The question of ethics as viewed by Mohamed Arkoun

Abstract

The question of ethics is among the most important questions that occupied many philosophers and thinkers both in ancient and modern times, and despite its importance, it did not receive research and attention in our Arab culture, especially in the Renaissance era, and despite the emergence of several Renaissance intellectual projects, ethical studies witnessed a decline in the level of discussion and analysis compared to what was written about it in the Arab and Islamic heritage. We find that most of those who wrote on the topic of ethics in the Arab Renaissance were not writers characterized by the foundation of the project as much as their ethics remained related to behavior and separate from thinking as they lacked the philosophical background.
In order to crystallize universal values that apply to everyone and not values confined to local and limited cultures. Arkoun relies on the historical and philosophical approach to the study of the moral issue in Islam and in this, he sees that classical Islamic thought was more serious than contemporary Islamic thought in dealing with the moral issue, therefore his goal was a rigorous and critical review of all cultural and moral heritage, whether Islamic or Western modernist.