Arabic philosophy the philosophy produced in Arabic by philosophers of various ethnic and religious backgrounds who lived in societies in which Islamic civilization was dominant and who identified with its cultural values. (The appellation ‘Islamic philosophy’ is misleading, for it suggests a specific religious content that was not necessarily there – just as medieval Latin philosophy is not ‘Christian’ philosophy.) In the historical evolution of Western philosophy it is the heir to post-Plotinian late Greek philosophy and the immediate precursor of later medieval philosophy, which it heavily influenced and to which it exhibits a parallel but independent development after Avicenna well into the twentieth century. The philosophical curriculum of higher education that had spread among the Hellenized peoples of Egypt, the Middle East, and Iran in the sixth century followed the classification of the sciences current in Alexandria, a classification that had developed from that of Aristotle’s works. Aristotle’s Organon, including the Rhetoric and Poetics, and prefaced by Porphyry’s Isagoge, constituted the canonical nine books on logic, the instrument of philosophy. Philosophy proper was then divided into theoretical and practical: theoretical philosophy was further subdivided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; and practical into ethics, economics (household management), and politics. Carriers of this higher education were primarily the Eastern churches and monastic centers in the Fertile Crescent. With the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the eventual spread of Arabic as the language of learning, the entire curriculum was translated upon demand into Arabic by Syriacspeaking Christians in the eighth through the tenth centuries. The demand from Arab intellectuals, who by the time of the translations had developed a significant scholarly tradition of their own and actively commissioned the translations. The entire corpus of Aristotle’s writings, together with the complete range of commentaries from Alexander of Aphrodisias onward, constituted in Arabic the standard textbooks in logic, physics (including meteorology, the theory of the soul, and zoology), metaphysics, and ethics. Metaphysics was also studied as a rule in conjunction with or in the light of the pseudo- Aristotelian Theologia Aristotelis (selections from Plotinus’s Enneads, Books 4–6) and the Liber de causis, along with other selections from Proclus’s Elements of Theology. Mathematics included geometry (Euclid’s Elements), astronomy (Ptolemy’s Almagest), arithmetic (Nicomachus’s Introduction), and music (Ptolemy’s Harmonics). Economics was based almost exclusively on the neo-Pythagorean Bryson’s Oikonomikos, while politics mainly drew on Plato’s Republic and the Laws and especially on the pseudepigraphic correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander (Aristotle’s Politics was known in Arabic in fragmentary form). In medicine, which was considered an applied science and as such remained outside this classification, Galen’s entire works were translated. His abridgments of Plato and his Stoicizing logic formed the basic source of knowledge on these subjects in Arabic.
The early history of Arabic philosophy presents two independent lines of development. One is associated with the first philosopher and Arab polymath al-Kindi (d.873) and his followers, notably as-Sarakhsi (d.889), Abu-Zayd al- Balkhi (d.934), and al-‘Amiri (d.992). These philosophers, who appear to stand closer to the Neoplatonism of Athens than to the neo-Aristotelianism of Alexandria, sought in their works to present the various parts of philosophy to an Arab audience, integrate them into Islamic intellectual life, and solve the philosophical problems that arose in the process. The famous physician Rhazes (Abu-Bakr ar-Razi, d.925) may be tenuously related to this line, although he appears to be mostly an autodidact and his philosophy was decidedly more eclectic, leaving no following. The second is that of the Aristotelians of Baghdad, founded by the Nestorian scholar and translator Matta Ibn Yanus (d.940). His Aristotelianism can be traced directly to the Alexandrian commentators and reaches beyond them to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius. His students, al-Farabi (d.950) and Yahya Ibn ‘Adi (d.974), and the wide circle of disciples of the latter, prominent among whom are Abu-Sulayman as-Sijistani (d.c.985), ‘Isa Ibn-Zur’a (d.1008), Al- Hasan Ibn-Suwar (d.c.1030), and Abu-l-Faraj Ibn at-Tayyib (d.1043), engaged in