Ali Çaksu’s 2017 article “Ibn Khaldun and Philosophy: Causality in History,” published in the Journal of Historical Sociology , offers a compelling and nuanced examination of Ibn Khaldun’s engagement with philosophical traditions—particularly Aristotelian causality—and his innovative adaptation of these concepts within his philosophy of history. By focusing on the role of causation in Ibn Khaldun’s magnum opus, the Muqaddimah , Çaksu challenges reductive interpretations that label Ibn Khaldun a mere Aristotelian or a passive inheritor of Greek thought. Instead, the article presents him as an original and dynamic thinker who synthesized philosophical, theological, and empirical insights to construct a historically grounded science of civilization ( ‘ilm al-‘umrān ). Çaksu’s central thesis is that while Ibn Khaldun was deeply informed by the Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), he significantly transformed this framework to suit the contingen...
...in his own words and in the words of others who read his works
