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Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: World as (Arabic) Text:An Introduction to Islamic Neopythagoreanism Monday, April 4, 2016 Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale)Assistant Professor of History at the University ofSouth Carolina Western—i.e., Islamo-Christian—understandings of nature have long been logocentric: the world as text. For medieval and early modern thinkers, this logocentricity was mandated by the common neopythagorean doctrine that the uncreated, all-creative divine Word is expressed in twin Books—revealed scripture on the one hand (the Bible or the Quran) and the book of nature on the other. The commensurability of the two Books encouraged, in turn, the application of the hermeneutical methodologies that scripture elicits to the physical and metaphysical worlds, giving rise in Europe to Newtonian “scientific modernity” in its drive to mathematize the cosmos.This early modern neopythagorean turn is exemplified by the emergence of Christian kabbalah in Renaissance Italy; yet the Arabic science of letters ('ilm al-huruf), or lettrism—the primary expression of Islamic neopythagoreanism—, was even more widespread and intellectually mainstream throughout the contemporary Islamicate world than its Hebrew cognate was in Europe. Due to persistent scholarly positivism and occultophobia, however, this basic problematic has been wholly elided in the literature to date. I therefore introduce lettrism as a primary methodology for mathematizing the cosmos, with a focus on thinkers in 15th- and 16th-century Iran, and propose it as an essential node for comparative early modern Islamo-Christian history of philosophy-science. Time: 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium Sponsor: Middle Eastern Studies, Medieval Studies, Mathematics and Religion Programs Contact: Tehseen Thaver. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 845-758-7207 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://inside.bard.edu/religion/events/