Description

Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History – A Study in the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of Culture

by Muhsin Mahdi

Have our historical and cultural sciences made philosophy superfluous, or are they themselves, on the contrary, in dire need of a philosophical foundation? This book attempts to clarify this problem through the study of perhaps the only great thinker who considered the problems of history and culture, and founded a special science to deal with them, based on the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and their Muslim followers.

This is the first study of Ibn Khaldun which is not an apology either for the modern social sciences or for the ‘modern’ character of Ibn Khaldun’s thought, but a throughgoing analysis and interpretation of his text. This study concentrates on examining the principles of Ibn Khaldun’s new science of culture and explaining the precise nature of these principles against the background of Classical and Islamic Philosophy.