Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة | Julius-Maximilians - Universität Würzburg (original) (raw)

Book Chapters by Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies , 2021

Philosophical and theological ethics in the Islamic tradition tend to be appraised on the basis o... more Philosophical and theological ethics in the Islamic tradition tend to be appraised on the basis of a unilateral perspective, which circumvents a moral rational approach to intuition. On this account, moral knowledge is expected to rest on intuitive judgments, which are universally accessible to human beings. Looking at moral ontology and epistemology in Arabic philosophy, I demonstrate that taking intuitionism as the only valid rational discourse to ethics needs to be challenged. In fact, Arabic philosophers do not subscribe to a realist view of the good and evil in relation to human actions, and rather admit a division between cosmic values in metaphysics and moral values in ethics. In so doing, they show how metaphysics ascribes a substantial view to good in existence and a negative theory to evil, while the science of ethics admits a teleological and relative view of the good. Overall, the falāsifa remain committed to Aristotle’s premise that ethics does not rely on abstraction and emphasized the role of experience too. But, they seem to be also attentive to the dialectical nature of Islamic jurisprudence in producing norms considering both principles of the law and its particular application. This is also clear in their epistemology of ethical judgments such as the maxim justice is good. While they ascribe a universal status to ethical maxims, they preclude from granting them an absolute status over the authority of norms construction. Instead, philosophers attribute a dialectical role to ethical maxims to guarantee both consensus over norms and the possibility to produce truthful opinions.

Philosophy and Language in the Islamic World, 2021

Interpreting Averroes, Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni

Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, from Antiquity to the Present, 2018

Looking at the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Arabic tradition, particularly Averroes’ ... more Looking at the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Arabic tradition, particularly Averroes’ Middle commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Talḫīṣ al-ḫaṭāba), I discern the impact of the Islamic legal context on the commentator’s reading of Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric. Placing Averroes’ interpretive enterprise within the context of Islamic governance has already been highlighted, particularly the role of Islamic law in his conception of the political role of rhetoric. Such attention to Islamic law, however, has often been conceived in a theoretical fashion, without attesting to the concrete and epistemological basis of legal practices of the courts. Focusing on Averroes’ discus- sion of the role of rhetoric in the judicial discourse, I address the impact of Islamic legal procedures known as the rules of evidence: witnesses and oaths and their modus operandi in the court, in shaping Averroes’ conception of the political role of rhetoric. Accounting for Islamic rules of evidence, I argue that Averroes ascribes a practical role to rhetoric in the court in order to establish a consensus in the implementation of justice. In so doing, Averroes oversteps his role as commentator and rather draws from his own practical concerns over the implementation of justice in the court as a legal practitioner: the Qāḍī of Cordova.

The present volume brings together thirteen articles as so many chapters of a book, devoted to th... more The present volume brings together thirteen articles as so many chapters of a book, devoted to the history, methods, and practices of the commentaries that have been written on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Examining both the linguistic and factual background, these contributions attempt to insert each of the commentaries into its particular historical, political, social, philosophical, and pedagogical context.
The historical periods and geographical areas that arise – from Greco-Roman antiquity to Heidegger’s philosophy, from the Syriac and Arabic traditions to the Western world – make it possible, in sum, not only to indicate how the Rhetoric has been read and interpreted, but also to offer general perspectives on the practice of explicating ancient texts.

Le présent volume rassemble treize articles envisagés comme autant de chapitres d’un livre et dédiés à l’histoire, à la méthode et à la pratique des commentaires à la Rhétorique d’Aristote. Mêlant l’approche matérielle et linguistique, ces contributions se proposent de réinscrire chacun des commentaires dans son contexte historique, politique, social, culturel, philosophique, et pédagogique particulier.
Les périodes et les aires géographiques considérées ici—de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine jusqu’à la philosophie de Heidegger, des traditions syriaque et arabe au monde occidental—permettent, in fine, non seulement de suggérer des pistes de lecture pour la Rhétorique et l’histoire des interprétations de la Rhétorique, mais aussi de dessiner des perspectives plus générales sur la pratique du commentaire.

