UnMaP
The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy: An AI-Enhanced Material History of Arabic Logic Across Time (12th-19th c.) and Frontiers (from Spain to India)
Project
Contrary to a popular belief, holding that philosophy in Arabic declined around the twelfth century CE, reflection on key philosophical problems has actually continued to thrive in forms that are still largely unexplored to date. Arabic philosophical manuscripts present a wealth of textual and visual annotations by students, teachers, and individual scholars who have kept selecting, manually copying, teaching, and studying philosophical texts up to our days. Well after the printing revolution, the margins of manuscripts served across the Arabo-Islamic world as material platforms for this choral philosophical enterprise.
Yet, with only a few notable exceptions, this “real-life” philosophy has been cut out of historico-philosophical accounts, in which the spotlight is often on a relatively narrow canon of great minds. The views shared by the many professors, students, and scholars who contributed to shape the practice of philosophy in the Islamicate world have thus remained on the uncharted margins of manuscripts and on the fringe of the global history of philosophy.
The ERC Starting Grant project “The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy” (UnMaP) aims to bring those contributions from the margins of manuscripts into the forefront of philosophical discourse. By delving into the paratextual annotations found within the manuscript tradition of the Logic section of Avicenna’s (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428H/1037) most encompassing philosophical summa, the “Book of Healing” ("Kitāb al-Shifāʾ"), UnMaP promises to broaden the horizons of the global history of philosophy.
Driving hypothesis
From Antiquity until the dawn of Modernity, Aristotelian logic and the corpus of texts collectively known as the “Organon” served as the bedrock of scientific method across a vast geographical area extending far beyond the borders of the Mediterranean. In the Arabo-Islamic tradition, logic appears to have formed a staple part of the curricula of higher-level education until the 13th/19th century. However, the contexts and modalities through which the discipline was concretely taught and studied largely elude our understanding to date.
A promising way to recover this vast missing chapter of the history of Arabic philosophy is to adopt a new approach to the “common denominator” of philosophical education and practice across the Islamicate world: the manuscript book. Professors, students, and scholars who taught, studied, and debated philosophy in the Arabo-Islamic tradition historically engaged with the ideas and arguments of authoritative texts from the margins surrounding the main text. The margins of the manuscripts represent an unconstrained space which is the uncharted terrain in which they challenged assumptions, critically assessed the reliability of information, built networks of cross-references, and graphically represented arguments. Copies of influential and widely circulated works – such as Avicenna’s philosophical summae – served as material platforms for collective intellectual exchange and scholarly debate. A large part of this treasure trove of scholarly production, including notes and appending comments ("ḥawāshī", “taʿālīq”) as well as graphic representations and models, stands as the sole point of access to a scholar’s original thoughts, or to the content of lectures and the students’ queries and doubts. These unexplored sources can offer a brand-new insight into the contents, dynamics, and forms of scholarly debate over the centuries.
Objectives
The project seeks to integrate the material study of manuscripts – through codicological and philological analysis – with the examination of their philosophical and conceptual content. The underlying assumption is that the material features of these manuscripts can be expected to offer a wealth of new data concerning the intellectual environments in which these texts circulated. The project’s proof of concept involves a pioneering large-scale analysis of the traces of philosophical activity found in the manuscripts that preserve the Logic section of Avicenna’s “Kitāb al-Shifāʾ”, the most influential Medieval Arabic summa of Peripatetic philosophy, which has served as a primary “vector” of Aristotelian logic for centuries. UnMaP seeks to examine the visual and textual annotations on this work made by professors, students, and scholars over a span of seven centuries (6th/12th-13th/19th centuries), across a vast geographical area extending from present-day Spain to India.
UnMaP achieves its general aim by fulfilling three key objectives (O):
To fill a gap in the current historico-philosophical account by mapping the uncharted routes of Avicenna’s logic across the Islamicate world.
To unveil the “marginal” history of Arabic logic by exploring unresearched corpora of annotations on the manuscripts of the logic section of Avicenna’s “Kitāb al-Shifāʾ” revealing the philosophical engagement of students, professors, and scholars from the Islamicate world with key conceptual nuclei of Avicenna’s logic.
