Sharjah International Foundation for the History of Arab and Muslim Sciences

Scholarly accounts of the reception of Greco-Roman philosophy in Islamic thought and, subsequently, in Medieval Europe have traditionally relied on the notion of knowledge transfer to describe the movement of philosophical and scientific ideas across cultures. According to this model, ancient knowledge is often portrayed as having travelled from Greece to the Islamic East and later returned to the Christian West through processes of translation and mediation. While this framework has proven useful for pedagogical purposes, it arguably rests on the problematic assumption of a sharp cultural rupture between East and West.

My paper proposes a reconsideration of this model by introducing the concept of knowledge migration. Rather than emphasizing opposition, discontinuity, or clearly bounded cultural spheres, the notion of migration foregrounds cultural continuity within a broadly shared intellectual space extending from antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods. From this perspective, Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Christian intellectual traditions participate in a common philosophical discourse, within which knowledge does not simply move between cultures but migrates, adapts, and is rearticulated across changing linguistic, religious, and institutional contexts.

Ancient cosmology and its reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance provides a particularly interesting case study for this conceptual shift. Cosmological models, far from being mechanically transmitted, were continuously reshaped as they migrated through successive intellectual environments. By reframing East–West exchanges in terms of knowledge migration rather than knowledge transfer, this paper aims to highlight the fluidity, resilience, and interconnectedness of ancient cosmological thought across time and traditions.