Foreword: The PhilAnd Project

Abstract

“The origin and early development of philosophy in tenth-century al-Andalus: the impact of ill-defined materials and channels of transmission” (hereafter, PhilAnd) is an Advanced Grant ERC project funded by the European Research Council and currently being conducted at UCLouvain and the Warburg Institute (University of London).1 PhilAnd aims to provide new insights into an important chapter in the history of Islamic speculative thinking. It is concerned with the time and the form under which philosophy – in the sense of a rational, scientific and comprehensive system to approach the reality of the world around us – appeared for the first time in al-Andalus, and with the role played by this formative stage in the history of philosophy as later developed in the Iberian Peninsula among the three monotheistic communities. PhilAnd pursues three main objectives, namely: (1) to determine whether the emergence of philosophy in al-Andalus did not significantly predate the time ordinarily acknowledged in modern scholarship; (2) to establish whether the impact of this early phase on later developments of rational thinking in al-Andalus was not considerably greater than has usually been assumed thus far; (3) to provide evidence in order to assess, on a scientific basis, the originality of the first Andalusī philosophers with respect to their predecessors in the Orient. The project stands at the crossroads of several major lines of enquiry in modern scholarship: the overall history of Arabic sciences in al-Andalus, the libraries and cultural centres of al-Andalus, the interaction of politics, religion and science in the Peninsula, the common threads of Islamic and Jewish philosophy and mysticism in and outside the Peninsula, Greek-Arabic philosophy across the Mediterranean or more specifically in the context of Shīʿism and Ismāʿīlism, Arabic into Latin and the legacy of Arabic sciences in medieval Europe, the reception of Jewish literature in the Latin Middle Ages. Although it has been designed to develop and stimulate a network of collaborations with