Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas ed. by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman (review)

The Festschrift is a curious beast. One would like to think there was a time when such a celebratory effort had no function to perform beyond that of delighting its recipient. Even the expectations of a general – or indeed a specialized – academic readership might benignly be relegated to the status of a secondary concern, just so long as the person whose life’s work was being honoured saw something in the materials that tickled her or his fancy. Less still was the FS an acceptable vehicle for self-promotion or career advancement of any sort. The traditional Festschrift, in other words, may have been one of the last bastions of that venerable and, let us not be coy, profoundly odd creature that seems now on the verge of extinction: pure, fundamentally disinterested (in the sense of serving no vested interest) scholarship in the Geisteswissenschaften mould.

The days of the traditional FS must, one suspects, be numbered. One hears dark rumours of publishers insisting that FS collections ‘serve academic markets’, that they ‘provide thematized overviews’ and that they ‘attract audiences’. In the face of such pressures, what should one say of the volume under review, which so stubbornly seems to resist any demand for uniformity or enforced relevancy? Perhaps that it is a curious beast as well, a specimen spirited from another time and place.

But then, a curious beast (and I use the term both advisedly and affectionately) is also the honouree of the present volume, Professor Dimitri Gutas of Yale University. Equally at home in the halls of late antique learning and early Islamic literary circles, post-Aristotelian Peripatetics and post-Avicennian madrasahs, Gutas has straddled Graeco-Arabic studies like a mighty colossus for the past 35 years, leaving a large and – one suspects – irreproducible footprint on both sides of the divide. The shape of the present FS not only reflects this breadth of interests, but also speaks to the refreshingly old-fashioned values that its honouree has always insisted upon: hard work, due diligence, care and caution, and above all an attention to textual detail, not only in the way that it reads but the way that it connects up with the wider circles of scholarship of an age, with all the social and cultural dimensions that implies. Remarkably, these old-fashioned ways are the ones that point the way to the future.

Here, then, is a collection with the title Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion. That pretty much covers it, one supposes! Singling out individual contributions in these kinds of collections is always difficult and frequently unfair. That being said, students and scholars of Shi‘a learning may wish to turn their attention to Tony Street’s essay, ‘Medieval and Modern Interpretations of Avicenna’s Modal Syllogistic’. Although there is nothing especially Shi‘a about its contents, Street’s excellent analysis of the possible reconstructions one may give to Avicenna’s theory of modalities leans heavily on Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who is certainly one of the pre-eminent Shi‘a thinkers in the vein of philosophical kalam that rose in Avicenna’s wake. Alexander Treiger’s article ‘Avicenna’s Notion of Transcendental Modulation of Existence’ is instructive to aficionados of the School of Isfahan, insofar as Treiger spells out clearly and in a balanced manner what exactly was new about Avicenna’s view of amphibolous predication (in brief: the application of tashkik to the analysis of ‘existence’ – as a term, one might add, seeing as how the ontological implications of this view are considerably murkier in Avicenna than they are in the works of successive philosophers). Finally, David King’s short piece on the origins of algebra level-headedly addresses the tradition of stories that suggest an involvement on ‘Ali Ibn Abi Talib’s part in its genesis...