Reason Unbound

Mohammad Azadpur is Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.

"Reason Unbound is a clearly articulated work which will be of interest to students and scholars of the history of Islamic philosophy and to those interested in exploring how the Islamic and European philosophical traditions may benefit from each other." — Journal of Shi'a Islamic Studies"Reason Unbound provides an excellent synthesis of Islamic philosophy and the continental tradition of European philosophy. The author presents a persuasive argument and backs it up well with evidence from both Islamic and Western philosophy." — Oliver Leaman, author of Islamic Philosophy: An Introduction

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Islamic Philosophy and the Crisis of Modern Rationalism1. Beyond Orientalism and Academic Rationalism: A Critique of the Standard Readings of Islamic Philosophy1.1. Philosophy as Practice of Spiritual Exercises1.2. Standard Readings of Islamic Philosophy2. To the Things Themselves: Corbin and Heidegger on Phenomenological Access2.1. Phenomenology According to Henry Corbin2.2. Heidegger’s Phenomenology2.3. Two Contemporary Approaches to Heidegger’s Phenomenology2.4. Back to Corbin3. From the Things Themselves to Prophecy: Philosophical Cultivation in Islamic Peripateticism3.1. The Ethical Foundations of Islamic Philosophy3.2. Alfarabi’s Appropriation of Islamic Ethics3.3. Alfarabi’s Philosophical Appropriation of Islamic Prophetology3.4. The Reception of the Notion of Active Intellect in the Islamic Philosophical Tradition3.5. Alfarabi on Religion and Politics3.6. Avicenna on Philosophical Felicity3.7. Avicenna on Intellectual Prophecy4. Disciplining the Imagination: Intellect, Imagination, and Prophecy4.1. Prophetic Imagination4.2. The Beautiful and the Sublime4.3. Before and After Kant4.4. Avicenna on the Poetic Cultivation of Imagination5. The Theologian’s Dream: Imagination and Intellectual Heresy5.1. Ghazali on Dreams5.2. Ghazali and Avicenna on the Interpretation of Prophetic Symbols5.3. Ghazali’s Charge of Heresy Against Islamic Peripatetics and Averroes’ Reply6. On Human Finitude, Conscience, and Exemplarity: A Comparison between Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology6.1. Being-Toward-Beyond-Death: On the Immortality of the Soul in Islamic Peripateticism6.2. Conscience and the Active Intellect6.3. Paradigms of Emulation: Divine Exemplars and Existential HeroesConclusion: Importance of Islamic Peripateticism for Modern Philosophy in the West and Its Impact on Later Islamic Philosophy1. Islamic Peripateticism and the Predicament of Modern Western Philosophy2. Peripateticism in Later Islamic PhilosophyNotesBibliographyIndex