Dr Dustin Klinger

My research interests are broadly in the history of Graeco-Arabic philosophy and in Islamic intellectual history, especially the so-called postclassical period from around 1200-1700 that remains heavily understudied.

About my first book, Being Another Way: The Copula and Arabic Philosophy of Language, 900-1500 (University of California Press 2024):

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“In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula, “to be”—an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, had invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as they explored the consequences of their intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to some core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy.”

During my fellowship at I Tatti, I have been working on a book titled Renaissance Orientalisms: Arabic Philosophical Manuscripts in Humanist Circles, 1450-1650. As I was exploring the extraordinarily rich postclassical Arabic philosophical tradition, I began to wonder why premodern European scholars did not seem to have had any knowledge of that tradition, even though its main texts were available in the Mediterranean markets of, for example, Istanbul, Tunis, or Fez. And in fact, as my preliminary research has shown, there were manuscripts of such texts in Rome and Florence already in the Cinquecento. Hence, for this book project I study the material and intellectual histories connected to the circulation of those manuscripts on postclassical Islamic philosophy among Italian Renaissance humanists. The book will be an intervention in the history of Orientalism, as well as in Renaissance studies, showing how scholars across the Mediterranean – and sometimes far beyond – interacted with one another, as well as with the ideas and intellectual traditions of the perceived other.

My next book project as a British Academy International Fellow is titled Language and Meaning in Postclassical Islamic Intellectual History (1300-1500). My previous research has brought to light that in this period there was a remarkable turn to treating questions of what we would call “philosophy of language”. This was the case not only in the more strictly philosophical tradition that emerged from the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, but across many disciplines of the Islamic scientific canon. My book project for the fellowship will focus on the varieties of theoretical approaches to linguistic meaning across scientific disciplines in this period as a way of charting this “linguistic turn”, thereby showing the vitality of philosophical production through the period and making its pivotal texts and arguments available for further study.