Course Description for Jewish and Islamic Thought

Description: Often medieval philosophy is presented in its Christian guise alone, giving the impression that the medieval philosophical tradition, influenced by the great thinkers of Greek antiquity, is exclusively a Latin tradition, with no substantive contribution by those who wrote in Arabic and Hebrew. We shall revise this view. Our focus will be a select group of philosophers who lived between the 10th-12th centuries, a roughly three hundred-year period that is a high point in medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy—a time before Greek philosophy was rediscovered in Christian Europe. Philosophers to be studied in some detail are Saadya Gaon, Al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, and Maimonides, and in addressing topics in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, philosophical psychology, and especially in philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy.