Ahmed El-Sayed Abdel Meguid

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Position: Assistant Professor
Department: Department of Philosophy

Brief Biography

Ahmed Abdel Meguid is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, The American University in Cairo (AUC), Cairo, Egypt. He earned his BA at AUC and his MA and PhD in philosophy at Emory University. He has lectured widely in key institutions in North America and Europe including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and was recently a fellow of the Center for Ethics at the University of Toronto. His research draws on Islamic and German philosophy focusing on metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of mind and social and political philosophy. He has published articles in the European Journal of Political Theory, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, Theology and Science and Journal of Islamic Philosophy, in addition to book chapters published by Oxford, One World and The Atlantic Council. He is currently finalizing two monographs titled Being and Representation: Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Modal Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind and Rethinking Al-Kindī’s Philosophy: The Systematization of Early Islamic Modal Epistemology.

Research Interest

Areas of Specialization

Classical and post-classical Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology
Modern German philosophy and phenomenology (especially, Kant and Husserl)

Areas of Competence

Metaphysics and epistemology
Philosophy of mind
Gender and social and political philosophy

Education

PhD, Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2012
MA, Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2007
Bachelor of Arts, Summa Cum Laude, The American University in Cairo, Egypt, 2002; major in philosophy and economics

“The Epistemic Import of Modal Operators and the Critique of Naturalism: Towards a New Interpretation of al-Ghazālī’s Critique of Peripatetic Essentialism and Theory of Theodicy.”
“Al-Junayd’s Epistemic Definition of Monotheism (tawḥīd) and his Theory of Self-Consciousness.” Journal of Islamic Philosophy, Vol. 15:24 (2024), pp. 5–41.
“Reversing Schmitt: The Sovereign as a Rational Guardian and the Peculiarity of the Islamic State of Exception in al-Juwaynī’s Dialectical Theology.” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2020, pp. 489–511. Translated into Arabic and Turkish.
“Al-Kindī’s Theory of the Finitude of Time and His Critique of Aristotle’s Theory of the Eternity of the World in the Treatise on First Philosophy: The Role of the Perceiving Soul and the Relationship between Sensation and Intellection.” Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, 29:3 (2018), pp. 323–356.
“The Truncated Debate: Egyptian Liberals, Islamists and Ideological Statism,” co-authored with Danish Faruqi. In Egypt and Contradictions of Liberalism: Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy, Oxford: One World Publications, 2016, pp. 253–288.
“Political Realism in the Naturalistic-Psychological Roots of Averroës’ Critique of Plato’s Theory of Political Constitutions in the Republic.” In Matter and Form from Natural Science to Political Philosophy, ed. Ann Ward. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2009, pp. 71–84.
“Human Rights from an Islamic Perspective: A Response to the Crisis of Christian Humanism from Modernism through Post-Modernist.” In The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse. Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2018, pp. 15–20.

Ahmed El-Sayed Abdel Meguid

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