C.F. Murtha (Colin) MA

Colin Fitzpatrick Murtha started studying the Arabic language in Egypt, where he also began his studies in philosophy, earning his bachelor's degree in philosophy from the American University in Cairo. He also studied Classical Arabic in Amman, Jordan so as to gain expertise in reading Arabic philosophical manuscripts composed during the medieval period. He received his master's degree from Freie Universität Berlin in "Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World" before pursuing his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Andreas Lammer, first at Universität Trier and is continuing his research currently at Radboud.


His primary research interests are concerned with philosophical texts written in Arabic during the medieval period, of which many are extant to us only in manuscript form. His aim generally is to make significant philosophical works available to a wider audience through translation and to make them more clearly intelligible through the publication of studies on texts from this period. One such undertaking is the translation of Avicenna's fifth natural science, the "meteorology" of his monumental philosophical summae, the Cure, a project which he is carrying out with Dr. Andreas Lammer. In this science, Avicenna details his theories of the natural world, everything that occurs naturally from the center of the earth to the moon, like comets and clouds, minerals and mountains, rivers and rainbows. Murtha's dissertation [expected 2024] is a study of this work and Avicenna's other meteorological writings, which he contextualizes by accounting for the early reception of Aristotle's Meteorologica in the Islamic world before and into Avicenna's lifetime, and how Avicenna "reformed" the science of meteorology.