In the Footsteps of the shaykh: The Philosophy and Corpus of Bahmanyār b. al-Marzubān

• Applicant: Damien Janos, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550624520

The project will provide the first comprehensive, detailed, and systematic study of the works and philosophical doctrines of Bahmanyār b. Marzubān (d. ca. 1066‒67 C.E.), one of Avicenna’s main disciples and an important Arabic philosopher of the eleventh century C.E. Avicenna (or Ibn Sīnā in Arabic, d. 1037 C.E.) is widely considered the most important philosopher of the Islamic tradition. Known to his disciples as al-shaykh al-raʾīs (“the Leading Master or Teacher”), or simply as the shaykh (“Master”), Avicenna thoroughly reshaped Aristotle’s philosophical system and articulated innovative theories and arguments on various seminal subjects, which had a lasting and deep influence on subsequent Islamic intellectual history. This explains why the existing scholarship on Avicenna is massive. In contrast, Avicenna’s disciples have received relatively little scholarly attention, even though they occupy an important place both historically and philosophically. Indeed, they were the first to engage with, discuss, and transmit his philosophical doctrines, and they also accompanied the master during certain periods of his life, eventually forming an “Avicennian School.” The proposed project aims to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on the works and thought of Bahmanyār, who was arguably Avicenna’s most important disciple, and who produced one of the first major summa of “Avicennian philosophy” entitled The Book of Validated Knowledge (Kitāb al-Taḥṣīl). The project will reconstruct Bahmanyār’s metaphysical, theological, cosmological, physical, and epistemological system on the basis of both published and manuscript texts. The project will be articulated along three main research axes: 1/ a codicological and philological axis, which will focus on identifying, collecting, studying, and editing Arabic manuscripts that contain unpublished treatises by Bahmanyār; 2/ a philosophical and doctrinal axis, which will consist in the analysis of Bahmanyār’s philosophical ideas, doctrines, and arguments; and 3/ a social-historical and hermeneutical axis, which will investigate the historical, social, and intellectual context of Bahmanyār’s work, his self-perception as a philosopher, his philosophical method, and his relation to the “Avicennian School.” While conceptually distinguishable, these three axes overlap and are interdependent. The analysis will rely on a wide range of published and unpublished texts and will also make a contribution to the digital humanities by digitizing the obtained manuscripts and preparing new, critical editions of Bahmanyār’s Arabic treatises. In terms of deliverables, the main outcome of the research project will be the publication of the first English monograph devoted to Bahmanyār’s philosophy, which will fill an important gap in the study of Avicennism and, more broadly, of Arabic philosophy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants