Symposium: “Philosophy between the Islamicate and Latin American Traditions: Civilizational Perspectives on Alienation/Ghayriyya (Otherness) in the Knowing/Being”

Date: June 22-24, 2024

Venue: Online

Sponsored by: Department of Aesthetics and History of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Seville (Spain)

Co-organizers: Anthony F. Shaker, and Amilcar Aldama Cruz

Latin America is a unique mosaic of cultures, mostly of its own making, that trace their origins back to western European, Indigenous, African and Islamic sources; its philosophies can be found in its rich literature and art and studied there, not just in the departments of philosophy.

The Islamicate world is also a cultural mosaic. Despite its long experience, it faces a similar challenge of emancipation from the contemporary morass and its chaotic monologues all during the short 150-year history of “Western” economic, political and intellectual domination of the rest of the world. The “philosophical attitude” that has existed there for fourteen centuries has been expressed in various forms (falsafa, taṣawwuf, ʿirfān, poetry, etc.).

This symposium will gather scholars from two traditions for an open discussion on:

• alienation and ghayriyya (otherness) as a problematic of philosophy;
• various aspects of this problematic; the patterns of human thinking that typify it; the forms in which it has been articulated over the millennia; its trajectory since the seventh century; and its repercussions on contemporary Islamicate and Latin American thought;
• the prospects of human reasoning in the new world being born before our eyes.

Given the centrality and fruitfulness of the concepts of “alienation” and “ghayriyya” (otherness), this is an opportunity to investigate how it can serve as a framework for future dialogue within and across cultural spheres.

The symposium will be conducted online and is open to all participants free of charge. However, prior registration is mandatory. To register, please contact Dr. Anthony F. Shaker via afshaker@aol.com. (Please indicate your full name, occupation and country in the email.)

List of Lectures

June 22, 2024:

• The decolonial dilemma today: Local memories and global disorders
  – Prof. Walter Mignolo, Duke University
• Argentine Rodolfo Kusch: Towards a Latin American philosophy of liberation from alienated being and self
  – Prof. Ángel Horacio Molina, San Jorge School
• The spiritual transformation among some Argentine philosophers (Vicente Fatone, Armando Asti Vera, Ismael Quiles)—à propos the concept of ḥikma
  – Prof. José Antonio Antón Pacheco, Universidad de Sevilla
• The secret literature of the last Muslims of Spain
  – Dr. Luce López-Baralt, University of Puerto Rico
• Aḥmad Ibn Muṣṭafa al-ʿAlawī (d. 1934) and his understanding of divine oneness
  – Prof. Omneya Ayad, Uskudar University
• Western humanism and the origin of modern man’s incapacity for and confusion about the transcendence and strength of thought
  – Prof. Hamidreza Ayatollahy, Allameh Tabatabaii University

June 23, 2024:

• Feeling more powerful than the King of Persia, when attending a laughing dawn: The imprint on José Martí’s thought of the mystical ʾišrāqī
  – Prof. Amilcar Aldama Cruz, Universidad de La Habana
• Possessiveness and the otherness of perfection: Some reflections on ghayr and ghayra in Akbarian doctrine
  – Dr. Stephen Hirtenstein
• The human being as an alien in the world: Suhrawardī and the story of Ghurbat Al-gharbiyya
  – Prof. Mahdi Saatchi, Shahid Motahari University
• Understanding Mexica (Aztec) Philosophy
  – Prof. Jim Maffie, University of Maryland
• Practical perfection and becoming Godlike
  – Prof. Reza Hadisi, University of Toronto
• Poetic discourse as a means of instruction for the inhabitants of the city in the political philosophy of al- Fārābī
  – Prof. Kamal Cumsille, Universidad de Chile

June 24, 2024:

• Insān (human being) and the function of ghayriyya (otherness) in philosophy
  – Dr. Anthony F. Shaker
• The philosophical ground of alienation, forgetting and othering in Molla Fenari
  – Prof. Bülent Sönmez, Katip Çelebi University
• From unity to plurality with ‘other’ in Ibn-Arabi’s intellectual system
  – Prof. Hamedeh Rastaei, Aletaha Institute of Higher Education
• Language reforms in the early decades of the Republic of Türkiye
  – Prof. Hilal Oytun, Jagiellon University
• Investigating effective sociological factors in modern natural sciences based on Islamic teachings
  – Prof. M. Dawud Fazel Falavarjani, Imam Khumayni International University
• Cultural madness: A study of alienation in nineteenth-century Romania
  – Dr. Victor Taki, Concordia University of Edmonton

To register, send an email (name, occupation, country) to Dr. Anthony F. Shaker at: afshaker@aol.com, please indicate your full name, occupation/area of studies, and country.

More information on: mesana.org