Münster report

I spent most of this past week at the Deutsche Orientalistentag (DOT), a big gathering of people who work on "oriental studies." It didn't do much to convince me that the now widely abandoned concept of "oriental studies" should be revived; as you might imagine "oriental" in this context means having to do with non-European cultures of the "east", mostly Islamic, Indian, and Chinese. Of course there are plenty of links between these cultures, but I think one would be hard pressed to make a case that there is one single, well-defined field here (it could just as well be called "not-European studies"). On the other hand, it has a long history, and was in many ways a great event, featuring lots of exciting scholars with a wide range of expertise, so maybe that is reason enough to keep doing it. I spent most of my time at a multi-session panel on philosophy in the Islamic world which was very enjoyable, and featured a lot of papers from younger scholars in the field. So that was very encouraging, though my self-conception as being myself one of the younger scholars in the field is increasingly embattled as the years go by. Oh well.

In my own paper I presented a comparison between texts by Abu Bakr al-Razi and Judah Halevi, in which they criticize the use of "nature" by philosophers in explaining things like the development of human embryos. I came across the passage in Halevi while doing reading for the podcast, so this was a nice case of the podcast feeding back into my actual research. The presentation was sort of a capstone to our work on the Leverhulme Trust funded project on "Natural Philosophy in the Islamic World," which is coming to an end next month.