Stanford University professor Riga Wood said: "Medieval Western thinkers were indebted to Muslim thinkers in their understanding of Aristotle as well as in their philosophical innovations."
According to Ashura News, citing Mehr correspondent, the 27th session of the series of international sessions of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Tehran was dedicated to a conversation between Nadia Maftuni, Director of the Department of Islamic Philosophy and Theology of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Tehran, and Professor Riga Wood, one of the prominent researchers of medieval philosophy.
This Stanford University professor has innovative research in the field of early readings of Aristotle's works in the Madrasa philosophical tradition and the development of metaphysical and scientific ideas in the 13th century. He has always paid special attention to the works of Richard Rufus, the 12th century philosopher. In 1996, he launched a project entitled Editing the Works of Richard Rufus, which was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and its results have also been published in the scientific collection Auctores Britannici. He has also written extensively about the influence of Averroes on Western philosophy and the transmission and development of Aristotelian ideas.
At the beginning of the meeting, Riga Wood’s biography was read and Nadia Maftuni thanked her for her presence at the meeting.
Riga Wood said after thanking Maftuni: “One thing that has changed about my biography is related to Elon Musk. He and the Department of Government Efficiency that he started, known as DOGE, have canceled my research and I don’t know if my research will continue or not. Now I am fighting to get my research that was approved by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) back. I am eighty years old and I don’t need a salary. But my assistants have to pay their mortgages and without those grants I can’t afford to pay my assistants’ salaries. Now I am involved in this issue. The people from the Department of Efficiency, with their intervention, fired eighty percent of the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities. They also revised the spending of the foundation’s budget, making changes to support the president’s goals. Almost everyone who had a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2020 to 2024 lost their grant. I had to fire my computer and student advisor who was my assistant and helped me with research and references. Unfortunately, this is a big problem.
Mahmoud Nouri, another professor in the School of Theology, asked him later in the session: “What do you think the future of this issue will be?”
“I think Trump is going too far,” Wood said, “and that makes it easier to resist these changes. But how soon will this resistance happen, and how much damage will be done before it happens, and how much damage will be reparable, those are all questions that are being asked.”
Riga Wood introduced the idea that Muslim scholars in the Middle Ages served Western civilization by translating Greek texts into Arabic and making them accessible to Western scholars, but this idea has now been challenged for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is the shortcomings of those translations. The question now arises whether we should accept the extreme revisionist view put forward by Guggenheim for such reasons? In 2008, Céline Guggenheim argued that it was very likely that European culture would have developed as it is without any contact with Islamic culture. He claims that all the necessary translations were prepared in a monastery called Mont Saint-Michel by James of Venice in the 1120s, about a hundred years before the Arabic translations. There are reasons why some might be inclined to agree with Guggenheim. One of these reasons is that Western thinkers themselves have not acknowledged their indebtedness to Islamic philosophy. Another reason is that Aristotle's commentators did not refer to the Arabic manuscripts and, according to Guggenheim, referred to the translations of James of Venice. As a result, we may think that Guggenheim is right. But there were strong objections to Guggenheim.
The session continued with discussions about Avicenna and Roger Bacon's view that Avicenna was a pure imitator of Aristotle. In the continuation of this discussion, Nadia Maftouni opposed Bacon's view and said: For example, regarding the five esoteric senses conceptualized by Avicenna, this fivefold form is not seen in Aristotle's works. So Avicenna was not a pure imitator of Aristotle.
Riga Wood confirmed this and stated: Western medieval thinkers were indebted to Muslim thinkers in their understanding of Aristotle and also in their philosophical innovations. He devoted this section to three arguments. One is an argument based on the historical order of events. The second is an argument based on concepts that have entered Western philosophy from Islamic philosophy and were not present before, including the naturalistic or naturalistic interpretation of miracles and prophecy, as well as the unity of material reason. The third is an argument based on the difference in interpretations before and after the acquaintance with Ibn Rushd. In this context, he mentioned Richard Rufus and his two treatises entitled Memoriale and Scriptum, both of which are commentaries on Aristotle's metaphysics, but the second treatise is ten times longer than the first in terms of the number of pages, and its writing dates back to the time when Rufus was acquainted with both Ibn Rushd's interpretation of metaphysics and numerous other works by him.
By comparing the two treatises, this university professor showed what deeper and more detailed topics were raised in each field in the second treatise compared to the first treatise, and he noted that Rufus refers to Ibn Rushd by the specific name "The Philosopher."
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