Reception Theory Among Muslim Philosophers

Abstract

This study explores the concept of reception as articulated by two prominent Muslim philosophers, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, aiming to establish the foundations of reception theory within the context of Islamic philosophy. It examines how each philosopher conceptualized the relationship between text and receiver: al-Farabi viewed reception as a result of the shock of strangeness caused by the encounter with the text, whereas Ibn Sina linked it to the imaginative faculty. The research traces the linguistic and semantic roots of the term "reception," and reviews its development in modern Western literary criticism, highlighting that some foundational ideas of the theory were already present in Islamic philosophical and critical thought, albeit not in a fully systematized form.