دانلود کتاب فلسفه در جهان اسلام – جلد سوم

With any luck, you are not merely browsing this volume in a bookstore or online, but are a proud owner who has just lovingly taken it down from the special shelf you reserve for books likely to impress house guests. With even more luck, it resides there alongside the first two installments of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. If so, you may already have noticed that it is somewhat fatter than the second volume—Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds—which was, in turn, already fatter than the initial offering, Classical Philosophy. Like a middle-aged parent whose work and family duties allow no time for regular exercise, the History of Philosophy has good excuses for its weight gain. In the second volume, we devoured a whole millennium of philosophy, stretching from contemporaries of Aristotle in the fourth century BC to the end of late antiquity with Boethius and Maximus the Confessor. In a further bid to satisfy your appetite for philosophy, this book will cover an even larger time-span, and a far larger geographical area to boot. Like its predecessors, the volume you’re about to read is aimed at a general audience. You need to be armed with nothing but interest in the topic. I’ve tried not to assume familiarity with the territory covered in the first two volumes, though this certainly wouldn’t hurt. As ever, my approach is chronological, though certain themes act as leitmotifs for the story as a whole. (For a briefer survey which instead adopts a thematic structure, see my recently appeared Very Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy.) Some of the themes are predictable: reactions to the Greek philosophical tradition; and the use of philosophy to defend and interpret Islam; proofs of God’s existence; and the nature and fate of the human soul. Some, I think, may be less expected. Among recurrent philosophical themes, one of the more prominent is the critique of taqlˉıd, or blind acceptance of traditional teaching. I was so struck by the frequency with which this issue arose that, while revising the book, I decided to add further material on taqlˉıd in the Ottoman empire.