The Youth Who Defeated Aristotle: The Life and Thought of Dashtakī (d. 948/1541)

Abstract

The running thread of the present article is the perceived union and harmony between faith and reason in the worldview of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī (d. 1542), arguably the most significant–but little-known to modern scholarship–Shiʿi intellectual and polymath of the late medieval era. The study sets to do three things: first, to introduce to introduce new data and material for the study of early Safavid intellectual history, focusing on the figure of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī (d. 1542), his life, writings, and legacy; second, to set out the contours of Dashtakī’s major accomplishments in philosophy, namely in metaphysics; and third, to call for a revised reading of the Safavid intellectual and cultural renaissance, showing that there was precedent in the example of the Shiraz Circle and particularly in Dashtakī, who, along with his contemporaries, led an important scholarly revival in religion and philosophy well over a century before the rise of the Isfahan school in the early decades of the eleventh/seventeenth century. The article will be concerned primarily with Dashtakī the son who lived under the dispensation of the Safavid rulers.