LEM

Ziad Bou Akl is a member of the cluster "Sacred Books : Canons and Heterodoxies" of the Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (LEM-UMR 8584), and he is Professor at the Ecole pratique des hautes études, where he holds the chair Philosophy in Islam.
His work focuses on the links between Arabic philosophy (falsafa), rational theology (kalām) and legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) during the classical period. He is also interested in philosophical manuscripts in Arabic.

See the curriculum vitae of Ziad Bou akl.

Domains of research

– Arabic philosophy and theology of the kalām
– Legal theory
– Philology and codicology

Research topics

– Philosophy of law and language in Islam
– Classical Ash’arite thought
– The practical philosophy of Averroes
– The first doxographies of the kalām

Project in progress

Early doxographies of the kalām and, in particular, al-Ashʿarī’s The Doctrines of the Muslims and the Differences of the Believers (maqālāt).

Research’s seminar

– Les premiers siècles du kalām à travers Les Doctrines des musulmans d’al-Ashʿarī
Every Wednesday, from 12pm to 2pm, from October 18, 2023 to June 06, 2024,
Sorbonne, 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005, Paris.

– Introduction à la philosophie arabe : la notion de raison
Every two weeks, thurday from 10 to 12 a.m. from october 19 2023 to May 30 2024,
Campus Condorcet, 8-14 cours des Humanités, 93322, Aubervilliers.

– (with Jean-Pascal Anfray), Translatio Studiorum, philosophie arabe et latine,
one Tuesday a month from 6 to 8 p.m. at the l’Ecole normale supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

Awards and honorary distinctions

2017 - ’Sheikh Zayed Book Award’ (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), prize for best translation, for Averroès : le philosophe et la Loi. Edition, translation and commentary of the Abrégé du Mustaṣfā, coll. ’Scientia Graeco-Arabica’, no. 14, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2015.

2014-2015 - Winner of the Innovation Fund Research at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau for a project on Arabic semantics.