Ideology, Ethics, and Philosophical Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Iran

by Juan Cole

Abstract: Intellectual biography as a discipline assumes that the life and thought of an individual can shed light on an epoch. In some cases such a claim is justified, especially where the epoch is obscure and the thinker genuinely representative of the culture of a profession in a city or region. I shall argue the validity of this principle with regard to eighteenth-century west-central Iran and Mohammad Mehdi Niraqi (d. 1794), a prominent Imami Shi'i religious scholar who wrote prolifically and authored a huge three-volume work on ethics.