rigorous textual analysis and philosophical interpretation of Aristotle’s works and composed independent monographs on all branches of philosophy. The Aristotelian line of Baghdad, and especially the work of al-Farabi, was transmitted to Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) toward the end of the tenth century and formed the basis of the philosophical tradition there, whose major exponents were Ibn Bajja (Avempace, d.1139), Ibn Tufayl (d.1186), Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d.1198), and Maimonides (Ibn Maymun, d.1204). This tradition came to an end with the reconquista of all Islamic Spain except Granada about two decades after the death of Ibn Tumlas (d.1223), the last major Andalusian philosopher. These two lines eventually merge in the work of Avicenna, who set himself the task of synthesizing, in the light of concerns valid in his time, the divergent tendencies of Aristotelian philosophy as it had developed throughout the ages. The Alexandrian schema of the classification of the sciences, which was adopted by Arabic philosophy, implicitly also presented, by means of the connections it established among the various subjects, a blueprint of a work that would encompass all philosophy. Philosophers prior to Avicenna, both the Greeks after Plotinus and the Arabs, failed to note its potential as an outline for a comprehensive work on all philosophy, and had worked on different parts of it. Avicenna was the first to perceive this and to create in his various writings an internally consistent system having mutually interdependent parts and based on the syllogistic logic of Aristotle. His philosophical summae thus mark the end of ancient and the beginning of Scholastic philosophy. In these works Avicenna paid relatively little attention to certain parts of philosophy, in particular the mathematical part of theoretical, and virtually the entirety of practical, philosophy. As a result, Arabic philosophy after him concentrated on three major fields – logic, physics, and metaphysics – which became the norm. Practical philosophy developed along different lines, to a large extent divorced from mainstream philosophy. The highly influential work by Miskawayh (d.1030) on ethics provided a model that was followed by later treatises, which constituted a separate genre of philosophical writings. As for mathematics, its different parts were pursued largely independently of the rest of philosophy.
After Avicenna, Arabic philosophy was dominated by his thought and developed along the lines of the reconstructed Peripateticism he established. In the first place, his powerful integrative systematization of philosophy elicited a reaction by certain philosophers toward a more pristine Aristotelianism, notably by Averroes, ‘Abd-al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d.1231), and the eighteenth-century Ottoman scholar Yanyali Esat (As’ad of Yanya, d.1730), who even executed new Arabic translations from the Greek of some of Aristotle’s physical works. Secondly, it generated among his followers, notable among whom are Nafir-ad-Din at-Tusi (d.1274) and Qutb-ad-Din ar-Razi (d.1364), a long series of philosophically fecund commentaries and supercommentaries. Thirdly, it forced most theological writing to adopt logic as its method, and philosophical, rather than theological, analysis as the means of argumentation, a procedure established by al-Ghazali (d.1111) and consolidated by Fakhr-ad-Din ar-Razi (d.1209). And fourthly, it formed the basis for the further development of his metaphysics (in particular the concepts of essence and existence and the schema of emanation) through the incorporation of the illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardi of Aleppo (d.1193) and the mystical theories of Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240) in the works of Shiite philosophers active since Safavid times (sixteenth century). This movement, initiated by Mir Damad (d.1632) and developed by his pupil Mulla Fadra (d.1640), has continued after the latter’s death among Iranian philosophers writing partly also in Persian.
The colonization of the Arab world by Western powers since the nineteenth century has resulted in the spread of modern European, and especially French, philosophy among Arab intellectuals. Modern Arab philosophical thought is now developing along these lines while at the same time efforts are being made to relate it to traditional Arabic philosophy.
See also AL-FAARAABII, AL -GHAZA ALi, AL -KINDII, ARISTOTLE , AVERROES , AVICENNA , ISLAMIC NEOPLATONIS. D.Gu.