Revisiting Premodern Islamic Science and Experience

Hannah Erlwein holds a PhD in Islamic intellectual history from SOAS University of London (2016). She specializes in the two premodern Islamic sciences of kalam (theology) and falsafa (philosophy). She has published several articles and chapters dealing with various aspects of the premodern Islamic intellectual tradition. Her PhD thesis was published by De Gruyter in 2019 as Arguments for the Existence of God is Classical Islamic Thought: A Re-appraisal of Perspectives and Discourses. She has conducted postdoctoral research at LMU Munich (2017–2019) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (2019–present) within Katja Krause's research group "Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body, ca. 800–1650." At the MPIWG, she has investigated premodern Islamic debates about the nature of, and ways to attain, scientific knowledge, with a particular focus on the notion of experience.

Katja Krause, professor of the history of science at the Technical University Berlin, leads the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research rethinks the relationship between experience and science in the premodern sciences of living beings. She is also interested in the continuities and discontinuities of scientific practices and ideals from premodernity to the present. Among her recent publications are Aquinas on Seeing God (Marquette University Press, 2020) and the edited collection Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2023). After earning her PhD in philosophy at King’s College London, Katja Krause held postdoctoral fellowships in the history of science at the MPIWG and Harvard University and an assistant professorship in medieval thought at Durham University.