Nadia Maftouni

Biography

Nadia MAFTOUNI Iranian author and artist, is a senior research scholar at Yale and associate professor at University of Tehran. Born 14 January 1966 in Tehran, she was in love with both math and poetry in her childhood. But she chose to study mathematics at high school. Her idea at the time was that she couldn’t study math all by herself, contrary to poetry and literature. As a teenager, she became one of NODET’s select students in the second year of its foundation, 1977. In 1982, she was enrolled at Sharif University of Technology in her birthplace Tehran and started studying applied physics. In those days, she used to audit philosophy lessons at University of Tehran as a hobby. When she was 19, Nadia fell in love with Iranian artist Hossein Nuri a playwright and a painter on a perfect day in Fall. It was so that philosophy met up with art in her life, as well as in her mind!

She is best known as a leading researcher on Muslim philosophers with her modern reading of their works. In the eighth to eleventh centuries when philosophy wasn’t having a good time in Europe, it was thriving in territories under the rule of Muslims. Philosophers like Kindi, Fārābī and Avicenna were creatively experimenting with ideas of Greek philosophers to arrive at original ideas. The outcome of these experiments was partly discovered by forerunners of the European enlightenment and played a role in shaping early modern philosophy. The outcome of these experiments was a rational approach. Their rationalist tone was best transferred to Europe through Averroes and it influenced philosophical contemplations of various figures from Aquinas to Descartes and Spinoza. But rationalism is not the only souvenir that philosophers of the Islamic era could have had for contemporary philosophy. When Nadia started analyzing Fārābī’s original texts, she realized that many aspects needed to be dusted off and presented, not to showcase their past potential, but to contribute to a present need. She was working especially on the issues related to philosophy of art. The theories developed by philosophers of the Islamic era were in large measure unknown when she began her work.