Event Description

This conference at Warburg Institute will celebrate the recent publication of three books on or related to the cosmos and spirit in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world from late Antiquity until the the early modern period:

• Juan Acevedo, Alphanumeric Cosmology from Greek into Arabic (Mohr Siebeck, 2020)
• Michael-Sebastian Noble, Philosophizing the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and ‘The Hidden Secret’ of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (De Gruyter, 2021)
• Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice, ed. Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Farouk Yahya (Brill, 2021)

Each of these books is innovative in examining how the cosmos, its numinous aspects and the position of the human being, were understood, especially in terms of symbolic and hidden forces and their practical applications. They reveal the hidden knowledge of the occult traditions that had profound influences within the societies in which they were transmitted. While the lines of transmission can be traced across language, ethnic and religious boundaries in the Mediterranean and Middle East, the emphasis of these books is on the rich melting pot of the variegated Islamicate world, from which later Iranian, Turkic, Byzantine and Western European traditions emerged.

Friday 9 and Saturday 10 July 2021, 14:00–19:00 (BST)

Source: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/24440

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