Al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153 C.E.) Al-Shahrastānī (d. A.H. 548 / C.E. 1153) was an influential historian of religions and a heresiographer. He was one of the pioneers in developing a scientific approach to the study of religions. Al-Shahrastānī’ distinguished himself by his desire to describe in the most objective way the universal religious history of humanity. He was wrongly recognized as an “Ash‘arite” theologian; this is why

God and Time Any theistic view of the world includes some notion of how God is related to the structures of the universe, including space and time. The question of God’s relation to time has generated a great amount of theological and philosophical reflection. The traditional view has been that God is timeless in the sense of being outside time altogether; c'est, he exists

Religious Disagreement The domain of religious inquiry is characterized by pervasive and seemingly intractable disagreement. Whatever stance one takes on central religious questions—for example, whether God exists, what the nature of God might be, whether the world has a purpose, whether there is life beyond death—one will stand opposed to a large contingent of highly informed and intelligent thinkers. The fact of extensive religious disagreement

Margaret Cavendish (1623—1673) Margaret Lucas Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, était un philosophe, poète, playwright and essayist. Her philosophical writings were concerned mostly with issues of metaphysics and natural philosophy, but also extended to social and political concerns. Like Hobbes and Descartes, she rejected what she took to be the occult explanations of the Scholastics. Against Descartes, cependant, she rejected dualism and incorporeal substance of

Parmenides of Elea (Late 6th cn.—Mid 5th cn. avant notre ère) Parmenides of Elea was a Presocratic Greek philosopher. As the first philosopher to inquire into the nature of existence itself, he is incontrovertibly credited as the “Father of Metaphysics.” As the first to employ deductive, a priori arguments to justify his claims, he competes with Aristotle for the title “Father of Logic.” He is also commonly

Xunzi (Hsün Tzu, c. 310—c. 220 B.C.E.) Xunzi, along with Confucius and Mencius, was one of the three great early architects of Confucian philosophy. À bien des égards, he offers a more complete and sophisticated defense of Confucianism than Mencius. Xunzi lived toward the end of the Warring States period (453-221 BCE), generally regarded as the formative era for most later Chinese philosophy. It was a