Animals in Philosophy of the Islamic World
by Sarah Virgi and Alexander Lamprakis
October 2023 – Six years ago, Peter Adamson and Bligh Somma started to think about a project on animals in philosophy of the Islamic world. What started as a spontaneous idea evolved into an ambitious research project, which sparked an extraordinary philosophical journey, earning the highest research grant of the European Research Commission (ERC). The project lasted for five years, from 2018 to 2023, and involved a team of ten international scholars who produced articles, book chapters and monographs on this topic, some of which have already been published, while others are forthcoming.
In this interview, we sat down with Peter Adamson and Bligh Somma to learn more about the project’s origins and main discoveries. As we learned, scholars involved in this project explored fundamental questions about animal consciousness, emotions, the classification of animals, differences and commonalities between human and non-human animals, and the consideration of non-human animals in ethics and moral philosophy. As Peter Adamson explains in this interview, the project challenged the idea that before Darwin, animals were seen as undeserving of our consideration, because of their vast inferiority to humans. Discussions of animals in the Islamic world show that this assumption is untrue. Contrary to common belief, pre-modern Islamic scholars seriously pondered these questions. The research revealed shifting attitudes toward animals, taking into account both religious traditions and the influence of Aristotelian biology and zoology, as well as ancient Greek medicine on Islamic thought.
About Peter Adamson
Professor Peter Adamson holds the Chair of Late Antique and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich. He was the principal investigator of the ERC project “Animals in Philosophy of the Islamic World,” (2018-2023) and the DFG-funded project “The Heirs of Avicenna” (2016-2019) and is currently at the head of the research project “The Philosophy of the Baghdad School,” equally funded by the DFG. He has published widely in the field of ancient and medieval philosophy and is the host of the philosophy podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.”
About Bligh Somma
Dr. Bligh Somma is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, in New York City. Their research interests are in philosophy of animals, disability, and adoption. They were one of the post-doctoral researchers in the ERC project “Animals in Philosophy of the Islamic World” (2018-2023) and the author of the monograph Models of Desire in Graeco-Arabic Philosophy (2021).
Members of the ERC Project
Peter Adamson
Tommaso Alpina
Hanif Amin Beidokhti
Dustin Crummet
Rotraud Hansberger
Nicolas Payen
Michael Payne
Jens-Ole Schmitt
Bligh Somma
Sarah Virgi
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