Lambertus van Lit

Postdoc Assoc Middle East Studies
34 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06511-8936

Eric van Lit is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Council on Middle East Studies from July 2015 to June 2016. His main interests lie in Islamic intellectual history, in particular philosophy from the late medieval and early modern period. His doctoral research at Utrecht University was on the commentary tradition on Suhrawardī, tracing the development of the notion of the ‘world of image’ (ʿālam al-mithāl) from Avicenna and Suhrawardī in the twelfth century up to the present. At Yale, he is conducting research on the reception of Tahāfut al-falāsifah (the incoherence of the philosophers), written by the famous eleventh century theologian Ghazālī. The philosophical brilliance of this book is broadly acknowledged by modern scholarship, but little is known about the reception by Islamic intellectuals themselves. In addition to his research, Van Lit is concerned with the growing importance of technology in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies, on which he writes on his weblog.