Every culture has its own “world of knowledge”, a way in which it conceives the

limits of human knowledge: what one knows, what one can know, and what one Otto Spies Memorial Series
cannot know. This study seeks to explore the Ottoman “world of knowledge” and its
historical development: the way the horizons of this mental universe were delineated
edd. Stephan Conermann & Gül Şen
in space and time; the way these horizons expanded (or contracted) over time;
the way this universe was seen as having limits, showing fields that could not (or
should not) be known and how these limits shifted to and fro in the continuum of
reality; and, finally, the way knowledge was organized, i.e. taxonomies of the fields
of science, demonstrating hierarchies of the world in relation to what was deemed
necessary, useful, or harmful to man. Volume 11

Marinos Sariyannis
THE AUTHOR

Marinos Sariyannis is Research Director at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/

Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas in Rethymno, Greece, where he works
since 2007. He studied at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Ph.D. 2005) The Horizons, Limits, Taxonomies
and taught at the Ionian University (Corfu) and the University of Crete (Rethymno).
His research interests include Ottoman social, cultural and intellectual history in the of Ottoman Knowledge
early modern period. He is the author of several books, including A History of Ottoman
Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill 2019) and Perceptions
ottomanes du surnaturel. Aspects de l’histoire intellectuelle d’une culture islamique à l’époque
moderne (Paris : Les éditions du Cerf 2019), and of more than forty papers and book
chapters. He is currently leading a five-year research project, “GHOST Geographies and
Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and
the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities”, under the European Research Council funding
scheme ERC-CoG 2017.

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