Reintroducing Philosophy: Thinking as the Gathering of Civilization, According to Contemporary, Islamicate and Ancient Sources. By Anthony F. Shaker

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This book covers a great deal of ground. It includes the constant presence of Heidegger, excerpts from Islamic, Indian and Chinese philosophy, and a great number of modern European and American thinkers from Kant up to today. It was my intention to concentrate on Shaker’s account of Islamic philosophy, since for readers of this journal that presumably would be of most interest. He writes a good deal on Mullā Șadrā and a range of other thinkers within that tradition like al-Qūnawī and the falāsifa. On the whole his comments on these thinkers are sensible and perceptive, and there is nothing controversial here. What is more challenging is the central claim that Islamic science had a significant effect on science as a whole, something we are told that has been willfully ignored and misrepresented, and the non-Islamic world has imposed its views on an unwilling Islamic public. Those nasty Europeans with their imperialistic ways and materialist science forced Islamic science to reject its roots and mimic the Western variety. On the other hand, we are told that the Orientalists at the same time did their best to obscure the roots of Western science in the earlier discoveries in the Islamic world. This is of course familiar territory, although Shaker is critical of the idea of the Islamization of knowledge which has been proposed in modern times, seeing that quite rightly as an evasive strategy when dealing with the religion/science dichotomy. He does not go into much detail here on this point, or indeed on any point. For a very long book (over 750 pages) there is a remarkable lack of argument on the key issues that the author selects. There is however a great deal of exposition of the thinkers and theses that he thinks are crucial to understanding how philosophy should be pursued. Yet it is not easy to discern the central thesis.