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  • The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy ed. by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat
  • Syed A. H. Zaidi
The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy Edited by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier López-Farjeat New York: Routledge, 2015. 412 Pages.

The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy is a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding field of Islamic philosophy. An important point of method that guides this volume is that it lets the Islamic philosophical tradition itself define its core issues, as opposed to allowing the categories and criteria of other philosophical traditions do the work. What emerges is a presentation of Islamic philosophy that clarifies its similarities and differences with non-Islamic philosophical traditions. At the same time, the volume is more than a mere historical overview of the different schools and ideas to be found in Islamic philosophy. Rather, the issues dealt with by Muslim philosophers are treated as timely and relevant to the present as well as the past.

The volume presents thirty-three essays that focus on major philosophical issues in Islam from different periods of Islamic history. These essays are presented in seven sections: (1) Philosophical Issues in Islamic Revelation and Theology; (2) Logic, Language, and the Structure of Science; (3) Philosophy in the Natural Sciences; (4) Metaphysics; (5) Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind; (6) Ethics and Political Philosophy; (7) Philosophy, Religion, and Mysticism. The collection contains a number of previously examined topics, such as the problem of essence and existence in Ibn Sīnā's (d. 428/1037) thought and an examination of Mullā Ṣadrā's (d. 1050/1640) thesis of the unity of the Intellect and the intelligible. It also examines less [End Page 85] studied areas of Islamic philosophy, such as pedagogical methods in Islamic philosophy and Philosophical Sufism.

Aside from discussing these issues conveniently in one volume, the work has other important advantages as well. First, it approaches Islamic philosophy as a field in which "religion and philosophy are ߪ integrated with matters of religious revelation" (p. 1). In other words, it does not treat Muslim philosophers merely as self-marginalized students of Greek philosophy. Instead, the editors of the volume demonstrate how Muslim philosophers attempted to integrate Greek philosophy, along with other sciences borrowed from previous civilizations, in a holistic manner that produced a new worldview centered on revelation.

Second, this volume clarifies complex issues of Islamic philosophy in succinct and sometimes novel ways. Issues discussed include the unity of the individual intellect and the Active Intellect (ittiḥād al-'āqil wa-l-ma'qūl), transubstantial motion (al-ḥaraka al-jawhariyya); the relationship between Sufism and Islamic philosophy, and the relationship between ethics and philosophy in Islam. For example, Cristina Cerami's essay, "The Eternity of the World" (pp. 141–155) demonstrates how the philosophers al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), Ibn Sīnā (d. 429/1037), and Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198) reconciled the cosmologies and physical structures of the universe from Plato and Aristotle with Islamic scriptures. In particular, Cerami discusses how al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā integrated Neoplatonic ontology into their cosmological worldviews in order to argue for the eternity of the world and the superlunary spheres.

However, despite the strengths of this essay, it misses some important points. For example, in her explication of Aristotle's superlunary universe, Cerami neglects to mention the relationship of ether to the movement of the spheres and the effects of this relationship on Aristotle's notion of the eternal universe. In addition, she states that although Ibn Sīnā's concept of time-as-perpetuity (dahr) was conceived as a type of eternity, Ibn Sīnā clearly conceived of time-as-eternity and time-as-perpetuity as two distinct ontological realities. In The Glosses (al-Ta'līqāt), Ibn Sīnā describes time-as-perpetuity as "a [state of] being [existing along] with Time. ߪ This state of being surrounds Time, and is the Heavenly Sphere, which exists together with Time. Time is connected to this state of being because it is produced from the motion of the sphere. This is the relation of the changeless to the changeable. Nevertheless, the...

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