BIOGRAPHY
Hasan Spiker is a philosopher and comparative scholar of Islamic, Greek, and modern thought. He is the son of Anglo-American converts to Islam, members of a trailblazing group who in their 1970s communes initiated some of the first experiments in the revival of traditional structures of Islamic knowledge and Sufism within the desacralized context of the modern West. After growing up in a rich spiritual and intellectual home environment, Spiker spent twelve years studying the Islamic sciences in the Middle East, primarily under the tutelage of the Iraqi sage and theologian al-Sayyid Quṣayy Abū al-Siʿd. In the course of his studies, Spiker principally focused on interactions between the school of Ibn ʿArabī and late kalām theology, and also completed his memorization of the Qur’an.
Upon his return to the United Kingdom, Spiker entered the University of Cambridge, where for his MPhil he studied the works of Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, and Hegel, under the guidance of Professor Douglas Hedley, a renowned scholar of Platonism and German Idealism, and one of the key contemporary proponents of Platonism as a living tradition. For his thesis on the relationship between Platonic hierarchy and Enlightenment conceptions of individual self-determination, Spiker received a distinction and faculty prize from the University of Cambridge.
From 2014-2022 Spiker was a researcher on Tabah Foundation’s flagship ‘Classification of the Sciences’ project, widely lauded as one of the most significant contemporary attempts to renew the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of traditional Islamic philosophical thought. His main area of study in Islamic thought is the intersection of ʿilm al-kalām (Muslim theology), Avicennan philosophy, and ʿilm al-taḥqīq (experiential metaphysics), in Greek thought, the Neoplatonic critique of Aristotelian immanentism, and in modern thought, the philosophy of Kant, the metaphysics of freedom, and the possibility of metaphysics. He joined Zaytuna College as a lecturer in philosophy and logic in 2022.
EDUCATION
University of Cambridge, PhD Candidate, Philosophy.
University of Cambridge, MPhil, Philosophical Theology.
University of London, BA (Hons), Philosophy.
Traditional Islamic studies (2000-2001 and 2006-ongoing), primarily with al-Sayyid Quṣayy Abū al-Siʿd al-Rifāʿī al-Ḥusaynī (full-time, 2008-2016).
SELECTED WORKS
Things As They Are: Nafs al-Amr and the Metaphysical Foundations of Objective Truth. Abu Dhabi: Tabah Foundation, 2021.
The Metacritique of Kant and the Possibility of Metaphysics. Abu Dhabi: Tabah Foundation, 2022.
Hierarchy and Freedom: An examination of some classical metaphysical and post-Enlightenment accounts of human autonomy. Cambridge: New Andalus, 2022.