A twelfth-century Arabic philosophical fable shaped English empiricism and Robinson Crusoe

Evidence

This story about a foundling, reared by a gazelle on a desert island, who learns first to fend for himself and then to explore the way the universe works and ultimately to discover God, may possibly have had some influence on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Ibn Tufayl’s fantasy may also have had a role in shaping English empirical philosophy as it was developed by John Locke and others. Like Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is an enquiry into what sorts of things God has fitted humans to know. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 169

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s broader theme—orientalist scholarship transmitting ideas into the West; also a nice counter to the ‘self-contained West’ narrative.
• SEED: Essay angle: a counterfactual-adjacent genealogy showing an Arab fable hiding inside canonical English empiricism and fiction.