Janne Mattila

Janne Mattila’s project investigates the development of philosophical virtue ethics in the Islamic world between ca. 900 and 1500 CE. The big question concerns the philosophical and religious components of ethical thought. Many recent studies have shown the philosophical interest of ethical arguments in theology and jurisprudence; in contrast, scholarship of philosophical virtue ethics has been scarce. Yet, during this period, virtue became a central concept in religious disciplines, and thus an important component of “Islamic ethics”. The big question can be divided into a historical and a philosophical part: 1) How is philosophical virtue ethics, ultimately grounded in Greek philosophy, fused with the Islamic components of jurisprudence and theology, as well as with Arabic, Persian, and Sufi notions of virtue? 2) How can the focus on the moral status of acts in jurisprudence and theology be combined with the focus on moral agent in philosophy? This big question is approached through various case studies. The first concerns the reception of Miskawayh (d. 1030), the most prominent moral philosopher of the Islamic tradition: In what ways do later authors adapt his seminal treatise of the Purification of Character Traits into their respective religious contexts? A second case study addresses the taxonomy of virtues: How and by what grounds are the initially Platonic and Aristotelian classifications of virtues transformed by later authors?