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Fact and Value in Islam
Abstract
The collapse of fact-value dualism announced by prominent, contemporary moral philosophers and philosophers of science has prompted leading historians to reassess some of the principal assumptions of their disciplines. Few scholars have embraced this task with greater candour and perspicacity than Wael Hallaq. In a series of acclaimed publications, Hallaq uncovers the ways fact-value dualism has shaped and distorted our understanding of Islamic intellectual history and the interpretation of Islam’s seminal texts. Hallaq argues that fact-value dualism is a distinctly modern, western doctrine, part of the baleful legacy of the Enlightenment and positivism that continues to haunt the study of premodern Islam. Far from being a transcendental truth, Hallaq argues that the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition more generally were not burdened by the false doctrine of fact-value dualism, but in them fact and value were “one and the same” and formed a “unity.” In this paper, I discuss Hallaq’s ambitious claim that this doctrine, which we might call *fact-value monism*, characterises the Islamic tradition. I present evidence that leading medieval Qur’an exegetes did not read the Qur’an in the way that Hallaq implies they must have if fact-value monism correctly represents the metaphysical outlook of premodern Islam. First, the radical anthropocentrism of the fact-value monism Hallaq attributes to premodern Islam is at odds with how prominent exegetes interpret cosmological verses linked to human interests. Second, Hallaq consistently characterises divine creativity as fulfilling a purpose in a way that is out of step with many Sunnī theologians and Qur’an exegetes who explicitly deny that God acts to achieve ends. Third, in interpreting cosmological verses, leading exegetes turn to Ptolemaic and Aristotelian cosmological models rather than “moral cosmologies” to interpret the Qur’an’s descriptions of the cosmos. Finally, exegetes identify forms of reasoning they believe the Qur’an takes for granted in its readers, reasoning in which readers distinguish between the way the world actually is and counterfactual alternatives the reasoner nevertheless entertains as possible owing to *epistemic values* such as simplicity, uniformity, arbitrariness and patternedness. They appear to assume that the Qur’an takes for granted that epistemic values permeate human experience of and reasoning about the natural world. I conclude that, in premodern Islam, facts and values each played vital rôles in theoretical and practical reasoning, rôles in which they were entangled but remained, nevertheless, distinct.
Discipline
Philosophy
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None