Ottoman Philosophy

Abstract

Modern scholarship on the history of Ottoman philosophy is in its early stages. For much of the twentieth century, the dominant presumption was that there was little to study. Philosophy, it was believed, had been repudiated by mainstream Sunni Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and henceforth only survived among the Shiites and enjoyed a silver age in Safavid Iran (1502–1722). Specialists have now largely challenged this view. Admittedly, there were few who openly identified as “philosophers” (falāsifa) in the Sunni Islamic world after the thirteenth century. But this was largely because falsafa tended to be understood as a school of thought rather than a specific discipline. The falāsifa were those who adhered to Neo-Platonism or Neo-Platonized Aristotelianism. They upheld the theologically problematic theses of the eternity of the world, that God does not possess knowledge of material particulars in the sublunary world, and the denial of bodily resurrection. Philosophy in the sense of a discipline committed to the rational discussion of metaphysics, physics, logic, and ethics continued unabated in later centuries.

The present article will begin with a brief historical introduction, followed by an outline of Ottoman scholarship in these four subdisciplines. The survey will be mainly historical and bibliographic. Given the early state of research, it is simply not feasible to structure the presentation on the basis of the ways in which Ottoman contributions to the rational sciences were or were not innovative.