Philosophy, Art and Critique: A (short) conversation with the “other”

Document Type : Original Independent Original Article

Author

SOAS, University of London and Fellow, Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge

Abstract

 
Abstract: The article sketches a nexus between philosophy, art (poetry) and critique with a particular emphasis on the contribution of classical Muslim philosophers. At the same time, it demonstrates how luminaries such as Omar Khayyam and Ibn Sina, contributed to the renewal of philosophy as a freedom seeking exercise and as a means to pursue happiness through knowledge. In the second part of the article this discussion is geographically de-located to include critical theories from mainland Europe. The conclusion focuses on the comparability of these contemporary critical theories with the philosophies of the “east”. 

Keywords

References

[1]. On the emancipatory promise of art and philosophy see Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
[1]. See Adorno’s classic The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 2001.
[1]. Ibn Sina, Fontes sapientiae (uyun al-hikmah), edited byAbdurrahman Badawied, Cairo: no publisher, 1954, p. 16.
[1]. Quoted in Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 26.
[1]. See further Nasr with Aminrazavi (eds.), An Anthology, pp. 196. ff.
[1]. Umar Khayyam, ‘The Necessity of Contradiction, Free Will and Determinism (Darurat al-tadadd fi’l- alam wa’l- jabr wa’l-baqa)’, in Nasr with Aminrazavi, An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, p. 404, emphasis added.
[1]. Quoted in Mehdi Aminrazavi, ‘Martin Heidegger and Omar Khayyam on the Question of “Thereness” (Dasein), in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm, Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, p. 281.
[1]. Ibid., p. 283.
[1]. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, edited by Mehdi Aminrazavi, London: Curzon, 1996, p. 81.
[1]. On Adorno’s use of the term ‘Naturschöne’  see further Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia, pp. 211 ff.
[1]. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987,  p. 120.
[1]. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of theory, London: Pinter, 1988, p. 31.
[1]. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, p. 228.
[1]. Ibid., pp. 130-131.
[1]. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by C. Lenhardt, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 66-67. 
[1]. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 131.
[1]. Ibid., p. 131.
[1]. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, London: New Left Books, 1974, p. 247.
[1]. The case for utopia has been recently revisited by Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili. See their edited volume Globalization and Utopia: Critical essays, London: Palgrave, 2009.

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