Nader El-Bizri - Intellectual Profile

Intellectual Profile

Nader El-Bizri's areas of expertise are in Phenomenology, in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, and Architectural Humanities (Architectural theory). 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.

He also composed commentaries on these phenomenologists in addition to writing about notions central to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. 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 developed an expertise in history of philosophy and science in Islamic civilisation, with a special focus on the traditions of polymaths like the optician and geometer Alhazen (al-Hasab Ibn al-Haytham), the metaphysician and physician Avicenna (Abu 'Ali Ibn Sina), and the tenth-century encyclopaedist thinkers, the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa').

El-Bizri studied under Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Robert Nozick, and A. I. Sabra at Harvard University, and he also was the student of Richard J. Bernstein and Agnes Heller at the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York. He also conducted research with the Islamic philosophy scholar Parviz Morewedge at the State University of New York in Binghamton . In more recent years, he established solid academic collaborations with the influential phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Editor of Analecta Husserliana and President of The World Phenomenology Institute, New Hampshire, USA). Moreover, El-Bizri's interpretations of the history of the exact sciences in classical Islamic civilization have been partly inspired by the legacy of the mathematician, historian and philosopher of science: Roshdi Rashed (Emeritus; CNRS, Paris). However, in recent studies that aim at 'renewing the impetus of philosophical thinking in Islam', El-Bizri offers critical analyses of the conventions of methodology and historiography that dominate the mainstream academic and epistemic approaches in studying 'Islamic philosophy' from 'archival' standpoints, within Oriental and Mediaevalist Studies; arguing that these do not usually recognize the fact that 'philosophy in Islam' can still be a living intellectual tradition, and that its renewal requires a radical reform in ontology, epistemology and cosmology within Islamic thought, which have primacy over the emphasis on theories of value, on politics and law. Besides his research in phenomenology, and the history and philosophy of the exact sciences, El-Bizri contributes to the philosophical debates within contemporary Architectural theory and Architectural humanities, through his studies on space and place, and the theories of vision, as these are informed by the phenomenological traditions, the history of Graeco-Arabic optics, and research on the perspective legacies in the Renaissance pictorial arts.