SYMPOSIUM: “Philosophy between the Islamicate and Latin American Traditions: Civilizational Perspectives on Alienation/Ghayriyya in the Knowing/Being. (22-24 June 2024)
CONTACT: Dr. Anthony F. Shaker, afshaker@aol.com.
DATE: 22-24 June 2024.
SPONSOR: Department of Aesthetics and History of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Seville (Spain).
LANGUAGES OF PRESENTATION: English, Spanish, Farsi.
This symposium brought together a group of learned scholars for a dialogue across two cultural spheres. They include:
Luce López-Baralt (University of Puerto Rico), José Antonio Antón Pacheco (Universidad de Sevilla), Jim Maffie (University of Maryland), Amilcar Aldama Cruz (Al-Mustafa International University, Universidad de La Habana), Omneya Ayad (Uskudar University), Anthony F. Shaker (scholar of Islamic Philosophy), Ángel Horacio Molina (San Jorge School), Mahdi Saatchi (Shahid Motahari University ), Hilal Oytun Altun (Jagiellon University), Hamedeh Rastaei (Aletaha Institute of Higher Education), Hamidreza Ayatollahy (Allameh Tabatabaii University), Houssem Eddin Chachia (University of Murcia)
Latin America is a unique mosaic of cultures, mostly of its own making, that trace their origins back to western European, Indigenous, African and Islamic sources; its philosophies can be found in its rich literature and art and studied there, not just in the departments of philosophy.
The Islamicate world is also a cultural mosaic. Despite its long experience, it faces a similar challenge of emancipation from the contemporary morass and its chaotic monologues all during the short 150-year history of “Western” economic, political and intellectual domination of the rest of the world. The “philosophical attitude” that has existed there for fourteen centuries has been expressed in various forms (falsafa, taṣawwuf, ʿirfān, poetry, etc.).
Alienation as psychological dysfunctionality covers neither the full range of the concept nor the role it has played in contemporary philosophy, particularly Hegelianism-Marxism. And it has little bearing on the concept of “ghayriyya” and its role in the philosophy that developed in the 1,400-year-old Ḥikma tradition. Consequently, this symposium will not explore either concept in the sense of human dysfunctionality.
In ʿilm al-ḥikma (science of philosophy), the discourse on “ghayriyya” in Arabic and “bēgānagī” in Farsi, or “gharb” (exile, from which the word “maghrib” or west is also derived, meaning “where the sun sets”) is pervasive. It also proved instrumental in the founding of the exact and human sciences in the Islamicate world. Nevertheless, the sciences are only one type of knowledge, since ʿilm al-ḥikma more broadly considers knowledge within the framework of both the knowing and the existing, jointly.
At one point, philosophy on the European subcontinent arrived at something approaching this conception, in the wake of the heavy borrowing from the ambient Islamicate world that had taken place all through the medieval period, where one of the principal channels of transmission was al-Andalus. Therefore, the idea behind alienation and otherness, together with their transcendence (e.g., “Aufhebung” for Hegel, or “tanassukh” and “tanazzuh” in Ḥikma), arguably, originates from a common Leitmotif. “Ghayriyya”, which enjoys a much longer and richer history in ʿilm al-ḥikma, has given rise to a host of other concepts—derivatives like “separation” (taghayyur) and possessiveness (ghayra), and opposites like “union” or unification (tawḥīd)—that is to say, the separation of “otherness” and the union expressible as a divine self-identity, respectively.
Something on this order has animated the intellectual life of Latin America, as well. At the same time, interest quickly gravitated toward the theme of cultural alienation, because Latin American philosophers, writers and artists have always faced the twofold challenge of self-identity and emancipation. A formerly colonized region, Latin America has also inherited a good portion of its philosophical lexicon from outside, some of it dating back to the French Enlightenment. But its philosophy is much richer than meets the eye, since it contains other important roots, particularly Indigenous and African. Philosophical ideas are easily found in literature, art, not just in a discipline called philosophy—for example, in the writings of José Enrique Rodó, Martín Luis Gusmán, Alfonso Reyes and Antonio Caso, Diego Rivera, José Carlos Mariátegui, Ramón Rubín, Ricardo Pozas, Rosario Castellano, Miguel Angel Asturias, and many others.
Human dysfunctions come more easily to attention in moments of crisis than tranquillity. So, their prominence in the discourse that exists in the social formation associated with the contemporary “West” (essentially, the US, England and France) since the twentieth century is not surprising. There, psychiatrists keep coining euphemistic clinical names for them, as the legislators and legal experts invoke and normalize them, thereby shifting the “moral” regime. Contemporary philosophers, for their part, like to weave new interpretations—a good example being French Existentialists’ musings about alienation. In the end, instead of receding, many of that society’s most obvious psychological and social dysfunctions keep on expanding and being rehabilitated by the philosophers as somehow part of the very fabric of a supposed “human personality”.
This order of things appears to be coming to a head in the so-called “West”. In contrast, this symposium seeks to encourage a dialogue that reaches beyond the unusually chaotic conditions of our time that give rise to the present fixation of human dysfunctions, in the first place.
We are delighted to announce that the University of Seville will be the primary sponsor of this symposium. We look forward to seeing you all there 22-24 June 2024.