Title:

Specimen philosophiae orientalis antiquissimae ex Corano

Short title

Title variations

Title in English

A specimen of the most ancient oriental philosophy from the Qur'an

Section

Language

Latin

Creation date

1719

Genre

Content

Other

Content table

Formal Expression

Prose

Qur'an quotations

Yes

Original

Source

Use (macro-category)

Speculative / Philosophical / Scholastic / Mystical

Use (micro-category)

Bibliographical references

Descriptive card

In 1719, eight years after his treatise De Mohammedi furto sententiarum scripturae sacrae, Schwartz took his argument in an intriguing direction. A preoccupation of Schwartz’s in those years was the refutation of atheism. A central tool in his arsenal were philosophical proofs for the existence of God, ranging from Antiquity to Descartes and to his own day. Schwartz himself even offered his own “argument from design”, proving, to his mind, the existence of a benevolent deity from the structure of a single leaf. In the Qur’an he identified several such philosophical proofs, which Schwartz acknowledges as valid and genuine, in the sense that while they d not appear in the Bible, he takes them to be genuine Abrahamic arguments about God and the proof for his existence, which Muhammad had picked up. The Qur’an, several year earlier decried by Schwartz as the work of a literary plagiarist, becomes an intriguing storehouse of Abrahamic philosophy, proving the existence of God and offering a Lutheran theologian and pedagogue in the early eighteenth century, helpful arguments against contemporary European disbelief.

Entry author

Asaph Ben Tov