ERC Team

Godefroid de Callataÿ has specialised in the history of Arabic sciences and philosophy, and the role played by Islam in the transmission of Hellenistic knowledge to the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Amongst other subjects, he has published extensively on the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, and has edited and translated various epistles as part of the ‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’ series at Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies. From 2012 to 2017, he has directed ‘Speculum Arabicum’, a project on comparative encyclopaedism in the Middle Ages designed to explore medieval encyclopaedism in the East and the West in order to provide unbiased information and quantifiable benchmarks that can help us better understand the extent of what Europe owes to the scholars of Islam.

Since October 2017, he is the Principal Investigator of PhilAnd, an Advanced Grant ERC project to be conducted for five years at the University of Louvain in partnership with the Warburg Institute of the University of London. With Sébastien Moureau, he also contributes more specifically to sub-project 5, consisting in the critical edition, the English translation and the commentary of Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s Rutbat al-ḥakīm.

Among his publications are the following monographs: Annus Platonicus. A Study of World Cycles in Greek, Latin and Arabic Sources (1996); Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. A Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam (2005) and The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, On Magic. 1. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52A (2011, with Bruno Halflants).

Complete CV and list of publication available at CV January 2018.pdf

His main field of research is the history of sciences in the Arab-Muslim world and their transfer to the Latin West in the Middle Ages. He is especially interested in the so-called “occult sciences”, with a focus on alchemy. He got his PhD from the University of Louvain, with a thesis on the Pseudo-Avicennian De anima, the translation and compilation of three Arabic alchemical treatises misattributed to Avicenna. He has been a post-doc fellow at the Atelier Vincent de Beauvais, at the University of Louvain and at the Warburg Institute of the University of London. With Bruno Halflants and Godefroid de Callataÿ he is currently contributing to the critical edition and the annotated English translation of the long version of the Epistle of Magic (52b), attributed to the Ikhwān al- Ṣafā’, to be published by Oxford University Press and the Institute of Ismaili Studies in the “Epistles of the Brethren of Purity” series.

As part of PhilAnd, his main contribution is to sub-project 5, consisting in the critical edition, the English translation and the commentary of Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s Rutbat al-ḥakīm.

Complete CV and list of publication available at https://uclouvain.be/fr/repertoires/sebastien.moureau.

Liana’s academic journey so far reflects her interest in Islamic esoteric thought and the occult sciences, in addition to the intercultural exchange of occult and esoteric ideas between the Islamicate world and Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. Her approach to the occult sciences privileges the text as a source of our evaluation of their place in the intellectual and scientific activity in Islamicate societies. She focuses on how their practitioners and authors created theories that negotiated epistemological shifts which inform and are informed by political, religious, scientific disciplinary frameworks and institutions.

Her first monograph, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. In 2014, she received the British Academy postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Oriental Studies (The University of Oxford) to undertake a project entitled ‘On the Margins of Legitimacy: Magic in Medieval Islam’. She engaged in a comprehensive analysis of magical practices in medieval Islam (from pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica to Ahmad al-Būnī ), their cosmological frameworks, and the epistemological shifts that transformed them. As part of the project, she is currently preparing a critical translation from Arabic into English of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm  by Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī. In 2016, she joined the University of Louvain-based ‘Speculum Arabicum project: Objectifying the contribution of the Arab-Muslim world to the history of sciences and ideas: the sources and resources of medieval encyclopaedism’. She conducted research on Epistle 52b (the long version of the last epistle – ‘On Magic’) of the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ in collaboration with Prof. Godefroid de Callataÿ, Dr. Sébastien Moureau and Mr. Bruno Haflants.

She will now continue to work with UCL in collaboration with the Warburg Institute, as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC PhilAnd project. Her objective is to provide an in-depth analysis of the understudied Kitāb al-Baḥth attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, and to gauge its influence in al-Andalus. She will produce a critical edition and translation into English of the text.

Janne Mattila’s primary area of research is history of philosophy and general intellectual history of the first Islamic centuries. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Helsinki in the discipline of Arabic and Islamic studies. His doctoral thesis was an investigation into the idea of happiness in 10th-century Aristotelian philosophy and Ismaili theology. As a post-doctoral researcher, he has worked at the universities of Jyväskylä and Helsinki. His research interests have focused in particular on ethics and philosophical interpretations of religion in both the Aristotelian and the more esoterically oriented intellectual traditions. The authors he has studied include the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʼ), Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī, and Avicenna. In addition to scientific publications, he has translated the animal fable of the Brethren of Purity into Finnish.

Janne Mattila’s research in the PhilAnd project focuses on the Epistles and the two related works (Al-Risāla al-jāmiʻa and Risālat jāmiʻat al-jāmiʻa) of the Brethren of Purity, as well as their impact on the genesis of philosophical and esoteric thought in al-Andalus. The main research problem is the internal dating of the 52 epistles and their two ‘summaries’, with the aim of establishing the chronology of their redaction. Recent research has demonstrated the early introduction of the Epistles into al-Andalus. This part of the project will therefore both further investigate the relations between the Epistles and the early Andalusian philosophical and esoteric authors and employ the Andalusian texts as a means for the relative dating of the Epistles.

Elaine Van Dalen is a philologist and an intellectual historian of medieval Islam. She works with Arabic, Greek, Syriac, and Hebrew texts to study the history of medieval Islamic science and philosophy. To date, she has worked specifically on Islamic medicine and Graeco-Arabic translation. Her research is inspired by questions of transmission and translation of scientific and philosophical texts and ideas, originating from an underlying interest in the nature of human knowledge. Her interests are interdisciplinary; she has written on conceptual topics such as medieval Islamic paediatrics, but also worked on the linguistic characteristics of the medieval medical commentary, as well as textual problems of authorship attribution and textual criticism.

Her academic journey began at Leiden University, Netherlands, where she received bachelors in Hebrew and Aramaic Languages and Cultures (BA 2011), and Arabic Language and Culture (BA 2011). During this time, she spent a semester abroad at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, a city then on the verge of revolution where she would soon go back to complete her master in Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo (MA 2014). From Cairo she moved to Manchester, UK, to study the Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms from a socio-linguistic perspective. There she received her PhD in Classics and Ancient History under supervision of Peter Pormann, in February 2017. After a few months of postdoctoral research at Manchester (mostly on the authorship of Ibn an- Nafīs’medical commentaries), she took up a teaching fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in Islamic History in autumn 2017.
 
Since January 2018, she is a postdoctoral researcher in PhilAnd. Her research focuses on the influence of Ibn Waḥshiyya’s Filāḥa Nabaṭiyya on the development of philosophy in the Islamic and Jewish Neoplatonist milieus of early medieval Andalusia (10th-12th century). She is particularly interested in the adoption of Nabatean bāṭinism in Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s (d. 964) Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Goal of the Wise), but also in the works of the Jewish philosophers Ibn Gabirol (d.1070) and Ibn Ezra (d. c. 1167), and the Islamic mystics in the tradition of the karamāt al-awliyā’.