Reason, Physicalism, and Islam

ENDNOTES

[^1]- E. F. Gautier, Le Passé de l’Afrique du Nord (Paris, 1937) p.[^9]:

[^2]- Ibid, 24; and see 96: “He has a western conception of history. … Ibn Khaldu>n’s stay in Andalusia brought a breath of our Renaissance into his oriental mind.” For an incisive critique of Gautier’s agenda, see Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World, trans. David Macey (London, Verso, 1984) p.76f.

[^3]- Salafi> generally designates Muslims who take the ‘righteous forebears’ (al-salaf al-s}a>lih})—the first-generations of the Prophet Muh}ammad S{, his Companions and their Successors—to be the best model for practice and guidance. Beginning in the late 19th century, a number of loosely related “Salafi> ” reformist movements arose in the Islamic world in response to the challenges of modernity. Many of their intellectual leaders (Muh}ammad Abduh, Rashi>d Rid}a>) urged Muslims to adopt a wider scope of rationality, particularly by reforming traditional religious education, encouraging them to close the technological and scientific gap with Western European powers.

[^4]- For more details, see our article “Jihad Akal” in Utusan Malaysia for 27th July [^2003]:

[^5]- These include institutions and organizations receiving government support in countries such as Malaysia, Jordan, and Iran. To the best of our knowledge, there is no informed assessment of current efforts of this kind among Muslim societies worldwide; this would have to include non-governmental religious and civic initiatives as well, where the situation is not as bleak.

[^6]- Initiated in particular by the work of Herbert Feigl, “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’”, in Feigl, M. Scriven & G. Maxwell (eds.), ‘Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science II p.1–540, on 370–497; new ed. as The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’ (Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1967). See also Edgar Wilson, The Mental as Physical (London, Routledge, 1979).

[^7]- As an instructive example of the materialist physicalistic approach, see Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, the Realization of the Living (Dordrecht/Boston/London, D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980). Although the authors state that “living systems are cognitive systems, and Living as a process is a process of cognition” (p.13), this living nervous-system based approach to ‘knowing’ does not take us much beyond Aristotle’s entelechial view of the soul as merely an organic by-product of the living organism, which led him to deny the survival of soul after the decease of the body. Further, see our remarks below on the philosophy of ‘mind’.

[^8]- Heinz Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and the End of the Middle Ages, translated R.J. Betanzos (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1994; German original published 1922) p.[^31]: Heimsoeth’s statement is merely part of his characterization of the conventional view concerning the transition to modernity that he intended to revise. His work sought to undermine the validity of trying to “distinguish modern philosophy, as purely secular and directed toward nature and natural existence, from medieval philosophy, which always inquired about ultimate supernatural things, about God, immortality, and the soul. Separating philosophy as autonomous science and secular wisdom from theology is absolutely not the same thing as separating their contents from the sources and the great questions of religious life” (ibid, 32).

[^9]- See for example Mortimer J. Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter (New York, Macmillan, 1990); Gregory McCulloch, The Mind and Its World (London, Routledge, 1995); and the work of H. Feigl cited above.

[^10]- Colin McGinn, The Character of Mind, (2nd ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1997) [^39]:

[^11]- Sergio Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Thought, trans. S. Staton (Cambridge University Press, 1995; 1st pub. Rome 1986) 4–[^5]: We should recall that in (dualist) Cartesian terms the ‘mind’ is purely spiritual and radically non-spatial as a conscious immaterial substance; this was basically

the preferred definition of the intellect among Muslim philosophers and the later theologians after al-Ghaza>li> (al-‘aqlu jawharun basi>t}un qa>’im bi-nafsihi).

[^12]- See the informative overview of the main historical-theoretical tendencies by S. Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind.

[^13]- As a sampling, we should mention foremost the studies by Robert J. Sternberg rethinking the nature of intelligence from philosophical, folk, and psychodevelopmental perspectives; eg. Sternberg’s Beyond IQ: a triarchic theory of human intelligence (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1985); & the volume edited by Sternberg, Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins and Development (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Also of interest are current revisionist theories about ‘multiple intelligences’ as developed especially by Howard Gardner, along with Daniel Goleman and others, and now being applied in the educational and management fields; eg. H. Gardner, Frames of Mind, 10th ed. (New York, Basic Books, 1993); & his Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York, Basic Books, 1999).

[^14]- Hilary Putnam, “Why There Isn’t a Ready-made World”, Synthese 51 (1982) 141–167, on 146–[^7]:

[^15]- See for example the brief study by a leading20th century Occidental student of Islam, Arthur J. Arberry’s Revelation and Reason in Islam (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1957; rpr. 1965).