “long debate” is the debate about knowledge, conduct, and governance, which had animated theearliest philosophical inquiries into the nature of things.2. The debate had been discontinued by the need of Christianity to solidify its religious position.3. The greatest opponent of debate is orthodoxy, and Christian orthodoxy arises out of several coreconcepts: the old anti-intellectualism the church fathers, the social ambitions of the church to build andrun a new society, and the Augustinian conception that while reason has its use, faith is paramount.4. The combination of these elements resulted in a degree of fundamentalist conviction that was hostile todebate. If not a heresy, debate is at least an insult to the faithful and the faith.5. The contribution of Islamic culture was to show the West that there is more than one book of truth andmore than one set of prophecies, more than one language used to express thanks to God, and morethan one culture that might ground a spiritual life.20©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership