A Linguistic Turn in Late Medieval Islamic Intellectual History: The Quest for Meaning in the Commentaries on al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya (1350-1550)

• Applicant: Dustin Klinger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2023 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522527571

In the postclassical (roughly 1200-1600) Islamic intellectual tradition—a period that remains heavily understudied—there emerged a peculiar scientific discipline by the name of ʿilm al-waḍʿ (literally: the “science of assignment”). It was only codified in the course of the 14th century when the traditional scientific disciplines had long reached their mature form. Its purpose was to systematically study the ways in which Allah assigned all linguistic expressions to all given meanings. This science was considered specifically Islamic, of minor importance, difficult to make sense of, and has remained an elusive concept for the few Western scholars who have taken note of it. However, I believe that when the substantial and unduly neglected corpus of writings on ʿilm alwaḍʿ is seen in its proper intellectual-historical context, the beginnings and development of ʿilm al-waḍʿ emerge as a foundational enterprise in fundamental semantics, or in what we today would call “philosophy of language”. Writers of ʿilm al-wadʿ texts were responding to a need to pin down an Arabic (as opposed to Aristotelian) theory of meaning that was compatible with existing logical and linguistic theories. As such, it had to be entirely separable from its Islamic presuppositions and applicable to any natural language. The eponymous and foundational text for this new science, al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya by the theologian-philosopher ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 1356), fits on a single folio. However, it elicited more than 44 commentaries, some over a 100 pages long. In these commentaries, which remain almost entirely unedited and unstudied, postclassical Arabic philosophers discussed with great sophistication a range of questions that we would classify as pertaining to philosophy of language. My project will collect and investigate the manuscripts of these commentaries in order to study this "linguistic turn" in late medieval Islamic intellectual history. The main objective of the proposed project is this (i) to present the development of ʿilm al-waḍʿ in its historical and intellectual context. More specifically, this means that the project aims (ii) to describe and analyze the corpus of commentaries on Ījī’s Risāla, (iii) to study the main theorems of ʿilm al-waḍʿ and how they developed between 1350 and 1550, (iv) to substantiate, based on the research conducted on (ii) and (iii), the argument that ʿilm al-waḍʿ should be understood as what we would call “philosophy of language”, and (v) to study the influence that the development of ʿilm al-waḍʿ had on other scientific disciplines. The primary research output will be a monograph consisting of five chapters: (1) ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya and the Emergence of ʿilm al-waḍʿ (2) The Commentary Tradition on ʿilm al-waḍʿ (3) Case Study: ʿIṣām ad-Dīn al-Isfarāʾinī and His Commentary (4) A Linguistic Turn? Reading ʿilm al-waḍʿ as “Philosophy of Language” (5) The Influence of ʿilm al-waḍ on Other Disciplines

• DFG Programme: Research Grants