The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy: An AI-Enhanced Material History of Arabic Logic Across Time (12th-19th c.) and Frontiers (from Spain to India)

Contrary to the popular belief that philosophy in Arabic declined around the 12th century, it has actually thrived in forms that are largely unexplored.

Arabic philosophical manuscripts present a wealth of textual and visual annotations by students, teachers, and individual scholars who have kept selecting, manually copying, teaching, and studying philosophical texts until the 19th century.

Well after the printing revolution, the margins of manuscripts served across the Arabo-Islamic world as material platforms – akin to today’s academic journals – for this choral philosophical enterprise.With a few notable exceptions, this “real-life” philosophy is cut out of historico-philosophical accounts, in which the spotlight is often on a selection of great minds.

The views shared by professors, students, and scholars have hitherto remained on the uncharted margins of manuscripts and on the fringe of the global history of philosophy.“The Uncharted Margins of Philosophy” (UnMaP) aims to bring those contributions from the margins of manuscripts into the forefront of philosophical discourse.By delving into the paratextual annotations within 207 manuscripts of the Logic of Avicenna’s (d. 1037) Book of Healing, spanning seven centuries and three continents, UnMaP promises to broaden the horizons of the global history of philosophy.

It will (1) shed new light on the uncharted routes of cultural transfer in the pre-modern, globalising world; (2) provide a generalisable model of research on neglected sources for the history of philosophy; (3) challenge the paradigm of knowledge as the product of a few soloists and their intellectual hegemony by bringing to light marginalised traditions from the past.With innovative techniques, including AI-driven handwriting analysis on manuscripts with Convolutional Neural Networks, this project pioneers a new “Material History of Philosophy”, bridging the gap between Material Philology, Philosophy, History, and Digital Humanities.