Professor Jon McGinnis and Assistant Professor Billy Dunaway, philosophers at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, have received substantial funding for a project that brings together Medieval Islamic philosophy and contemporary epistemology of religion.

They describe the project as follows:

There are many live and interesting questions about the epistemology of theology: can we know whether God exists, and if so, how? What can we know about theology? What does our best science tell us about these questions? These are not new questions, and existing scholarship in the philosophy of religion draws on the work of historical figures, especially from the Medieval Latin tradition, to explore answers to them. However the Islamic world also developed its own rich and sophisticated answers to the same questions. This project will bring the Islamic tradition into contact with contemporary Anglophone scholarship on the epistemology of theology.

Titled “The Christian West and Islamic East: Theology, Science, and Knowledge,” the project is being funded by a $933,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, with additional funding being supplied by the University of Missouri – St. Louis. The funds will support research assistance, summer salaries for visiting PhD students and for scholars at other institutions, publications, and several events over its projected 2.5 year span.

You can learn more about it here and here.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, “Shazdeh’s Garden”