Jon McGinnis

is a Greco-Arabist who also has interest in medieval Latin science, philosophy and theology. He received a Master's in Church History from the University of North Texas (1991) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania (2000), where he worked jointly in the philosophy department and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

As a graduate student he was a research fellow at Harvard University for a year in the department of the History of Science. He also was a Fulbright scholar to Egypt, where he studied at both the American University in Cairo and the University of Cairo.

Since becoming a professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis he has received a University of Missouri Research Board Award as well as National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Stipend, two NEH Fellowships and has been elected to Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is also on the executive council of the Society for Medieval and Patristic Philosophy. In addition to being the philosophy department's resident classicist and medievalist, he is also a fellow in the Center for International Studies.

His dissertation, Time and Time Again: A Study of Aristotle and Ibn Sînâ's Temporal Theories examines Aristotle's and the Muslim Aristotelian Avicenna's conceptions of time. In addition to his interest in ancient and medieval temporal theory, he has also recently completed translating Avicenna's treatise on kinematics, or the theory of motion and what is required for motion, and is beginning work on a book to be titled Avicennan Kinematics: Its Sources, Content and Influence, which in fact will be the first survey of medieval, Arabic kinematics. He also has done work on medieval Islamic conceptions of science and modal theories as well.

He has published articles in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, The Journal for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, KronoScope, The Modern Schoolman, Apeiron and Arabic Sciences and Philosophy. He also has several articles appearing as chapters in books dedicated to Islamic philosophy and science. He is both a contributor to and editor of a collection of articles on Avicenna, titled Interpreting Avicenna: Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2004). In collaboration with David C. Reisman he is bringing out the first anthology of classical Arabic philosophy to be published by Hackett Press in 2005.

Curriculum Vitae

Natural Philosophy in Medieval Islam: Its Historical, Scientific and Philosophical Context

Central to any complete philosophical system is an account of the physical world, that is, the world around us that we experience and with which we interact every day. Natural philosophy, or the study of nature, is just that, an account of the physical world. In this course you are introduced to a number of issues and puzzles associated with things natural and how thinkers in the medieval Islamic world addressed these issues and puzzles. You are asked to consider these topics both against their historical setting and for their own inherent philosophical and scientific value. As to this latter point, while some of the issues treated are dated—we no longer believe that there is an absolute up or down—others are still with us and very much debated by physicists and philosophers alike: Is matter continuous, atomic or some combination thereof? What constitutes a process? What is the nature of time? How are we to understand modalities, like possibility and necessity in nature? Moreover, the answers to many of these questions have ramifications not only for one’s scientific outlook but also for one’s metaphysics and theology. At the end of the course not only will you have a general knowledge of the physical systems of some great medieval thinkers but also you will see how natural philosophy influenced the culture, intellectual history and worldview of medieval Islam. You might even learn a little about the world around you in the process.