Islamic Philosophy and the Ethics of Belief

In this book
the author argues that the Falasifa,
the Philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age, are usefully interpreted through
the prism of the contemporary, western ethics of belief. He contends that their
position amounts to what he calls ‘Moderate Evidentialism’ – that only for the
epistemic elite what one ought to believe is determined by one’s evidence. The
author makes the case that the Falasifa’s position is well argued, ingeniously
circumvents issues in the epistemology of testimony, and is well worth taking
seriously in the contemporary debate. He reasons that this is especially the
case since the position has salutary consequences for how to respond to
the sceptic, and for how we are to conceive of extremist belief.

Anthony Robert Booth is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK. He also works for Trusting Banks, a NWO (Dutch Science Foundation) funded collaboration between the Universities of Groningen, the Netherlands, and Cambridge, UK. He has worked mainly on issues at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, and has published articles appearing in such journals as Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Synthese. He also co-edited Intuitions (2014).