Building Bridges Seminar

Ayman Shihadeh, an intellectual historian specializing in medieval Arabic and Islamic philosophy and rational theology, is reader in Arabic intellectual history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His main areas of interest are the Avicennan philosophical tradition, the development of the Ash‘ari school, the interaction between post-Avicennan philosophy and kalam (dialectic theology), particularly during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Arabic codicology. One of his current research projects investigates the transformation of the Ash‘ari stance towards Avicenna’s philosophical anthropology, especially his body-soul dualism, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. His undergraduate studies were at SOAS and his doctorate is from the University of Oxford.