Revealed Sciences - Stearns, Justin K.

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Résumé :
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco....

Biographie:
Justin K. Stearns is Associate Professor of Arab Crossroad Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, where his research interests focus on the intersection of law, science, and theology in the pre-modern Muslim Middle East. He is the author of Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean and al-Yusi: The Discourses (2011).

Sommaire:
Preface: paths not taken; Introduction: Narratives of science, old and new; 1. A landscape of learning in the far west; Excursus: the poverty of intellectual history as a series of great men; 2. Constructing science in Morocco between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; Excursus: the horizons of causality: how to think about causes, nature, and ghosts of scientific methods; 3. Legalizing science: the authority of the natural sciences in Islamic law; Excursus: Kuhn and the history of science in Islamicate societies; 4. Writing the mathematical and natural sciences; Excursus: Sufism and the spiritual life: balancing the exoteric and esoteric sciences; Conclusion.