UC Santa Barbara

Islamic Peripatetic traditions offer an understanding of the body-soul relation as one that mediates between the physical bodies of the macrocosmos as well as the subjectivity of the human microcosmos. This human subjectivity is guaranteed through self-knowledge and particularly the knowledge of the human soul (nafs) that serves as the gateway to profound existential truths. Furthermore, the view echoed by Islamic Peripatetics enables a resonance in the dualistic split of body-soul. A resonance achieved through the praxis of inward listening to humanly organized music as well as acousmatic listening to celestial sound. Whereas previous scholarship has generally glossed over 9th and 10th century Islamic Peripatetics use of the ontologically salient question that affirms the existence of the body and the soul as logos [relation]; I demonstrate that these philosophers negotiated and mediated these discourses through the metaphor of musical language. I will begin my presentation by contextualizing the dialectical arguments produced in Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Baghdad surrounding the question of the harmonicity or tuning [harmonia] of the body-soul relationship. After laying the foundational layer, I will address the impact of these philosophical theories on al-Kindī’s as well as the Ikhwān al-Safā’(s) conceptualizations of the interdisciplinary relationships between philosophical ethics, cognition, and music theory. This thesis offers new approaches towards understanding the body-soul problem through the unique musicological context of the 9th and 10th Islamic life worlds. My work will present a consistent Peripatetic thesis which denies [harmonia] or epiphenomenalist accounts of cognition. In al- Kindī’s case, I attempt to demonstrate his authorial consistency in presenting a non-cartesian dualistic understanding of the soul-body relationship, and how his rationalist ethics discovers a self-knowledge manifested in an affective musical ēthos theory.