This article contributes to the study of the globalization of science through an analysis of Ahmed Cevdet's nineteenth-century translation of the sixth chapter of Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) Muqaddimah, which deals with the nature and history of science. Cevdet's translation and Ottomanization of that text demonstrate that science did not simply originate in Europe to be subsequently distributed to the rest of the world. Instead, knowledge transmitted from Europe was actively engaged with and appropriated by scholars, who sought to put that material within their own cultural context in a manner that could serve their own intellectual and practical needs. Cevdet's case is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that (1) Islamic conceptions of human nature, the soul and the nature of knowledge provided particularly fertile soil in which empiricist and positivist traditions could take root, and (2) aspects of modern science – specifically its ostensive separation from metaphysical debates – made it more attractive to Islamic theologians than was, for example, the work of Aristotelian philosophers. Through an exploration of Cevdet's career and a close analysis of his historiographical treatment of Ibn Khaldun's account of sciences, this article foregrounds the agency of non-Europeans in the late nineteenth-century circulation of scientific knowledge.
In this paper, I examine several commentaries and glosses on the prolegomenon of Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s (d. 675/1276–77) Shamsiyya that relate to debates on the Aristotelian and Ibn Sīnān theory of science in the postclassical period. Chief among the commentaries of the Shamsiyya is Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 766/1365) Taḥrīr al-qawāʿid al-manṭiqiyya. This commentary, rather than the base text of the Shamsiyya, set the stage for later interpretations by Mirak al-Bukhārī (fl. 733/1332), Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Qāshānī (d. 755/1354), Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413), Dāwūd al-Khwāfī (fl. 839/1465) and ʿIṣām al-Dīn Isfarāyinī (d. 945/1538). I focus on three issues that were raised in these interpretations of the Shamsiyya’s prolegomenon: (1) the place of the elements of sciences in logical corpus, (2) the notion of the prolegomenon and its content, and (3) the real essence of a science. I attend to the particular debates and contentions on these issues to reveal the general idea of science at that time.
History of science witnessed a revolutionary change in the second half of the twentieth century with a heightened focus on the social, political, and cultural setting that shaped production and circulation of scientific knowledge. This approach, which also raised questions about the definition of science, had an effect on the historical studies of science in the Ottoman Empire since the mid-1980s. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn's Science Among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge continues this approach as she attempts to fill a gap in English literature on sciences in the Ottoman Empire by writing an introductory text. Shefer-Mossensohn states that she is not interested in the content of sciences, but rather in the processes that produced "Ottoman science" (p. 11). By focusing on the subjects that Ottomans were interested in studying and the pedagogies they used, Shefer-Mossensohn hopes to provide an answer to Peter Dear's question "What is the history of science history of?" The author responds adopting a wide understanding of science as a "body of knowledge about the reality of our lives" (p. 1). Science Among the Ottomans consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction, the author notes the historiographical shifts, and briefly reviews the secondary literature on Arabic-Islamic and Ottoman sciences. The first chapter deals with the concept of knowledge. Shefer-Mossensohn points out that Ottomans inherited sciences and knowledge from various civilizations including Turkic-Mongol, Chinese, Islamic, Byzantine, Mediterranean, and European civilizations. This is followed by diverging issues such as Seljukid decorative arts, contemporary Wahhabi understanding of the Prophetic hadith "Seek knowledge even in China," Ottoman gardening, the entry on knowledge in Meninski's thesaurus, epistemology, classifications of sciences, status of philosophical sciences, and amalgamation of diverging medical, astronomical and astrological bodies of knowledge. All of these show diversity of scientific traditions in the Ottoman Empire.
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