Scientific Methodologies in the Medieval Muslim World

Abstract

The paper deals with various methods of research activities of scholars of the medieval Muslim world. We argue that, despite the existing prohibition on the improper transfer of methods from one field of science to another, thinkers in the medieval Islamic world systematically resorted to the transfer of theoretical, particularly mathematical, constructions from one field to another, and, as in the era of European scholasticism, this was generally a standard method of reasoning. However, having analyzed a whole series of specific questions from the fields of jurisprudence, kalam, botany, zoology, medicine, etc., we find discrepancies in the teachings of even outstanding philosophers, which makes it difficult to construct a single systematic interpretation of their works, and forces us to raise the question of how, in general, a medieval philosophical text should be interpreted? Therefore, the absence of particular studies on this subject is, we think, one of the acute problems of the history and philosophy of science, and points out that we still do not have a complete analysis of the methods of research activities in the medieval Islamic world.