Sophia Vasalou studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and then completed her PhD at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her thesis, which is on medieval Islamic theology, is titled ‘Moral Agents and their Deserts: the Character of Mu’tazilite Ethics’ (2006). After having been a Junior Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, where her recent work centred on a project on Schopenhauer’s philosophy and a related interdisciplinary project on the idea of wonder, Sophia joined ECLA in January 2009.

Classes taught at ECLA:

PY Reading Group:

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Electives:

Ethics in Islam: Islamic law
Engaging Schopenhauer

Publications:

"Their intention was shown in their bodily movements”: the Basran Mu'tazilites on the institution of language’, Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming 2009)

‘“The mind as an object of God’s knowledge”: another Cartesian temptation?’, Philosophical Investigations, 32 (2009)

Moral Agents and their Deserts: The Character of Mu‛tazilite Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)

‘Personal identity as a task’, Inquiry, 51 (2008)

‘Subject and body in Basran Mu‛tazilism, or: Mu‛tazilite kalām and the fear of triviality’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 17 (2007)

‘The expression of wonderment’, Philosophical Investigations, 30 (2007)

‘I‛jāz’, in K. Versteegh et al., ed., Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2006), vol. 2

‘Equal before the Law: the evilness of human and divine lies; ‘Abd al-Ğabbār’s rational ethics’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 13 (2003)

‘The miraculous eloquence of the Qur’ān: general trajectories and individual approaches’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 4 (2002)