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Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings. Edited Muhammad Ali Khalidi. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xlviii + 186.
This volume contains a collection of translations of selected texts from works of famous philosophers writing in Arabic: al-Färäbi's The Book of Letters (Kitäb al-Hurüf), Ibn Slnä's On the Soul (from Kitäb al-Najät), al-Ghazäli's The Rescuer from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Daläl), Ibn Tufayl's Hayy b. Yaqzän, and Ibn Rushd's Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahäfut al-Tahäfut). As the introduction states, "the anthology attempts to provide a representative sample of the Arabic-Islamic philosophical tradition in a manner that is accessible to beginning students of philosophy, as well as to more seasoned philosophers with little or no exposure to this tradition." So the volume explicitly addresses "philosophers," primarily, and presents itself as a contribution to overcoming an outdated view of the role of medieval Islamic philosophy in the history of philosophy, a view according to which Arabic philosophers are "either considered curiosities ... or preservers of and commentators on the Greek philosophical heritage without a sufficiently original contribution of their own." Accordingly, Khalidi's anthology aims "to select texts that will be of particular interest to a contemporary authence." As "medieval Islamic philosophy is not generally regarded as part of the philosophical canon of the English speaking world" (p. xi), the anthology is designed to contribute to a process of "mainstreaming" Islamic philosophy by providing texts in which the emphasis is decidedly on "theoretical questions" (p. xii). Thus the selection of translated texts focuses on metaphysics and epistemology.
In fact, Khalidi's anthology is the first textbook to assemble a comparable range of translations from Arabic philosophical works, and...