John Ropoulos

About the doctoral dissertation

My research examines the ontological status of the divine attributes in Ottoman Kalām with a focus on how Ottoman scholars addressed both inherited and new problems concerning the attributes within a post-Avicennian Kalām framework. I concentrate primarily on foundational texts by earlier Persian authors such as al-Ījī, al-Taftāzānī, and al-Jurjānī that were transmitted into Ottoman madrasas and became the subject of extensive commentary and glossing. Additionally, I analyze independent treatises by Ottoman scholars that engage directly with questions surrounding the divine attributes. The corpus under study spans roughly the 9th–11th centuries AH (14th–17th centuries CE).