Dinani’s Work Reminds Us that Philosophy Is Not A Dead Discipline
Dustin J. Byrd, a professor of philosophy and religion at the university of Olivet, made the remark in an address to the International Conference on the Philosophical Thought of Gholam Hossein Dinani, held in Tehran on Monday.
Professor Byrd said Dinani is one of the few modern philosophers that truly unveils the ontological reality of the human condition no matter who the human is, to what culture they belong, or to what religion they adhere.
Dinani channels the deep philosophical thought of Avicenna, Suhrewardi, Mulla Sadra and other Muslim thinkers, preserving their universal truth while expressing them within semantic and semiotic forms that corresponds to today’s world, he stated.
He said Dinani’s critical approach to the primacy of reason, of intellect, of Aql, being the highest faculty of human being, comes within an age of extremes, an age where an instrumental rationality is consuming communicative rationality leading to the social malaise of nihilistic meaninglessness nurtured by the dominance of metaphysical positivism.
“On the other hand, his stance on Aql rejects the reactionary individual who pathologically retreats from the clings of materialism and takes refuge in anti-rational mysticism. Both extremes deny the reality of the human condition, that we belong to a world determined both by its material - the seen- and spiritual and metaphysical- the unseen- within which we have the intellect to navigate.”
He added that Dinani’s extensive opus reminds us that philosophy is not a dead discipline, one to be studied as a sterile thing outside of ourselves, but rather as a living way of being in the world. “One that has the capacity, if saturated within the being of the individual, to transform how the individual pursues life, how the individual makes critical judgements, how the individual comprehends the world in which they have bene thrown into.“
Read More:
He said philosophy, like religion, is a comprehensive orientation of action and interpretation of reality and “as such Dinani’s work imparts to us lessons of the ancient philosophers that thinking, especially critical thinking – for what is thinking without critique – is a form of self-discovery and emancipation from ignorance.
“Dinani’s work also reminds us of the fundamental compatibility of the reason and revelation, the extreme separation of which remains artificially contrived within the dogmatism of modernity and causing deleterious effects on individuals and societies, who, following the divorce of reason and revelation, find religion wholly irrational and secular modernity completely soulless, without inherent meaning or nihilistic.
“In this way, Dinani’s work is a conduit by which reason and revelation can once again find reconciliation.”
Here you can listen to Professor Dustin J. Byrd’s speech at the conference:
4325680
