We are excited to announce Professor Peter Adamson, a leading Historian of Philosophy and a principal scholar of Islamic Philosophy, as the Selfridge Lecturer for 2025.
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the author of Al-Kindī and Al-Razī in the series “Great Medieval Thinkers” from Oxford University Press, and has edited or co-edited numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast (www.historyofphilosophy.net), which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.
On Wednesday, March 26th at 4:30pm in the HST Forum 101, Professor Adamson will deliver the Selfridge Lecture entitled "Skepticism Across Borders: Arguments from Animal Difference in Chinese, Greek, and Arabic Philosophy". The lecture will focus on a skeptical argument stating that animals have a different perspective on the world from humans. Since there is no reason to prefer the human perspective on the world to animal perspectives, one should suspend judgment about the veracity of the human perspective. Obviously this argument needs a lot of filling out before it can be evaluated. To undertake this task, the lecture begins from a resonant passage in the Taoist classic, the Zhuangzi, before examining in more detail the skeptical mode from animals in Sextus Empiricus and similar material in Montaigne. The talk then turns to an epistle from the Islamic “Brethren of Purity,” who imagined animals bringing a court case against humans.
Professor Adamson will also give a College Talk on Thursday, March 27 at 4:30pm in the Scheler Humanities Forum (LI-200) on "Avicennan Scholasticism: Post-Classical Philosophy in the Islamic East". According to a long-standing, but now widely discredited, narrative about philosophy in the Islamic world, it more or less ends with the commentaries of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the 12th century. In fact, philosophy continued to be pursued with great sophistication for centuries thereafter. But there was indeed a difference: whereas early philosophical discussions mostly centered around Aristotle, as of the 12th century the focus moves to the ideas of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who displaced him as the definitive figure who all serious intellectuals needed to confront. In this presentation Prof. Adamson will compare this development to the scholastic tradition in medival Latin philosophy, suggesting that there are striking parallels: these range from the way that texts were written to the specific topics that received attention. In some cases we even see the same arguments being devised independently of one another in Latin and Arabic, simply because in both traditions it was so important to respond to Ibn Sina.
