Abdalla, Bakinaz
Junior Fellow: January–September 2019
Research Project: One Truth or Two? Jewish Averroists on the Truth of the Philosophers and the Truth of the Prophets: The Case of Isaac Albalag
Bakinaz’s main interest is medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy. Her current study examines the thought of the Jewish Averroist Isaac Albalag (thirteenth century) whose view on the relationship between religion and philosophy scholars have generally read in the light of the double truth doctrine, which was advocated by Latin Averroists. In her study, Bakinaz argues that Albalag’s treatise Tiqqun ha-de‘ot contains strong sceptical motifs that sufficiently undermine the primary elements in which the double truth hypothesis is rooted. However, the sceptical trend in the Tiqqun is local and hardly suggests that Albalag turned away from rationalism. This study considers Albalag to represent a model of Jewish Averroists who, while remaining generally committed to Aristotelian metaphysics as represented in Averroes’ commentarial works, devolved a relatively independent understanding of a number of epistemological principles, and, in particular, the relationship between religion and philosophy.
Bakinaz Abdalla earned a PhD in Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Studies Department at McGill University, Montreal (Canada). Her main research interests are medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, in particular the school of Jewish Averroism, Sufism, and the influence of Al-Ghazali’s writing von Abraham Maimonides.