The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 9, 1998

Medieval Philosophy

Giovanna Lelli
Pages 42-47

Avicennisme et averroïsme dans la poétique et la rhétorique islamiques médiévales
La tradition persane

The study of medieval Islamic philosophy is necessary in order to understand Islamic thought, both medieval and contemporary. I propose that the distinction within Islamic thought between two great paradigms, the Avicennian and the Averroistic, is a fertile approach. It is true that in the field of Islamic poetics and rhetoric we find nothing that corresponds to the philosophical and religious opposition between Avicennism and Averroism. Nevertheless, in the medieval Islamic world, besides the official rhetoric which was linked to the legal culture, we can find several elements of these two great cultural paradigms even in the theory of literature. Today, a renewed interest in Islamic aesthetics and philosophy might help the West recompose its fragmented postmodernism, while it could in turn help the Islamic world construct a new, critical and non-fundamentalist approach to its classical authors.