Peter Adamson at PIMS

Peter Adamson (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich) is giving this year’s Etienne Gilson Lecture at PIMS:

Avicennan Scholasticism

It is a familiar fact that philosophy of the Islamic world had an enormous impact on philosophy in Latin Christendom, especially on the scholastic tradition represented by such figures as Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Less familiar is the fact that, a century or so before scholastic emerged in Latin Christendom, a very similar philosophical tradition emerged in the Islamic East (Persia and its environs). Dozens of philosopher-theologians produced thousands of pages of highly sophisticated argumentation that, as this talk will show, anticipated philosophical moves made in Latin scholasticism on such issues as syllogistic theory, the powers of the human soul, and the nature of being itself. One can think about this phenomenon as an “Avicennan scholasticism” because it responded primarily to Avicenna (Ibn Sina), not to Aristotle as in the case of the Latin scholastics.