A Discourse on Method: Dialectics (‘ilm al-munazara) in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century

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Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at CRASSH for 2015-2016, delivers the first of his Leverhulme lectures. The second lecture, The Rise of “Deep Reading” in Ottoman Scholarly Culture,  will take place on Wednesday 4 May.

The science of ādāb al-baḥth or munāẓarah emerged relatively late in Islamic history. Its roots lay in the earlier science of eristic (jadal or khilāf) that had developed among early Islamic theologians and jurists (with some influence from Aristotelian topics and late-antique rhetoric). In this lecture, I will argue that there was an explosion of interest in the science in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. I will discuss the wider intellectual context of this development, as well as some of its consequences for the Ottoman tradition of logic.