Date:
On Wednesday, March 11, Thomas E. Burman Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Humanities and History at the University of Tennessee, will give his lecture titled "On the Edge of Scholastic Europe: Ramon Marti O.P.Confronts Judaism and Islam." The Catalan Dominican Ramon Martí (d. after 1284) was the most learned polemical author of the later Middle Ages. Having learned Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, his writing (a short work against Islam and two massive treatises including against Judaism) quotes directly and abun-dantly from Jewish and Muslim religious and philosophical sources. Since Martí lived his whole life in Iberia and North Africa, his intellectual production allows us to look at the Latin scholastic movement in its most dynamic period, not from its center in Paris and Oxford, but from its most distant periphery, both geographically and intellectually. Viewed through the lens of Martí's works written on this Iberian periphery, we are not surprised to find that Latin scholasticism is deeply preoccupied with Judaism, but Martí's only passing interest in Islam forces us to recognize that, despite being profoundly dependent on Arab philosophy, scholastic culture was largely unwilling or unable to think systematically about the religious beliefs of Islam.
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Where: Holsclaw Hall, University of Arizona School of Music
Suggested parking Park Avenue Garage (NE Corner of Park and Speedway)
