The orientation of this study 1

• Introduction 1
• Ibn ،Arabi’s picture of reality 3
• The question about questions: knowledge and its essential direction 4
• Metaphysics, historically positioned discourses and human aspiration 10
• Degrees of knowledge: the principle of immanencing 20
• Ibn ،Arabi and modern thought: a reconfigured
• topography 23
• Notes 33

2 Ibn Arabi: philosophy and reason 37

• Ibn ،Arabi, Averroës and philosophy as demonstrative science 37
• Philosophy, reason and metaphysics 43
• Reason and essential contestability 50
• Reason and commitment 54
• Scienti¥c philosophy 59
• Philosophy of the subject 68
• Wahdat al-wujud, wisdom and reason 74
• Notes 78

3 Ibn Arabi and the era 81

• The metaphysics of the era: creation and change 81
• Social science and the emergence of the modern era 88
• The reorientation of the self: science, technology and industrialization 98
• Modernity, postmodernity and relativism 108
• Notes 120
• viii ~ contents

4 Ibn Arabi and the self 123

• The metaphysics of self-knowledge 123
• Modern psychology and the self 135
• The treatment of the self in modern scienti¥c psychology 135
• The relative invisibility of the self under the searchlight of experimentalism 137
• Self and experience beyond the experimentalist paradigm 141
• The turn towards a discursive–critical perspective 146
• Further comments on the treatment of subjectivity and
• self in psychology and computational models of mind 148
• Wider perspectives on the mind and self in the early history of psychology: the case of Wundt and James 156
• Psychology, post-empiricist views of science and the self 165
• Psychology and essential contestability 169
• The self as sui generis 170
• Psychology, therapy and the self 172
• Feminism and the self 177
• Postscript 181
• Notes 183