Revisiting Premodern Islamic Science and Experience (Paperback)

This open access book takes a fresh look at the nature and place of experience in premodern Islamic science. It seeks to answer two questions: What kind of experience constituted premodern Islamic science? And in what ways did that experience constitute science? Answering these questions, the authors critique the trajectory of most existing histories of the period, which tend to reduce “experience” to empirical method or practice. This view reflects the emphasis that histories of modern science, especially of the Scientific Revolution, have placed on empiricism—the standard against which Islamic actors were then measured. This book offers a new historiography, arguing that experience had a far wider scope in the world of Islamic science. Combining an innovative theoretical framework with three case studies and a reflective epilogue by renowned experts in the field, this work offers the history of science a solid foundation on which to build its analyses of premodern science and the modality, scope, and role of experience therein. As a result, it speaks to specialists in the history of premodern Islamic science and historians of science in general to reconsider their historiographical assumptions. 

Hannah Erlwein holds a PhD in Islamic intellectual history from SOAS University of London (2016). She specializes in the two premodern Islamic sciences of kalam (theology) and falsafa (philosophy). She has published several articles and chapters dealing with various aspects of the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition. Her PhD thesis was published by De Gruyter in 2019 as Arguments for the Existence of God is Classical Islamic Thought: A Re-appraisal of Perspectives and Discourses. She has conducted postdoctoral research at LMU Munich (2017–2019) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (2019–present) within Katja Krause's research group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body, ca. 800–1650." At the MPIWG, she has investigated premodern Islamic debates about the nature of, and ways to attain, scientific knowledge, with a particular focus on the notion of experience.

Katja Krause, professor of the history of science at the Technical University Berlin, leads the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research rethinks the relationship between experience and science in the premodern sciences of living beings. She is also interested in the continuities and discontinuities of scientific practices and ideals from premodernity to the present. Among her recent publications are Aquinas on Seeing God (Marquette University Press, 2020) and the edited collection Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2023). After earning her PhD in philosophy at King’s College London, Katja Krause held postdoctoral fellowships in the history of science at the MPIWG and Harvard University and an assistant professorship in medieval thought at Durham University.