What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought
and beyond thought to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate
ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th 9th century.
However in contrast to contemporary philosophy they were not tackled by scholars adhering to
only one specific discipline. Rather they were addressed across multiple fields and domains
no less by linguists legal theorists and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In
response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines highly sophisticated and more
specialized areas emerged comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics
pragmatics and hermeneutics to name but a few - fields of research that are pursued to this
day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language thus has
been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general a theme which probably
due to its trans-disciplinary nature has largely been neglected by modern research. This book
brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved in order to
explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested
both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.
