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Nasir ad-Din Tusi on social cooperation and the division of labor: Fragment from The Nasirean Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

GUANG-ZHEN SUN
GUANG-ZHEN SUN*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
*
*Email: guang-zhen.sun@buseco.monash.edu.au
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Extract

Nasir ad-Din Tusi's (born 1201 in Tus in northeastern Persia; died 1274 in Baghdad), has been far more influential for his various contributions to astronomy and mathematics, including founding the Maraghah observatory (in Iranian Azerbaijan) and his brilliant reformulations of the Ptolemaic planetary model, which served as an important inspiration for Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) revolutionary work than for anything else. Nonetheless, he also stands as one major figure in the medieval Islamic philosophical ethics and a profound thinker on socio-economic matters, as is attested by his masterpiece Akhlāq-i Nāsirī (The Nasirean Ethics – titled after his first name), from which the following Fragment is taken. He may be deservingly credited as an important pioneer of the science of political economy.

Type
Fragment
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , December 2008 , pp. 403 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © The JOIE Foundation 2008

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