Wednesday, April 30, 2025 – 4:30pm, Stuart 104
Asad Q. Ahmed, The Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, Department of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, University of California, Berkeley
This lecture investigates the reception of the famous Avicennan “essence-existence” distinction in nineteenth century South Asia. Its point of reference is a treatise on simple and compound generation that lays out the various philosophical and theological issues at stake in upholding and rejecting the distinction. The treatise engages a rather extensive chronological span: it takes us from the Illuminationists and Peripatetics to debates in Isfahan and Shiraz and ultimately to the philosophers and theologians of South Asia. The lecture examines closely some of the technical arguments and assumptions underlying the adoption or rejection of the distinction, the technical prowess of some of the solutions, and the late and dynamic South Asian contributions to the debate. It concludes with reflections on why this subtle point of philosophy mattered in the broader South Asian context.
