The Making of an Ottoman Tradition of Natural Philosophy, ca. 1500–1800

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a hitherto unexplored tradition of Avicennian natural philosophy in the Ottoman Empire centered on Athīr al-Dīn Abharī’s (d. ca. 664/1265) thirteenth-century handbook of philosophy, Hidāyat al-ḥikma. Contrary to longstanding myths of Ottoman indifference toward or withdrawal from natural philosophy, this dissertation demonstrates that the discipline remained a vibrant and integral component of the empire’s scholarly culture for centuries. Chapters 1–3 trace the tradition’s development through a combination of book-historical and social-historical analysis, while Chapters 4–6 examine the substantive content of its core texts from the perspective of the history of philosophy. Chapter 1 offers a historical overview of Ottoman engagement with Hidāyat al-ḥikma. It demonstrates that, along with its attendant commentaries and glosses, the natural philosophy part of Abharī’s work was the centerpiece of the discipline throughout Ottoman history, and that, from the seventeenth century onward, its standard exegetical accompaniments became two works authored by Persian scholars and transmitted to the imperial heartlands via the Kurdish provinces: Qāḍī Mīr Maybudī’s (d. 909/1504) commentary and Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Lārī’s (d. 979/1572) gloss on this commentary. Chapter 2 traces the proliferation, from circa 1650 onward, of a new practice of writing further glosses on Lārī’s gloss in the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a scholarly biography of Lārī, followed by a prosopographical survey of seventeen super-glosses and their authors. The chapter demonstrates that this practice also originated in the Kurdish provinces before spreading westward into the imperial heartlands and maps the scholarly networks that channeled its transmission. Chapter 3 examines an episode in the vernacularization of the tradition in the eighteenth century through Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī (d. 1174/1760) and his İklīlü’t-terācim, an expanded Turkish translation of Hidāyat al-ḥikma, Maybudī’s commentary, and a partial one of Lārī’s gloss written for a provincial notable in western Anatolia. It argues that Aḳkirmānī’s translation emerged as the tradition was shaped by two eighteenth-century currents in the empire: a burgeoning Turkish vernacular readership for scholarly works and the growing involvement of provincial elites in scholarship and its patronage. It further argues that the translation was conceived in counter-response to earlier Ottoman court–sponsored projects aimed at promoting natural philosophies alternative to the tradition’s Avicennism. Chapters 4–6 illuminate the tradition’s Avicennian provenance by exploring discussions in the İklīlü’t-terācim regarding the definition of natural philosophy, the composition of natural bodies, and the nature of time, respectively.