Epilogue: Experiencing Experiences—Four Encounters with Experience in the Medieval Islamicate World
摘要
This epilogue explores and sometimes expands on many of the recurrent themes of this volume. It takes seriously the editors’ observation about the subject-rootednessSubject-rootedness of experience as understood in the medieval Islamicate world and about the notion of internalized objectivityObjectivity, internalized as a lens for reassessing our histories of science. It argues that rather than holding to our current sharp, even arbitrary, divide between the objective and subjective, it is more fruitful to approach Islamicate science as one that views the relation between the experience of the individual scientists and the standards of a given scientific community as forming an ecosystemEcosystem. Using the interpretive frame set out in the volume’s introduction, the epilogue supplements and contextualizes the essays to show that both subject-rootednessSubject-rootedness and internalized objectivityObjectivity, internalized were operative throughout the scientific endeavors of medieval Islamic science. Against this background, a number of disciplines that have been excluded from or marginalized in our histories of science—such as grammar, theology, astrology, and dream interpretation—emerge as areas of scientific and historical interest.