Hinrich Biesterfeldt is a retired professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in Bochum (Germany). He studied Semitic languages, Persian and Turkish, philosophy, and ancient and medieval history at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich, and Göttingen. His doctoral dissertation (Göttingen 1970, an edition and analysis of the Arabic translation of an essay by the Greek physician Galen on the relation between body and soul) was published in 1973. He spent a postdoctoral year at Yale University, two years at the German Orient-Institut in Beirut (Lebanon) and two further years at the University of Heidelberg, before he came to Ruhr-Universität in Bochum where he eventually became director of the Arabic branch of the Institute of Foreign Languages and taught Oriental languages and courses in the intellectual history of Islam at the Oriental Institute until his retirement (2008). He has pursued his interest in, and published widely on, the transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine to Arabic culture. His other fields of research include the early history of classifications of knowledge in Islam and classical Arabic prose literature. Together with Charles Manekin and Tzvi Langermann, he is the editor of a series of parts of Moritz Steinschneider’s monumental Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters […] (Berlin 1893) in English translation.  

Hinrich Biesterfeldt

Ethics in Graeco-Arabic Philosophy and Islamic Theology

The Greek ethical tradition has found its ways into Arabic literature in various forms: the aphoristic so-called wisdom literature (ḥikma), popular ethics proper (by authors such as Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī and Miskawayh), and mirrors for princes. Islamic religion and piety have their own ethical literature (e.g. Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī’s Qūt and al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ), and it is interesting to notice convergences as well as differences between both realms. The seminar will consist of a close reading and comparative analysis of selected passages from texts that feature (1) the structure and functions of the human soul and (2) the ideas on its virtues and vices.  

Introductory studies: “Akhlāḳ” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New edition (R. Walzer, H. A. R. Gibb); “Aḵlāq” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (F. Rahman); Dimitri Gutas, “Ethische Schriften im Islam”, in Orientalisches Mittelalter, ed. by Wolfhart Heinrichs, Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, 5, Wiesbaden 1990, 346-365.