Challenges the picture according to which Islamic culture during the European middle ages served as a passive conduit of ancient Greek sources to the Latin West, along with the conjoined conception that the Islamic achievement in science was a mere reflection, and perhaps a dim one, of earlier Greek achievements. Against this view, this article argues for the "naturalization" of science in the classical Islamic context in a way that allowed for distinctive achievements in their own right.

The undoubted truth is that there exist for the planetary motions true and constant configurations from which no impossibilities or contradictions follow; they are not the same as the configurations asserted by Ptolemy; and Ptolemy neither grasped them nor did his understanding get to imagine what they truly are.

The "Text" and the "Commentary" mentioned in the title of this essay are, respectively, the "Kitāb al-Manāẓir", or "Optics", of al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, composed in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, and the "Tanqīḥ al-Manāẓir li-dhawī l-abṣār wa l-baṣā'ir", written by Abū l-Ḥasan (or al-Ḥasan) Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century. It is known that, so far, only the first five of the seven "maqālāt"/Books that make up the Arabic text of IH's "Optics" have (...) been published, and that the "Tanqīḥ" was published in two volumes. I shall be concerned with certain episodes in the lives of these two works, my aim being to shed light on their transmission within the Islamic Arabic and Persian worlds. -/- . (shrink)

La insistencia de Ibn Hazm en la interpretación literal del Corán y la Sunna ha llevado frecuentemente a los investigadores modernos a concluir que él es un pensador conservador o dogmático. En realidad, no es ninguna de las dos cosas. El zahirismo de Ibn Hazm enfatiza el alcance limitado de la ley religiosa islámica, e intenta reducir las pretensiones de los juristas musulmanes de hablar en nombre de la ley de Dios. Esta metodología le lleva a apoyar el racionalismo, el (...) individualismo y el anticlericalismo. Ibn Hazm argumenta con consistencia a favor de estos principios en sus trabajos sobre teoría legal islámica, entre los que se incluye el texto al-Nubdha al-kafiya fi usul ahkam al-din que traducimos aquí. Esta propuesta implica socavar todo el sistema del madhhab, lo que explica la reacción negativa que recibió del sistema religioso establecido. En lugar del madhhab, Ibn Hazm intenta hacer valer la responsabilidad individual de cada musulmán en la obediencia a la ley de Dios, tal y como se revela claramente en el texto sagrado del Islam. (shrink)

La insistencia de Ibn Hazm en la interpretación literal del Corán y la Sunna ha llevado frecuentemente a los investigadores modernos a concluir que él es un pensador conservador o dogmático. En realidad, no es ninguna de las dos cosas. El zahirismo de Ibn Hazm enfatiza el alcance limitado de la ley religiosa islámica, e intenta reducir las pretensiones de los juristas musulmanes de hablar en nombre de la ley de Dios. Esta metodología le lleva a apoyar el racionalismo, el (...) individualismo y el anticlericalismo. Ibn Hazm argumenta con consistencia a favor de estos principios en sus trabajos sobre teoría legal islámica, entre los que se incluye el texto al-Nubdha al-kafiya fi usul ahkam al-din que traducimos aquí. Esta propuesta implica socavar todo el sistema del madhhab, lo que explica la reacción negativa que recibió del sistema religioso establecido. En lugar del madhhab, Ibn Hazm intenta hacer valer la responsabilidad individual de cada musulmán en la obediencia a la ley de Dios, tal y como se revela claramente en el texto sagrado del Islam. (shrink)

The regional brain networks and the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms subserving the cognition of visual narrative in humans have largely been studied with non-invasive brain recording. In this study, we specifically investigated how regional and cross-regional cortical activities support visual narrative interpretation using intracranial stereotactic electroencephalograms recordings from thirteen human subjects (6 females, and 7 males). Widely distributed recording sites across the brain were sampled while subjects were explicitly instructed to observe images from fables presented in “sequential” order, and a set (...) of images drawn from multiple fables presented in “scrambled” order. Broadband activity mainly within the frontal and temporal lobes were found to encode if a presented image is part of a visual narrative (sequential) or random image set (scrambled). Moreover, the temporal lobe exhibits strong activation in response to visual narratives while the frontal lobe is more engaged when contextually novel stimuli are presented. We also investigated the dynamics of interregional interactions between visual narratives and contextually novel series of images. Interestingly, the interregional connectivity is also altered between sequential and scrambled sequences. Together, these results suggest that both changes in regional neuronal activity and cross-regional interactions subserve visual narrative and contextual novelty processing. (shrink)

ʿUthmān ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nābulusī. The Sword of Ambi- tion: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt. Edited and translated by Luke Yarbrough. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Pp. xliv + 261. $40.