Ottoman Epistemology: Taşköprizade’s (d. 968/1561) Miftāḥ al-sa‘āda and the Perspectival Turn in the Classifications of the Sciences

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Zadeh, Travis

Abstract

This thesis seeks to refocus plural perspectives of knowledge in Islam by exploring the corpus on the classifications of the sciences (taqāsīm al-ʿulūm) from the early Abbasid treatises to the Ottoman scholar Taşköprizade’s (d. 968/1561) Miftāḥ al-sa‘āda wa miṣbāḥ al-siyāda (The Key to Felicity and the Beacon of Mastery). My study suggests a multilayered reading of this text—bio-bibliography, encyclopedia of the sciences, pedagogical guidance, map of knowledge—by examining its epistemology, taxonomy, pedagogy, and ideology. I show how and why Taşköprizade brings together contending metaphysical perspectives and renders them parallel truth paths, highlighting the epistemic expansion and metaphysical multiplicity in post-6th/12th-century Islamic culture as well as the drive for order and systematization in 10th/16th-century Ottoman Istanbul.

Against the presentist narratives of madrasas as sites of intellectual stagnancy, I demonstrate the deep investment of an Ottoman madrasa professor in a plethora of scientific disciplines. I explain Taşköprizade’s genuine interest in the philosophy of Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) with the latter’s epistemic expansion in relation to the Aristotelian tradition. I show how metaphysical multiplicity was the name of the game in later Islamic intellectual history, particularly highlighting the threads of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (d. ca. 560/1165), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), and Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240). Their teachings (along with others) contribute to the Ottoman epistemological notion of what I call combinatory superiority: the idea that combining multiple sources and methods of knowledge—reason, revelation, experience, intellectual inference, spiritual purification etc.—is epistemologically superior to drawing on one way of knowing. The notion of combinatory superiority lies at the heart of Taşköprizade’s project.

Recent research has called attention to the existence of parallel epistemological perspectives and the transformation from paradigmatic to perspectival conceptions of knowledge in Islam after the 6th/12th century. Building on this body of scholarship, I propose the term perspectival turn to explain the multiplicity of metaphysical and epistemological trajectories after Ibn Sīnā. In his works, Taşköprizade emphasizes the perspectival and preferential (istiḥsānī) aspect of the classifications of the sciences, recognizing multiple classificatory schemes and suggesting scholarly synchronicity in engaging with parallel epistemologies. In his Miftāḥ al-sa‘āda, he employs the fourfold division of existence (khaṭṭ, lafẓ, dhihn, ‘ayn) as an organizing principle, placing both the philosophical and religious sciences as “the real sciences” (al-‘ulūm al-ḥaqīqiyya) under a shared ontology but with distinct epistemologies. I propose approaching the taxonomies of the sciences as flexible rather than fixed phenomena, and taking seriously both perspectival plurality and scholarly synchronicity in order to better understand the intellectual and existential condition of Islam, past and present.

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