Seyed Muhammad Husein Muhammadi Demneh

• B7: Teaching Nature – Nature’s Teaching. Aesthetic Strategies of Knowledge Transmission in a Transcultural Perspective

The book Durrat al-ġawwāṣ is a natural encyclopedia from the 14^th century, written by the renowned scholar al-Ǧildakī, known for his work as an alchemist. The work heavily relies on literary and rhetorical structures that give it its distinctive character. In fact, the book Durrat al-ġawwāṣ is the result of an intertextual connection to alchemical texts from the Greek-Islamic tradition.
Specifically, this text aims to convey knowledge about nature, alchemy, and medicine to readers through the use of aesthetic means such as metaphors and literary forms. The goal of the research project is to elucidate al-Ǧildakī's aesthetic approaches, as well as his utilization of the encyclopedic form, literary structures, metaphors, and allegories in knowledge transmission. To achieve this, the dynamic relationship between autological and heterological dimensions, characteristic of aesthetic processes of knowledge transmission, will be reconstructed.