Project design
UnMaP proposes a novel approach to the “material” sources of the history of philosophy, reinstating the philosophical manuscript as more than just a witness of the works of a selection of leading philosophers, but as the ‘primary platform of a collective philosophical enterprise’. To this end, the project advocates for a profound integration between the study of the material characteristics of manuscripts from a codicological and philological perspective and the analysis of its philosophical and conceptual contents.
Drawing on key concepts and methods from Material History and applying them to the History of Philosophy, UnMaP aims to test a new theoretical framework – the “Material History of Philosophy” – within the context of the Arabic logical tradition. Research conducted under this framework develops along two main axes.
- The first revolves around the analysis of non-philosophical paratexts (such as their scribes’ signatures, their owners’ notes, etc.), which provide information on the intellectual circles in which philosophical texts were copied, read, and taught. The manual copying of texts was common practice within intellectual circles and educational settings across the Mediterranean; the examination of these paratexts enables us to trace a manuscript’s journey over time and reconstruct the intellectual landscapes it traversed.
- The second axis focuses on the analysis of philosophical paratexts to reconstruct the thoughts and readings of philosophers outside the traditional canon. These paratextual annotations provide valuable insights into the identities, intellectual milieu, and scholarly networks of these thinkers.
To achieve its objectives, UnMaP is structured around four main lines of research, organized into four Work Packages (WPs):
WP1: AI-enhanced analysis of manuscripts and non-philosophical paratexts (in collaboration with Scuola IMT Alti Studi, Lucca)
The aim is to analyse the non-scientific paratexts found in the manuscripts of the Logic section of Avicenna’s “Kitāb al-Shifāʾ” in order to map previously unknown intellectual and educational clusters (e.g., circles, schools) and to identify hitherto unrecognized intellectuals who engaged with Avicenna’s logic. In collaboration with Prof. Marco Paggi, head of the MUSAM Lab at Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) – a deep-learning algorithm widely used in computer vision – will be experimentally applied to the analysis of handwriting in the digitised manuscript corpus of the logic section of Avicenna’s “Kitāb al-Shifāʾ”. This corpus consists of approximately 200,000 images, a daunting quantity for manual inspection alone. Applying CNNs to this dataset is expected to help identify patterns that may reconnect scattered manuscripts to a shared milieu of production.
WP2: Digital edition and translation of key philosophical paratexts (in collaboration with CNR/ILC, Pisa)
The goal is to produce collaborative digital editions and translations of a set of philosophically significant paratexts selected from a representative group of at least twenty manuscripts. These paratexts will be identified using a “concept-to-paratext” approach: we will begin by isolating key conceptual nuclei from Avicenna’s logic, which will then guide our search for relevant marginal and interlinear materials. The digital edition will be developed with the support of the CNR/ILC team, who will contribute with the creation of a dedicated digital text editor.
WP3: Philosophical analysis of key paratexts
The aim is to carry out a historico-philosophical analysis of the newly identified philosophical paratexts selected through the “concept-to-paratext” approach described above. This analysis involves two main tasks:
- first, the investigation of the sources and their functions – for example, whether they serve pro- or anti-Avicennian purposes;
- and second, the conceptual analysis of the philosophical arguments they contain, conducted through an analytical approach.
WP4: Meta-analysis of key concepts within the “Material History of Philosophy” framework
The aim is to undertake a meta-analysis of several cross-cutting concepts that the study of philosophical paratexts is expected to redefine, including notions such as author, school, textual tradition, cultural transfer, philosophical practice, and originality. WP4 is structured into two main tasks:
- the development of a novel, bottom-up typology of the visual and textual practices through which the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition has expressed itself over the centuries and across the boundaries of the Islamicate world;
- a comparative analysis of key concepts and philosophical practices, aiming to bring the Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition into dialogue with neighbouring traditions, particularly Byzantine, Latin, Hebrew, Persian, Syriac, and Indian.
Methodology
By employing innovative techniques – including AI-driven handwriting analysis of manuscripts using Convolutional Neural Networks – UnMaP is grounded in a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary “fourfold methodology” (M1-4) that integrates the techniques of:
M1 – “Material philology”, studying the material characteristics of written artefacts
- Palaeography and codicology
- Ecdotics and textual criticism
M2 – Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities
- Application of an AI model (CNN) to Arabic palaeography
- Digital textual criticism (TEI encoding)