Project description

The project “Major issues and controversies of Arabic logic and philosophy of language” is a British-German collaborative research project which from 2011-2015 has been co-funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the British British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). With the funding provided by the DFG, three junior research positions could be established at Ruhr University Bochum. With the funding provided by the AHRC, Dr. Tony Street (Faculty of Divinity) organised 2012, 2013, 2014 annual workshops at the University of Cambridge (UK), enabling the researchers involved in the project to exchange their results and to discuss them within a larger community of scholars. A further Workshop was held in 2015 at Ruhr University Bochum. Part of the workshop lectures have been published in the Journal Oriens (Brill).  

The project integrates foundational research efforts on Arabic logic and philosophy of language. Against the twofold background of the late antique commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon and of the debates on issues pertaining to logic and philosophy of language in the formative period of Muslim theology and Arabic linguistics, the particular focal points of the project are, on the one hand, the relationship between Arabic logic, language and grammar and, on the other hand, the development of Arabic logic and philosophy of language after Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037). By pursuing a problem-centred intellectual history approach (German: ‘Problemgeschichte’), both the decisive discursive threads leading up to Ibn Sīnā’s new systematisation of Aristotelian logic and theory of science and the ensuing appropriation and development of this transformed philosophical heritage in the realm of the Islamic scholarly disciplines will be studied.