Most scholars assume that the Islamic concept of created human nature (fiṭra) indicates the natural religiosity of all human beings as created by God, and that, therefore, provides the basis for a kind of equality among humans – whether religious in nature or about gender and sexuality. While this is one interpretation of fiṭra, primarily found among scriptural commentators and theologians, this book highlights a far more diverse and contested tradition of interpretation and use of this concept. To demonstrate fiṭra’s rich use as a hierarchical, political, and ethical concept, the author introduces different philosophical engagements with the concept by al-Fārābī (d. 339/950); Ibn Bājja (d. 533/1139) and Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 581/1185); and Ibn Rushd (d. 595/1198). In the Introduction, she sheds light not only on the contemporary literature on created human nature and its roots in the scriptural sources but above all the importance of approaches to Islamic ethics that highlight the richness of the Islamic intellectual tradition and the complexity of its fundamental ethical concepts.

Peter Zachar argues that one of the challenges to accurate empathic understanding that Campbell identifies, that these imaginative reconstructions might be fictional just-so stories, is not resolved by one of his proposed solutions – adopting R. G. Collingwood’s critical approach to writing history by reconstructing the thoughts and motivations of important historical figures. In contrast to the notion of reconstructing another’s internal thought processes, Zachar claims that most of the information we use to understand others is based on third-person information, which is largely how psychotherapists are taught to understand others. He compares this process to Karl Popper’s notion of critical rationalism.

Roman monetary history, like all history, is history of mind. Purposeful action, as a product of the human mind, creates history. Economic models, methods and agendas, therefore, which ignore or assume away the mind are of only limited use for historians. Historians, however, can use the tools and concepts in this book to clarify and redeem some economic theories and concepts in order to better understand the societies they study.

Roman historians are typically trained under the aegis of Classics or Classical Studies; hence, they find comfort in the world of sources – a preference manifest in a broadly empiricist outlook and an affinity for methods of induction. There are, as this chapter argues, good reasons to question the reliability of traditional empirical approaches to historical questions. Equally, however, the deductive use of formal economic theory has its own drawbacks. Emergent neoclassical and new institutional studies have produced new questions and new insights, but Roman historians’ use of economic theory has also promulgated new anachronisms and perhaps even ‘economics imperialism’. Is Roman economic history doomed to be forever caught in methodological tug-of-wars over the use of economic theory? This chapter suggests that a way forward may be found in the sociological tradition of methodological dualism – a framework which unequivocally draws upon economic theory as a tool of ‘understanding’ rather than of testing or predicting. Methodological dualism is a foundational framework for rethinking the use of economic theory for understanding Roman monetary history.