There is, let us admit, something faintly comical about an academic field that cannot even decide what to call itself. It conjures up the sort of absurd scene that is so common in university life: the lengthy committee meeting devoted to working out what the committee’s remit should be, the tussle over the title of an endowed chair, the passionate debate waged over the placement of a comma. Yet serious intellectual disagreements can lie behind disputes over nomenclature. One such disagreement rages in my own field of speciality, which depending who you ask might be called “Arabic Philosophy” or “Islamic Philosophy.” Views on the question are so deeply held that when I co-edited the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy with Richard C. Taylor some years ago, one book review confined its remarks almost exclusively to complaining about the title.

This is ironic, since the beauty of the phrase “Arabic philosophy” should in theory be that it is so uncontentious. It would refer quite straightforwardly to philosophical texts written in the Arabic language. It does have a significant drawback, which is that people tend to misconstrue “Arabic” as a synonym for “Arab,” whereas in fact most philosophical writing in Arabic was not produced by Arabs. A famous exception is al-Kindī, tellingly dubbed “philosopher of the Arabs” already in medieval times, but at least as famous are al-Fārābī and Avicenna, two subsequent exponents of Aristotelian thought who wrote in Arabic but hailed from central Asia. Then too it may seem strange to define a field exclusively in terms of a language. This is not typical for other parts of the history of philosophy. Rather we tend to speak in terms of cultural developments (“Renaissance philosophy”) or, most often, plain old chronology (“ancient, medieval, early modern philosophy”). Or we reach for geographical boundaries: “Indian philosophy” is philosophy from India, written in many languages, and though “Chinese philosophy” could perhaps be a linguistic designation I take it to refer to philosophy from China, not philosophy written in Chinese.