Former Fellows

In the space of the four decades between the 1950s and the 1980s, hundreds of both popular and scholarly works on the medieval Arabic philosophers al-Fārābī (c. 872-c. 950) and Avicenna (980-1037), both of whom were ‘of Central Asian origin', were published in the Soviet Union, mainly in the Russian, Uzbek, and Tajik languages. The vigorous growth of these studies was in contrast with the difficult rise and problematical development of Soviet historiography of medieval philosophy in general. In this perspective, by examining the disparity between these two neighbouring fields of the ‘historico-philosophical science', my project aims to shed light on the tangled play of divergent philosophical and non-philosophical influences to which Soviet historico-philosophical practice was subjected. In particular, by means of analyzing the studies on al-Fārābī and Avicenna, I shall test the conjecture that on some occasions Soviet historiographical practice would temporary lay aside the standard criteria for the evaluation of philosophical doctrines (such as their belonging to materialism/idealism, their being progressive/reactionary etc.) and apply others, connected either to the need to show the equal importance of European and non-European philosophy, or to the need to accommodate the patriotic feelings of the Central Asian Soviet peoples.