Workshop: The Reception and Transformation of the Late Ancient Knowledge Tradition in the Arabic-Muslim World.
External venue
From June 11 to 13, 2025, a scientific workshop entitled “The Reception and Transformation of the Late Ancient Knowledge Tradition in the Arabic-Muslim World” will take place at the Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
will take place. The event is being organized by Prof. Dr. Cornelia Schöck together with her successor Prof. Dr. Andreas Lammer.
The event will open on Wednesday evening, June 11, 2025 at 6 p.m. c.t. in GB 5/160, with a keynote lecture by Prof. Asad Q. Ahmed (University of California, Berkeley) entitled “The Legacy of Avicennism in Nineteenth-Century South Asia”.
Abstract: The lecture examines the reception of the famous Avicennian “essence-existence” distinction in nineteenth-century South Asia. The focus is on nineteenth-century South Asia. The point of reference is a treatise on simple and compound generation, which sets out the various philosophical and theological issues involved in advocating and rejecting the distinction. The treatise spans quite a wide chronological range: it takes us from the Illuminists and Peripatetics to the debates in Isfahan and Shiraz and finally to the philosophers and theologians of South Asia. The lecture will closely examine some of the technical arguments and assumptions underlying the acceptance or rejection of the distinction, the technical capabilities of some solutions, and the late and dynamic South Asian contributions to this debate. It will conclude with reflections on why this subtle point of philosophy mattered in the broader South Asian context.
