Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief (eBook)

Anthony Robert Booth is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK. He also works for Trusting Banks, a NWO (Dutch Science Foundation) funded collaboration between the Universities of Groningen, the Netherlands, and Cambridge, UK. He has worked mainly on issues at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, and has published articles appearing in such journals as Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Synthese. He also co-edited Intuitions (2014).

Acknowledgements 8
Contents 10
Chapter 1: Falsafa as Ethics of Belief 12
1.1 Knowledge in Islam 13
1.2 The Ethics of Belief in the West 15
1.3 The Ethics of Belief in Islamic Philosophy 21
1.3.1 Im?n vs. Islam 21
1.3.2 Islamic Evidentialism 23
1.3.3 Moderate Evidentialism 30
1.3.4 Islamic Anti-Evidentialism 36
1.3.5 Moderate Anti-Evidentialism 39
1.4 Concluding Remarks 44
Notes 45
Chapter 2: Certainty and Prophecy 51
2.1 The Question of the Epistemic Elite 51
2.2 The Conditions of Certainty 53
2.3 The Active Intellect and the Prophetic Imagination 60
2.4 Moderate Evidentialism Versus Moderate Anti-Evidentialism 68
2.5 Concluding Remarks 71
Notes 72
Chapter 3: Prophecy and Politics 75
3.1 Human Perfection 75
3.2 The Utopian City-State 84
3.3 The Imperfect Cities, Democracy and Liberalism 89
3.4 Conclusion: Towards a Neo-Pyrrhonism? 94
Notes 96
References 98
Arabic Works Cited (Not in Translation) 98
Arabic Works Cited in English Translation 98
Secondary Sources 99
Index 105