The Shīʿah Institute’s Annual Symposium 2015: Philosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿah Islam

On the 2nd to the 4th of September 2015, the Shīʿah Institute held its first Annual Symposium at the Warburg Institute, University of London. This year’s Annual Symposium was themed around the subject of ‘Philosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿah Islam’.

The Dean of the Shīʿah Institute, Sayyid Amjad H. Shah Naqavi, delivers a welcome note to those convened for the Shīʿah Institute’s Annual Symposium 2015
                                                                                                                                                   

A look at the papers presented as part of the Shīʿah Institute’s Annual Symposium 2015 on ‘Philosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿah Islam’
                                                                                                                                                   

The following papers were delivered at this year’s Annual Symposium:

  • Sajjad Rizvi (University of Exeter) – The Problematic of Shīʿī Philosophy: Between Philosophical Analysis and Intellectual History
  • Wilferd Madelung (University of Oxford) – Shīʿah Islam and Universality in the Encyclopaedia of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ
  • Hussein Abdulsater (American University of Beirut) – The Theory of States from al-Mufīd to al-Murtaḍā
  • Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad (American University in Cairo) – ‘Imāmate by Any Other Name would Smell as Sweet’: Ibn ʿArabī, his Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, and the Doctrine of al-Insān al-Kāmil in Shīʿī Philosophy
  • Elizabeth R. Alexandrin (University of Manitoba) – Breaking Open the Seal: Ḥaydar Āmulī, Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūye, and Messianic Expectations
  • Seyed Salman Safavi (London Academy of Iranian Studies) – The Safavid Order and the Importance of Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn Ardabīlī in Shīʿī Thought
  • Mohammed Rustom (Carleton University, Ottawa) – Ḥaydar Āmulī on Imām ʿAlī as the Seal of Walāyah
  • Ahab Bdaiwi (University of St Andrews) – The Epistemic Value of Shīʿah Islam in Mediaeval and Early-Modern Philosophical Traditions in the Islamic East: from al-Dashtakī (d. 1498) to al-Shīrāzī (d. 1636)
  • Reza Pourjavady (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) – The Assemblies of the Believers: Nūr Allāh Shūshtarī’s Compendium on the Legacy of the Shīʿah
  • Matthew Melvin-Koushki (University of South Carolina) – Mīr Dāmād and the Neopythagoreanisation of Philosophy in Safavid Iran
  • Mohammed Redha al-Lawati (al-Raʾy, Muscat, Oman) – Linking the Contingent to the Eternal and the Material to the Abstract in the Horizons of the Substantial Motion of Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī
  • Cyrus Ali Zargar (Augustana College, Illinois) – The Imām’s Ethical Body: Embodied Virtue and the Human Constitution according to Mullā Ṣadrā and Fayḍ Kāshānī
  • Sayyid Amjad H. Shah Naqavi (The Shīʿah Institute, London) – ‘I am the Prayer of the Believers and their Fast’: Ḥakīm-i Kuchik’s Concept of the Holy Mystery
  • Hasan Ali Khan (Habib University, Karachi) – The Role of Astrology in the Celebration of Nawruz Through the Wilāyat of ʿAlī at Ghadir-Khumm
  • Jari Kaukua (University of Jyväskylä) – Mullā Ṣadrā on the Uṣūl al-Kāfī
  • Sumeyye Parildar (Istanbul University) – Applying Gradational Ontology onto Logic: Mullā Ṣadrā on Propositions, Conception, and Assent
  • Mathieu Terrier (École pratique des hautes études, Paris) – Between Theology, Historiography, and Philosophy: The Concept of Badāʾ in Mīr Dāmād’s Nibrās al-Ḍiyāʾ, its Sources, and its Extensions
  • Emann Allebban (McGill University, Montreal) – Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics of Causation
  • Hossein Kamaly (Barnard College, Columbia, NY) – On Knowledge by Presence and the Epistemological Turn in Ḥikmah
  • Pooya Razavian (University of Oxford) – A Gadamerian Critique of Shabestarī’s Philosophical Anthropology
  • Robert Gleave (University of Exeter) – Twelver Uṣūlī Debates in the Philosophy of Language after Ākhund al-Khurasānī