"...the Imagination (or love, or sympathy, or any other sentiment) induces knowledge, and knowledge of an 'object' which is proper to it..."
Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a scholar, philosopher and theologian. He was a champion of the transformative power of the Imagination and of the transcendent reality of the individual in a world threatened by totalitarianisms of all kinds. One of the 20th century’s most prolific scholars of Islamic mysticism, Corbin was Professor of Islam & Islamic Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Teheran. He was a major figure at the Eranos Conferences in Switzerland. He introduced the concept of the mundus imaginalis into contemporary thought. His work has provided a foundation for archetypal psychology as developed by James Hillman and influenced countless poets and artists worldwide. But Corbin’s central project was to provide a framework for understanding the unity of the religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His great work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to the study of the place of the imagination in human life.

Search The Legacy of Henry Corbin: Over 800 Posts

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

New Book with Essay on Corbin


Chapter 22: 
Henry Corbin's Hermeneutics of Scripture
by Hadi Fahkhoury

in



Philosophy and the Abrahamic Religions: Scriptural Hermeneutics and Epistemology
Editor: Torrance Kirby, Rahim Acar and Bilal Baş
Date Of Publication: Jan 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing

From Greco-Roman Antiquity through to the European Enlightenment, philosophy and religious thought were inseparably interwoven. This was equally the case for the popular natural or ‘pagan’ religions of the ancient world as it was for the three pre-eminent ‘religions of the book’, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The lengthy and involved encounter of the Greek philosophical tradition – and especially of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic strands of that tradition – initially with the Hellenistic cults and subsequently with the three Abrahamic religions, played a critical role in shaping the basic contours of Western intellectual history from Plato to Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine, and Proclus; from Aristotle to al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Ġazālī, Aquinas and the medieval scholastics, and eventually to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus and such modern philosophers and theologians as Richard Hooker, the Cambridge Platonists, Jacob Boehme, and G. W. F. Hegel to name but a few. The aim of the twenty-four essays comprising this volume is to explore the intellectual worlds of the three Abrahamic religious traditions, their respective approaches to scriptural hermeneutics, and their interaction over many centuries on the common ground of the inheritance of classical Greek philosophy. The shared goal of the contributors is to demonstrate the extent to which the three Abrahamic religions have created similar shared patterns of thought in dealing with crucial religious concepts such as the divine, creation, providence, laws both natural and revealed, such problems as the origin of evil and the possibility of salvation, as well as defining hermeneutics, that is to say the manner of interpreting their sacred writings.

Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University, Montreal. His recent books include Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005) and A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008).
Rahim Acar is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Marmara University, Istanbul. He is the author of Talking about God and Talking about Creation: Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ Positions (2005).
Bilal Baş is Assistant Professor of the History of Religions at Marmara University, Istanbul. His monograph, Ecclesiastical Politics during the Iconoclastic Controversy: The Impact of Eusebian Political Theology on Imperial Policy, will be published soon.

No comments:

Post a Comment