Professor Ahmed Alwishah’s New Book Explores Aristotle’s Enduring Legacy in Arabic Philosophy

Aristotle_Arabic_TraditionClaremont, Calif. (September 9, 2015)—Ahmed Alwishah, associate professor of philosophy at Pitzer College, has co-edited a collection of essays, Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition, that examines Aristotle’s enduring legacy through the lens of the Arabic tradition. The book, co-edited by Alvernia University Assistant Professor of Philosophy Josh Hayes, is scheduled for release this month by Cambridge University Press.

In Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition, contributing scholars in Greek, medieval and Arabic philosophy explore central themes in Aristotle’s body of work, including logic, rhetoric and poetics, physics and meteorology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics and politics. Alwishah has contributed one of 12 essays, “Avicenna on Self-cognition and Self-awareness.”

Alwishah and Hayes chose authors with wide-ranging historical expertise in Aristotle and Arabic philosophy who are thoroughly acquainted with the long-standing philosophical problems inherent in both traditions.

“The authors are both older scholars who are well established and respected interpreters of the ancient and medieval tradition and younger scholars who have begun to bring new and innovative approaches to this intersection between Aristotle and Arabic philosophy,” Alwishah said.

By systematically and distinctively capturing the phenomena of the Aristotelianism in the Arabic tradition, the book will have “a long-standing impact on the fields of ancient and medieval philosophy,” he said.

Ahmed Alwishah’s courses at Pitzer include Philosophy of Religion, Islam vs. Islam and Spinoza and Leibniz on Reality. In 2013, Alwishah was awarded a visiting fellowship to the University of Cambridge to research dialectical disputation—a form of philosophical debate—in the language of the Quran.

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