Organizing Knowledge: Encyclopaedic Activities in the Pre-Eighteenth Century Islamic World (Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9004146970 ISBN 13: 9789004146976

Publisher: Brill Academic Pub, 2006

Synopsis

The contributions in this volume offer the first comprehensive effort to describe and analyse the collection, classification, presentation and methodology of information in the knowledge society of medieval Islam in the disciplines of religious and legal learning, as well as the rational sciences of Hellenistic origin - philosophy, mathematical and medical sciences.The volume begins with a general discussion of the concept of encyclopædia. Successive chapters explore the bases of authority in the institutions of religion and law; biographical literature and handbooks of law; compendia of scientific and philosophical learning based on Iranian and Greek sources; and the more specialised expositions of mathematics and philosophy. The special character of Muslim institutions, their teaching traditions and syllabi is also put into perspective. This is a reference work for the principal genres of 'enyclopædic' outlines and manuals - biography, legal handbooks, historiography of knowledge transmission, cosmography, and the philosophical sciences - and a major contribution to the literary and intellectual history.

About this title

About the Author

Gerhard Endress, Ph.D.(1965) in Oriental Studies, University of Frankfurt, is Professor a the University of Bochum. Among his publications areProclus Arabus(1973), A Greek and Arabic Lexicon: materials for a dictionary of the mediæval translations from Greek into Arabic (ed., with Dimitri Gutas, 1992), andIslam: an historical introduction, 2nd edition (2002).

Edition details

• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 9004146970
• ISBN 13: 9789004146976
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Gerhard Endress