خلاصة:
This paper explores the construction of the canon of politicaltheory. I argue that the interpretation of the canon that definesancient pagan Greeks as the founders of western politicalthought, includes medieval Christian thinkers, and yet definesout Muslim and Jewish philosophers is based upon western eth-nocentric secular assumptions about the proper role of reason,experience and revelation in philosophical thinking
ملخص الجهاز:
I argue that the interpretation of the canon that definesancient pagan Greeks as the founders of western politicalthought, includes medieval Christian thinkers, and yet definesout Muslim and Jewish philosophers is based upon western eth-nocentric secular assumptions about the proper role of reason,experience and revelation in philosophical thinking .
7 So I aim to bring attention to the constructed nature of the canon of the history of political thought with an emphasis on the relationship between western and Islamic intellectual traditions.
Rather, Plato and Aristotle are the ancestors of a philosophical tradi- tion that criss-crosses between several different cultures and religions: pagan ancient Greece, the Christianised Roman empire, the Christian Byzantine empire, the Zoroastrian Persian empire, the Islamic empire, Latin Christendom, secular Europe and later, its colonies, now known as the West.
Understood from a “Westemist” perspective,“ it is clear that the story of the canon’s origins, its exclusive claim to Plato and Aristotle, its way of explaining the transmission of Platonic and Aristotelian thought from ancient Greece to Latin Europe via the inert hands of Muslim and Jewish philosophers, and its conception of Machiavelli as the break between “ancients” and “modems,” is no mere trifle: it is part of the very essence of what it means to be a “Westemer.
By erroneously claiming Plato and Aristotle as the founders of traditional western political philosophy, and by overlooking the interme- diate role of Muslim intellectuals, the canon has presented a monocultural story of the history of political thought that wipes out its true intercultural nature.