Conference Presentations by Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة

The Conceptual Ground of Good and Evil in Islamic Discourse: A Fecund Domain For Ethical Reflections

The notions of good and bad/evil in Islamic thought carries multifarious overtones, and their con... more The notions of good and bad/evil in Islamic thought carries multifarious overtones, and their conceptual and linguistic translatability cannot be limited to gauging human conducts. The complexity of these notions is rooted in the interpretive associations of good and evil (khayr and sharr) to different domains of ethical reflections, which range from aesthetic undertones reflected in the Arabic terms qabīḥ and ḥasan (ugly and beautiful) and connotations to truth and falsehood associated to terms like ḥaqq and bāṭil but also to communal basis of what is praised and what is blamed such as mamdūḥ and madhmūm, as well as the legal spectrum of norms which includes the obligatory wājib, forbidden ḥarām as well as what is recommended mandūb and finally the metaphysical connotations associated to existence found in philosophical discussions of concepts such as the notion of the ultimate good al-khayr al-maḥḍ or khayriyyat al-wujūd. All these nuances deserve close attention when tackling Islamic ethics. This diversity is also captured in the nature of the reflection found in queries related to the ontology of good and evil, the nature/moral character of human and divine actions, the basis of normativity and the methods of norms construction in relation to scripture and communal practice, the origin of moral agency and responsibility in this world, the concept of happiness and misery and its realization both in this world and the hereafter, virtues and vices as well as theological and philosophical positions on theodicy, God’s moral code, the nature of creation, providence and the problem of evil, the nature of poetic discourse and its ethical dimension, as well as the psychological role of good and bad actions on the purification of the soul and its rapport to mystical aims. This conference is the first attempt to tap into the different conceptual discussions on the notion of good and evil in the variegated areas of knowledge production in Islam ranging from: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, Sufism, Quranic exegesis, Hadith, and adab, and political thought in both classical and modern period.

Workshop européen de la philosophie arabe Logos -Physis -Nomos, Freiburg 2015

Colloque international de doctorants en histoire de la philosophie arabe, l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016

Gesetz und Gewissen in der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Goethe-Universität , 2018

Sémantique et psychologie dans la philosophie médiévale arabe et latine, Genève 2017, 2018

by Hany Rashwan, Bilal Orfali, Emad Abdul Latif د. عماد عبد اللطيف, Christine Kämpfer, Ferenc Csirkes, Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة, Enass Khansa إيناس خنسه, Nicola Carpentieri, CHIARA FONTANA, Murat Umut Inan, and Rebecca Ruth Gould

The conference full program

The conference brings new perspectives to Islamic discourses on ethics during the pre-modern peri... more The conference brings new perspectives to Islamic discourses on ethics during the pre-modern period across the disciplines of law, theology, philosophy, and adab. While ethics is defined in broad terms to encompass various scholarly discussions of morality, the conference adopts a contextualist approach to address the following issue: How did scholars think about ethics in their conception of the divine discourse on morality in light of the contingent nature of human reality? Earlier emic approaches to Islamic law led many to declare its literalist tendency an obstacle to rationalist ethics (as espoused, for example, by the Mu‘tazilite theologians, and by the philosophers). Exploring the question of contingency in Islamic ethics is predicated upon new findings in Islamic theories of law which not only underline jurists’ contextualist approaches to producing norms, but also the epistemological grounds of the theories which accommodate contingency (Johansen, Hallaq, Zysow, Gleave). In fact, in his recent work, Die Kultur der Ambiguität, Thomas Bauer has drawn attention to the complexity of Islamic normative discourses, depicting the tolerance of ambiguity as a key feature in the argumentation deployed in the production of the communally accepted in Islam. Evidently, these perspectives make room for adopting a contextualist approach to ethics; they help us overcome the tired opposition between scripturalism and rationalism as the only authoritative approaches to normativity in Islam.

Taking as central to its methodology Bauer’s perspectives, along with the contextual ethics of casuistry put forward by Jonsin and Toulmin in The Abuse of Casuistry, the conference is intended to explore further and more widely the contingency of ethical discourses in Islam. More specifically, discussions will include articulations of moral discourse in legal reasoning and argumentation, theological discussions of theodicy and divine command theories, the epistemology behind collecting moral knowledge in hadith collections, adab, aphoristic literature, rhetorical speeches and sermons, epistemological and ontological claims on morality, the reception of Aristotelian corrective philosophy of ethics and discussion of virtues. The conference will also serve to identify new questions, answers to which could give substance to the notion of the flexibility of norms across Islamic ethical discourses. Questions are to be answered from the perspective of each discipline, and speakers will be asked to reflect on the philosophical and theological implications that can be drawn. Comparative perspectives across the various Islamic sciences are especially encouraged.

Books by Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة

Feriel Bouhafa (ed.), 2021

Papers by Feriel Bouhafa فريال بوحافة

Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2022