Session 2 of the multidisciplinary workshop series on Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d. 1720)

Friday, November 6, 2020
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (Pacific Time)

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This is Session 2 of the multidisciplinary workshop, Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d.1720) organized and led by Prof. Domenico Ingenito (UCLA, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and Dr. Jane Mikkelson (University of Virginia) in cooperation with scholars working in Persian Studies, Islamic Studies, South Asian, Near Eastern, and Central Asian Studies, English, Anthropology, and Comparative Literature. All sessions will be held in English, and all reading materials (both primary and secondary sources) will be circulated and presented in English translation.

The end goal of philosophy is certain knowledge. What do imagination and lyric poetry have to do with this quest for certainty? Justine Landau and Domenico Ingenito join us to talk about the vital intersections between lyric poetry and philosophy in the premodern Persianate world. Placing Bidel in conversation with Avicenna and Ibn ʿArabī, we will see how Bidel’s style of steadfast imagining traces a distinctive, phenomenologically inflected path to certainty that is just as methodical and robust as the logic-driven procedures of systematic thought —and how lyric poetry for Bidel functions like philosophy in the first person.

In conversation with Domenico Ingenito (UCLA) and Justine Landau (Harvard)

RSVP Here (Zoom registration)

For more information about the workshop as a whole, including the complete schedule of meetings, please see the announcement here.

The workshop is sponsored and organized by UCLA Program on Central Asia (in collaboration with Iranian Studies), and co-sponsored by the Center for India and South Asia, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Center for Near Eastern Studies.

For questions about the event, please contact caw@international.ucla.edu

Sponsor(s): Program on Central Asia, Center for India and South Asia, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Iranian Studies