Nader El-Bizri (ed.)
Oxford University Press (2008)
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Abstract |
Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Brethren of Purity) were the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity of lettered urbanites that was principally based in Basra and Baghdad. This brotherhood occupied a prominent station in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia: Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contained fifty-two epistles that
offered synoptic explications of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age. Divided into four classificatory parts, it treated themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics and theology, in addition to moral and didactic fables. The Ikhwan were learned compilers of scientific
and philosophical knowledge, and their Rasa'il constituted a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization.
This present volume gathers studies by leading philosophers, historians and scholars of Islamic Studies, who are also the editors and translators of the first Arabic critical editions and first complete annotated English translations of the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa', which will be published in the OUP Series that this present volume initiates, as well as being members of the Editorial Board.
The chapters of this present volume explore the conceptual and historical aspects of the philosophical and scientific contents of the Rasa'il and their classification, as well as investigating the authorship and dating of this corpus and the impact that the Ikhwan's intellectual tradition exercised in the unfolding of the history of ideas in Islam.
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Call number | B746.I353 2008 |
ISBN(s) | 9780199557240 0199557241 |
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Reading The Case of the Animals Versus Man: Fable and Philosophy in the Essays of the Ikhwan Al-Safa'.Lenn E. Goodman
The Arrangement of the Rasa'il Ikhwan Al-Safa' and the Problem of Interpolations [with a Postscript].Abbas Hamdani
'Misled and Misleading' ... 'Yet Central in Their Intellectual Influence!' Ibn Taymiyya's Views on Ikhwan Al-Safa.Yahya J. Michot
Why We Need an Arabic Critical Edition with an Annotated English Translation of the Rasa'il Ikhwan Al-Safa'.Ismail K. Poonawala
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