Research profile

Chair of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy (Prof. Dr. Peter Adamson)

Research specialisms at the Chair of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy

Besides later ancient and Islamic philosophy, our chair has a strong interest in what is sometimes called “post-classical” or “post-formative” philosophy in Arabic (and Persian), especially the reception of Avicenna’s philosophy in the Islamic East.

Thanks to several recent funding projects in this area, the chair hosts what is probably the largest group of researchers on Arabic philosophy in Europe.

Figures covered in recent research by members of the team include Plotinus, Porphyry, Simplicius, Damascius, and Boethius in late antiquity, and for the Islamic world, philosophical translations into Arabic, al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, Miskawayh, Avicenna, Averroes, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

Research projects at the Chair of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy

Chair Prof. Adamson has led several major research projects in recent years, especially on philosophy in the Islamic world. These include a current DFG-funded project on Philosophy in the Baghdad School, which will produce translations and a book about the members of a group of (mostly Christian) philosophers who revived ancient Aristotelian and Platonist ideas in tenth century Iraq.

Another major project, The Heirs of Avicenna, has already begun publishing a series of open access sourcebooks on post-formative thought in the Islamic East. Finally, another major project was funded by the ERC and devoted to Animals in Philosophy of the Islamic World.

Within and outside the scope of Munich School of Ancient Philosophy (MUSAΦ), Prof. Adamson has supervised many doctoral projects, on topics in Neoplatonism and other areas of ancient philosophy, numerous figures and texts from the Islamic world, and occasionally also Latin medieval philosophy.

Many visiting researchers, including Humboldt fellows and investigators on DFG-funded research projects (for instance current research on the Avicenna-Bīrūnī correspondence and the logic and ontology of al-Khūnajī), have over the years enhanced the research environment at the Chair.

Toward a global philosophy

With its focus on the reception of ancient philosophy in both medieval Europe and the Arabic-speaking world, the Chair offers a platform for studying the exchange of ideas between European and non-European culture. This ambition is also embodied in Prof. Adamson’s Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast and book series, which has devoted hundreds of episodes and numerous books to philosophy in Europe from antiquity to the Renaissance, as well as Islamic, Indian, Africana, and now Chinese philosophy.

History of philosophy: the next generation

A number of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers have moved on from the Chair to take up postdocs elsewhere, as well as temporary and permanent positions, in a wide range of universities, for example at Edinburgh, Exeter, Fordham, Ioannina, Jyväskylä, Pavia, Leuven, Nijmegen, and St Louis, Syracuse NY, Utrecht, and Würzburg.

The Munich School of Ancient Philsophy (MUSAΦ)

In this regard, the activities at the Chair play a decisive role in fulfilling the mission of the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy (MUSAΦ), in that they complement the range of topics offered by Prof. Dr. Christof Rapp and Prof. Dr. Oliver Primavesi in connection with earlier ancient schools of thought (pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophy).