Hegel In The Arab World

Hegel's philosophy has been of fundamental importance for the development of contemporary thought and for the very representation of Western modernity. This book investigates Hegel's influence in the Arab world, generally considered "other" and far from the West, focusing specifically on Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Lorella Ventura discusses the reception of Hegelian thought and outlines a conceptual grid to help interpret the historical, cultural, and political events that have affected the Arab region in the last two centuries, and shed light on some aspects of its complex relationship with the western world.

Hegel's philosophy has been of fundamental importance for the development of contemporary thought and for the very representation of Western modernity. This book investigates Hegel’s influence in the Arab world, generally considered "other" and far from the West, focusing specifically on Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Lorella Ventura discusses the reception of Hegelian thought and outlines a conceptual grid to help interpret the historical, cultural, and political events that have affected the Arab region in the last two centuries, and shed light on some aspects of its complex relationship with the western world.

This book presents a unique rethinking of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy from unusual and controversial perspectives in order to liberate new energies from his philosophy. The role Hegel ascribes to women in the shaping of society and family, the reconstruction of his anthropological and psychological perspective, his approach to human nature, the relationship between mental illness and social disease, the role of the unconscious, and the relevance of intercultural and interreligious pathways: All these themes reveal new and inspiring aspects of Hegel’s thought for our time.

"It provides an account of the criticism of religion by key Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Lessing, Hume, and Kant. This is followed by an analysis of how the Romantic thinkers, such as Rousseau, Jacobi, and Schleiermacher, responded to these challenges. For Hegel, the views of these thinkers from both the Enlightenment and Romanticism tended to empty religion of its content. The goal that he sets for his own philosophy of religion is to restore this lost content. " -- back cover.

Comparing Averroes’ and Hegel’s positions on the relation between philosophy and religion, this book explores the theme of the authorities of faith and reason, and the origin of truth, in a medieval Islamic and a modern Christian context respectively. Through an in-depth analysis of Averroes’ and Hegel’s parallel views on the nature of philosophical and religious discourse, Belo presents new insights into their perspectives on the relation between philosophical knowledge and religious knowledge, and the differences between philosophy and religion. In addition, Belo explores particular works which have not yet been studied by modern scholarship.

This concise overview of the perception of Islam in eight of the most important German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows a new and fascinating investigation of how these thinkers, within their own bodies of work, often espoused contradicting ideas about Islam and their nearest Muslim neighbors. Exploring a variety of 'neat compartmentalizations' at work in the representations of Islam, as well as distinct vocabularies employed by these key intellectuals (theological, political, philological, poetic), Ian Almond parses these vocabularies to examine the importance of Islam in the very history of German thought. Almond further demonstrates the ways in which German philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx repeatedly ignored information about the Muslim world that did not harmonize with the particular landscapes they were trying to paint – a fact which in turn makes us reflect on what it means when a society possesses 'knowledge' of a foreign culture.

Scholars have come to recognize the importance of classical Islamic philosophy both in its own right and in its preservation of and engagement with Greek philosophical ideas. At the same time, the period immediately following the so-called classical era has been considered a sort of dark age, in which Islamic thought entered a long decline. In this monumental new work, Frank Griffel seeks to overturn this conventional wisdom, arguing that what he calls the "post-classical" period has been unjustly maligned and neglected by previous generations of scholars. The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam is a comprehensive study of the far-reaching changes that led to a re-shaping of the philosophical discourse in Islam during the twelfth century. Earlier Western scholars thought that Islam's engagement with the tradition of Greek philosophy ended during that century. More recent analyses suggest that Islamic thinkers instead integrated Greek thought into the genre of rationalist Muslim theology (kal=am). Griffel argues that even this new view misses a key point. In addition to the integration of Greek ideas into kal=am, Muslim theologians picked up the discourse of classical philosophy in Islam (falsafa) and began to produce books in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Avicennaa new and oft-misunderstood genre they called ".hikma"in which they left aside theological concerns. They wrote in both genres, kal=am and .hikma, and the same writers argued for opposing teachings on the nature of God, the world's creation, and the afterlife depending on the genre in which they were writing. Griffel shows how careful attention to genre demonstrates both the coherence and ambiguity of this new philosophical approach. A work of extraordinary breadth and depth, The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam offers a detailed, insightful history of philosophy in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the twelfth century. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of philosophy or the history of Islam.