Nader El-Bizri

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Nader El-Bizri (Arabic نادر البزري / b. 1966, Sidon) is a Lebanese philosopher, historian of science, and architect living in Britain.[1][2]

El-Bizri's areas of expertise are in Phenomenology, in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, and Architectural Humanities. He focuses mainly on theories of space/place and of perception, with a particular interest in classical optics and perspective Renaissance traditions. His interpretation of history of science and philosophy is guided by contemporary debates in epistemology and ontology (metaphysics). His philosophical analysis is principally oriented by phenomenological methods of investigation and interpretation, and his thinking is influenced by the traditions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His research in history of science and philosophy, which also informs his investigations in architectural history, theory and criticism, is methodologically inspired by the legacies of scholars of history and philosophy of science like: Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Alexandre Koyré. He was also the student of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Robert Nozick, and A. I. Sabra at Harvard University, and he studied with Richard J. Bernstein and Agnes Heller at the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research[1]. In more recent years, he established solid academic collaborations with the phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Editor of Analecta Husserliana and President of The World Phenomenology Institute, New Hampshire, USA).[2] Moreover, El-Bizri's interpretation of the history of the exact sciences has been influenced by the legacy of the mathematician, historian and philosopher of science: Roshdi Rashed (CNRS, Paris).

Nader El-Bizri is a Visiting Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Lincoln.[3] He is also a senior Research Associate in Philosophy at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London (also acting as General Editor, and Managing Editor ex officio, of a book series published by Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London; titled: The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity Series رسائل إخوان الصفاء [4],[5] He is also the Co-Manager of a joint institutional project between The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London and the Institut Français du Proche Orient (IFPO) in Damascus (Syria), and acts as the Coordinator of The Institute of Ismaili Studies Texts and Translations Series.[6],[7] El-Bizri has been an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge since 1999 (primarily lecturing on Arabic sciences and philosophy),[8] and he has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Cambridge (Islamic Architecture). He furthermore holds a Chercheur Associé post at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, and he was previously a lecturer in Architecture at the University of Nottingham, and taught at Harvard University and the American University of Beirut. Moreover, he is an elected member of the Steering Committee of the Société Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences et des Philosophies Arabes et Islamiques (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris),[9] and he is an active member of several societies, including The American Philosophical Association (APA), The British Society for Phenomenology, the International Husserl and Phenomenological Research Society, and the Architectural Humanities Research Association (British Universities Consortium). In addition, he serves as the Co-Editor of a book series in phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands),[10] and as a member of the Editorial Boards of a book series on philosophy and architecture (Toposophia; Lexington Books, Maryland, USA), and of a series on history of ideas in classical Islam (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity Series; Oxford University Press). Among his other offices, he is a board member on Fundamentals of Scientific Research at The Arab Organization for Translation in Beirut, as well as being the European Representative of the Equipe d’Etude et de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Scientifique Arabe, which is part of the Lebanese CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). He has also been a contributor to the Cultural Supplements of the daily Arabic international newspaper Al-Hayat (London; Beirut) الحياة .[11],[12]

Besides his academic undertakings Nader El-Bizri has over nine years of professional architectural design and consulting experience in offices and institutions in Geneva, London, Cambridge, New York, Boston and Beirut (He registered as Chartered Architect in 1990 as part of the Ordre des Ingénieurs et Architectes, Beirut, Lebanon).[13],[14]


Selected publications:[15]


· The Phenomenological Quest Between Avicenna and Heidegger (Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications, SUNY, 2000)[16]


· 'Avicenna and Essentialism', Review of Metaphysics 54 (2001), 753-778[17]


· 'Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), 473-490


· 'A Phenomenological Account of the Ontological Problem of Space', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 12 (2002), 345-364


· 'Avicenna's De Anima Between Aristotle and Husserl', in The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 67-89[18]


· 'Religion and Measure', Phenomenological Inquiry 27 (2003), 128-155


· 'Variations autour de la notion d'expérience dans la pensée arabe', in L'expérience, collection les mots du monde, sous la direction de N. Tazi, traduit par M. Saint-Upéry (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 2004), 39-58


· 'Ontopoièsis and the Interpretation of Plato's Khôra', Analecta Husserliana 83 (2004), 25-45


· 'On Kai Khora: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus,' Studia Phaenomenologica 4 (2004), 73-98


· 'La perception de la profondeur: Alhazen, Berkeley et Merleau-Ponty', Oriens-Occidens: Cahiers du centre d'histoire des sciences et des philosophies arabes et médiévales, CNRS. 5 (2004), 171-184


· 'A Philosophical Perspective on Alhazen's Optics', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15 (2005), 189-218


· 'The Conceptions of Nature in Arabic Thought', in Nature (Keywords Series), ed. Nadia Tazi (New York: Other Press, 2005), 63-92


· ‘Microcosm and Macrocosm: A Tentative Encounter between Graeco-Arabic Philosophy and Phenomenology’, in Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), 3-23


· 'Being and Necessity: A Phenomenological Investigation of Avicenna's Metaphysics and Cosmology', in Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), 243-261[19]


· 'Uneasy Meditations following Levinas', Studia Phaenomenologica 6 (2006), 293-315


· 'Being-towards-death: on Martyrdom and Islam', Cristianesimo nella storia 27 (2006), 249-279


· 'In Defence of the Sovereignty of Philosophy: al-Baghdadi's Critique of Ibn al-Haytham's Geometrisation of Place', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17 (2007), 57-80


· ‘Imagination and Architectural Representations’, in From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, eds. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, Bradley Starkey (London : Routledge, 2007), 34-42


· ‘Some Phenomenological and Classical Corollaries on Time’, in Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2007), 137-155


· ‘Préface’, in Ibn Taymiyya, Les Saints du Mont Liban: Absence, jihâd et spiritualité, entre la montagne et la cité. Cinq fetwas traduits de l’arabe, introduits et annotés par Yahya Michot -- Fetwas d'Ibn Taymiyya 5 (Beyrouth - Paris: Editions ALBOURAQ – La Librairie de l’Orient, 2007), vii-xviii


· ‘God: essence and attributes’, in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121-140


· ‘Le problème de l’espace: approches optique, géométrique et phénoménologique’, in Oggetto e spazio. Fenomenologia dell'oggetto, forma e cosa dai secoli XIII-XIV ai post-cartesiani, eds. Graziella Federici Vescovini and Orsola Rignani. Micrologus Library 24 (Firenze: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 59-70


[edit] References

  1. ^ The Institute of Ismaili Studies
  2. ^ Muslim Communities in Europe: Britain

[edit] External Links