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If we can think together, maybe we can live together: What the history of philosophy can teach us about inter-religious harmony - ABC Religion & Ethics
Over the last two weeks, long simmering hostilities between Israel and Iran flared, with the United States deciding to join the fray. In Syria, a recent suicide bombing targeting Christians at prayer in the Greek Orthodox Church of Mar Elias in Damascus killed 25 people and wounded 63 others. Ever since 7 October 2023, antisemitism and Islamophobia have both been on the rise in Australia.
The painful paradox behind these global and local upheavals is that the communities in question — Jews, Muslims and Christians — all see themselves as inheritors of a common biblical tradition, centred on the figure of Abraham. As conflict escalates abroad and social cohesion fractures at home, the challenge of inter-religious harmony is as urgent as ever. Is there any hope of harmony between the three Abrahamic faiths?
We hope so, and we think there is a surprising and neglected resource to draw on — the history of philosophy.
There is an extraordinary record of shared philosophical inquiry among the three Abrahamic traditions. It begins with philosophers like Philo of Alexandria (a Jew), Gregory of Nyssa (a Christian) and al-Kindi (a Muslim), and it cascades through the Middle Ages with some of the finest minds in human history — such as Maimonides (known to Jews as Rambam and to Muslims as Musa Ibn Maymun), Avicenna (Ibn Sina, from present day Iran) and Thomas Aquinas. Brilliant women like Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan are part of the story too.
The Abrahamic philosophical traditions explore the deepest questions that the three faiths ask — which are also some of the deepest questions any of us ask: What is the meaning of my life? What makes for a good society? How do we find truth? What is the nature of the divine?
The three traditions were in continual conversation with each other around these questions. Over centuries, Jews, Muslims and Christians found themselves debating, writing and living alongside each other — with their scriptures in one hand, and Plato or Aristotle in the other.
Ninth-century Baghdad and twelfth-century Toledo are especially vivid instances. In these cities, networks of Jewish, Christian and Islamic scholars, fluent in multiple languages, wrote, translated, commented on and dispersed philosophical texts in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin, transporting new ideas across the Islamic and Christian worlds. An iconic moment is the collaboration in Toledo between the Jew, Abraham Ibn Daud, and the Christian, Dominicus Gundissalinus, who together translated major works of Islamic philosophy for Latin Christian readers, working out their own distinctive philosophical views along the way.
The point of all these cross-tradition conversations wasn't to agree about everything — which would be both impossible and boring. Rather, like fans of opposing football teams who watch the game together and enjoy it more for that reason, the point was a shared project . These Abrahamic thinkers worked together on the project of philosophy, which is itself the project of seeking wisdom ( sophia , ḥokhmah , sapientia , ḥikmah ). They worked on shared questions, and thinking together helped each tradition sharpen its own answers to those questions — finding common ground here, differences there — and in the process they made neighbours of each other, intellectually and literally.
Disagreements were many, of course. Indeed, there was as much disagreement within each faith as there was between them — as when Maimonides sides with Avicenna against the Rabbis of the Talmud regarding natural science, or when Aquinas favours Aristotelian Muslim accounts of the soul and body over some Christian alternatives. And we cannot ignore the periods of political and social conflict in this history, particularly the oppression of religious and cultural minorities in both the Christian and Islamic worlds.
But the stand-out fact of Abrahamic philosophical history is the degree of intellectual collaboration between the three traditions.
We are the directors of the Notre Dame Centre for the History of Philosophy. We are both philosophers — one Jewish, the other Christian. Next week, we are launching a new annual lecture series, The John and Anna Belfer Oration in the History of Jewish Philosophy, in partnership with The Great Synagogue Sydney. It's an initiative we hope to replicate in Sydney's Christian and Muslim communities.
The extraordinary history of Abrahamic philosophy inspires our work in the Centre. Our hope is that — maybe, in some modest way — shared philosophical inquiry can once again serve as a bridge between Abrahamic communities. If we can re-learn how to think together, perhaps we can re-learn how to live together.
David Bronstein is Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for Ethics and Society and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is author of Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning: The Posterior Analytics.
Nathan Lyons is Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Philosophy and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is author of God and Being and Signs in the Dust: A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature.
