Arcs of Time: Zoroastrian Philosophical Anthropology

The project Arcs of Time: Zoroastrian philosophical anthropology (AOT) explores a new area of Zoroastrian thought by combining philological and philosophical methodologies to a more holistic understanding of the textual sources.

Zoroastrian philosophical anthropology analyses the person as an historical composite, whose spiritual and material parts change over time.

So, the AOT project analyses both the historical part of this theory, including debates on the origin of humanity and on the cyclical nature of human history, and it also analyses the constitutive part, including debates on psychophysical composition and on human wisdom.

Its objective is to produce philosophically precise translations of 40 chapters from Dnkard III that exhaust both parts of Zoroastrian philosophical anthropology. Dnkard III is a medieval encyclopedia of Zoroastrian thought, and it is preserved in a single problematic manuscript. Contemporary scholars are now turning their attention to the Dnkard.The method is a philosophically-informed philology.

It will first produce critical editions from the problematic manuscript, and adduce linguistic parallels within the wider Zoroastrian literature from this period in order to ensure philological accuracy.

It will second produce a rational reconstruction of the philosophical worldview expressed in the texts, and adduce conceptual parallels within both the Zoroastrian literature and the literature in Arabic contemporary to the authors of the Dnkard in order to ensure philosophical accuracy.

The philological work will be uploaded to an open-access online database for scholarly collaboration and for the general public; the philosophical work will result in two open-access articles meant to explain the technical details of the translations to audiences not specialized in the Dnkard or Zoroastrian thought.