Philosophical Sufism as Islamic Moral Intellectualism: Knowledge, Motivation, and the Substance of the Good

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between knowledge and moral action raised in the Socratic question: is to know the good to do the good? – a thesis discussed in contemporary analytic moral philosophy under the rubric ‘moral intellectualism’. It develops a modest version of this claim, namely, that certain forms of discursive theological-cosmological understanding can support moral motivation by thickening the agent’s grasp of what is ultimately good and worth pursuing. Chapter One clarifies the conceptual space for this claim by tracing the post-Socratic debate about moral motivation and showing how ‘thin’ conceptions of moral judgement and metaphysical deflations of value weaken practical commitment, motivating the need for a meaning-conferring moral ontology satisfying the triad of sense-making, purpose, and significance. Chapter Two reconstructs Akbarian philosophical Sufism through authoritative secondary scholarship as such a framework. It explains how this ‘theoretical gnosis’ (al-ʿirfān al-naẓarī) integrates metaphysics, anthropology, and spiritual formation in ways that yield action-guiding orientations, grounding moral cognition in being itself and sustaining it through the practical disciplines for forming occurrent knowledge: remembrance (dhikr), ontological poverty (faqr), and supplication (duʿāʾ). Chapter Three places this Akbarian reconstruction in comparative dialogue with Socratic-Platonic moral intellectualism, observing how both frameworks characterise actions in the demanding domain of interpersonal ethics and evaluating how each tradition cognitively structures the encounter with the ‘other’.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Islamic Studies