Content area
Full Text
RR 2005/338 The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy Edited by Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2005 xviii + 448 pp. ISBN 0 521 81743 9 (hbck); ISBN 0 521 52069 X (pbck) £47.50, $70 (hbck); £19.99, $29.99 (pbck) Cambridge Companions to Philosophy
Keywords Philosophy, Languages
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120510622580
By any reckoning this is a remarkable book. It is a truism to say that Arabic philosophy has been relatively neglected by mainstream scholarship (or, to put it another way, has been a specialist domain for a long time). Mixed as it is with a tradition of translation and adaptation of Greek classics like Aristotle's Metaphysics and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, and with the theology of mainstream Islam, it remains a complex and elusive field for many readers. The Companion defines "Arabic philosophy" as that tradition which, while it includes many Islamic thinkers, extends beyond just that, but also beyond what is merely "Arabic" (or Persian), since many thinkers were ethnically not Arab. Their emphasis is on the philosophical ideas that spread through the Arabic language, nurtured by courts like that of the Abbasid caliphate.
Their focal period extends from Classical times (of sources like Aristotle) and from the start of Islam in 622 CE through the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and then points forward to the fifteenth century and the scholastic (and esoteric) heritage of the ideas. We have,...