The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy

Abstract

The study of Islamic philosophy has recently entered a new and exciting phase. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the grand narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. The bulk of twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that the present Handbook gives roughly equal weight to every century from the ninth to the twentieth. The Handbook differs from previous overviews in another significant way: It is work-centered rather than person- or theme-centered. This format is intended to give readers a better sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like, and of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at play in works belonging to various periods and subfields within Islamic philosophy.