Medieval Islamic Philosophy

Classification

Period

c. 800-1400 CE

Regions

Middle East (origin), Europe, Africa

Domains

Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion

Overview

Medieval Islamic philosophy spanned several distinct currents; falsafa is not the whole of it. Falsafa was the creative engagement of Muslim thinkers with the Greek philosophical inheritance. It developed alongside, and often in tension with, kalām — the tradition of rational Islamic theology — as well as later Illuminationist and Sufi currents. Avicenna built influential theories of essence and existence, Al-Ghazali challenged the philosophers from within kalām, and Averroes defended philosophy's autonomy — debates that profoundly shaped both the Islamic world and the Latin West.

Key figures

Al-Kindi · Al-Farabi · Ibn Sina (Avicenna) · Al-Ghazali · Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

Methods used

• Syllogistic Analysis · Open in Methods
• Textual Exegesis · Open in Methods

Positions held

• Theism

  Question scope: The Existence of God

Influenced by

• Peripatetic School

  Once the whole of Aristotle's corpus had been translated into Arabic, al-Farabi and Avicenna read it as one system of demonstrative science crowned by the Metaphysics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias's treatises shaped their cosmology and their account of the intellect.

• Neoplatonism

  Arabic versions of Plotinus and Proclus, circulating under Aristotle's name as the Theology of Aristotle and the Book on the Pure Good, gave falsafa the hierarchy of One, Intellect, and Soul, and al-Farabi built on it his account of the world arising from the First by necessary, eternal emanation.

Later connections

• Averroism Influenced by this tradition

  Siger of Brabant and other Paris arts masters read Aristotle with Ibn Rushd's commentaries, in Latin from about 1230, and took from them his thesis that there is one intellect for all human beings; Siger also took his view that human happiness lies in conjunction with the active intellect.

• Medieval Jewish Philosophy Influenced by this tradition
• Scholasticism Influenced by this tradition

  From about 1230 Latin masters read Aristotle through Averroes's commentaries, which became the principal secondary literature of the universities once the Paris arts faculty made all of Aristotle's known works required reading in 1255.

• Sufism Influenced by this tradition

  The engagement is that of the later Sufis, Ibn Arabi above all, who cast his teaching in the philosophers' technical vocabulary — wujud for being, and the distinction between what exists necessarily and what exists only possibly — turning those terms to mystical ends.

References

• Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd [Averroes], §1.1 (Ibn Rushd found himself in the ruling circles of Marrakesh and became chief physician to the Almohad caliph there)
• Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2016) (Fatimid and Ayyubid Cairo as a principal centre of philosophical activity alongside Baghdad, Cordoba, and Marrakesh)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, §§1–2 — Formation: the early Abbasid translation movement and al-Kindi's ninth-century circle in Baghdad.
• Ibn Sina, The Metaphysics of The Healing, Book I, chs. 6–7 (the Necessary Existent, from whom everything possible receives its existence)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, §4 (the complete Aristotelian corpus understood as a systematic whole based on demonstrative science and crowned by the Metaphysics, apparent in al-Farabi and Avicenna, and Alexander's treatises shaping their cosmology and noetics)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, §3 (the Arabic Plotinus and Proclus, and the extraordinary impact of the Theology of Aristotle's Plotinian doctrines of the One, the intelligible world, and the soul) and §4 (al-Farabi's First, from which emanation necessarily and eternally gives rise to the world)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ibn Rushd [Averroes] (the short, middle and long commentaries on Aristotle as his principal philosophical form)
• The Book of Healing — Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
• The Incoherence of the Philosophers — Al-Ghazali
• The Decisive Treatise — Ibn Rushd (Averroes)