115 pages, paperback,
14,8 x 21,0 cm, 2021
More information
Every culture has its own “world of knowledge”, a way in which it conceives the limits of human knowledge: what one knows, what one can know, and what one cannot know. This study seeks to explore the Ottoman “world of knowledge” and its historical development: the way the horizons of this mental universe were delineated in space and time; the way these horizons expanded (or contracted) over time; the way this universe was seen as having limits, showing fields that could not (or should not) be known and how these limits shifted to and fro in the continuum of reality; and, finally, the way knowledge was organized, i.e. taxonomies of the fields of science, demonstrating hierarchies of the world in relation to what was deemed necessary, useful, or harmful to man.
The Author
Marinos Sariyannis is Research Director at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas in Rethymno, Greece, where he works since 2007. He studied at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Ph.D. 2005) and taught at the Ionian University (Corfu) and the University of Crete (Rethymno). His research interests include Ottoman social, cultural and intellectual history in the early modern period. He is the author of several books, including A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill 2019) and Perceptions ottomanes du surnaturel. Aspects de l’histoire intellectuelle d’une culture islamique à l’époque moderne (Paris : Les éditions du Cerf 2019), and of more than forty papers and book chapters. He is currently leading a five-year research project, “GHOST Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities”, under the European Research Council funding scheme ERC-CoG 2017.
