Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition
@inproceedings{MelvinKoushki2017PowersOO,
title={Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition},
author={Matthew Melvin-Koushki},
year={2017}
}Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism. Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th–11th/10th–17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences, to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout… CONTINUE READING