Muhammad Ali Khalidi Home Research Teaching Politics Muhammad Ali Khalidi Home Research Teaching Politics About me I am Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Before that, I was Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. I’ve also taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Nevada at Reno, and (as a post-doc) at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. You can download a copy of my CV here and can contact me via email. My work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science. I’ve also done some work on classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy. You can read or listen to interviews about my work here and here. Scroll down for information about and links to my books. My current project is a book titled, Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences, which is supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). To get some idea of what it’s about, you can watch a 2016 presentation on mind-brain taxonomy here. I also organized a workshop on this topic in 2019. More information about publications, teaching, and political writings can be accessed through the links at the top right. The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. Philosophy in the Islamic world emerged in the ninth century and continued to flourish into the fourteenth century. It was strongly influenced by Greek thought, but Islamic philosophers also developed an original philosophical culture of their own, which had a considerable impact on the subsequent course of Western philosophy. This volume offers new translations of philosophical writings by Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ghazali, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). All of the texts presented here were very influential and invite comparison with later works in the Western tradition. They focus on metaphysics and epistemology but also contribute to broader debates concerning the conception of God, the nature of religion, the place of humanity in the universe, and the limits of human reason. A historical and philosophical introduction sets the writings in context and traces their preoccupations and their achievement.  Back to top Back to Top Photo credits: Mark Riskedahl