Falsafa
A philosophy of translators turned founders: thinking with in the language of the Qur'an, without sacrificing either.
c. 830 – c. 1198 · living tradition
(the Arabic transcription of the Greek philosophia) refers to philosophy in the Greek tradition as practised in the lands of Islam. Born of the great translation movement sponsored in Baghdad by the Abbasid caliphs and their courts, which tradition associates with the "House of Wisdom", it opens with , is systematized by , the "second teacher" after , culminates in and finds its last great Western representative in , commentator on Aristotle in Córdoba. These thinkers do not form a uniform doctrine: al-Fārābī thinks above all about the city and prophecy, Avicenna builds a metaphysics of being that breaks free of Aristotle, Averroes returns to the Aristotelian text and to the interpretation of religious Law. Falsafa inherited an Aristotle read through the , weathered the critique of the theologians and, translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, transformed . The period recorded here ends with Averroes, who closes the Andalusian line; in the East, was renewed again by Suhrawardī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and Mullā Ṣadrā, in the Persian tradition of ḥikma (wisdom), still taught today.
Truth does not contradict truth: where Revelation seems to belie demonstration, it is the text that must be interpreted.
Existing is not contained in what a thing is: there must therefore be a being whose essence is to exist, the .
Man fulfils his nature by thinking: supreme happiness is the conjunction of the human intellect with the .
Justification
For the , in formulations that vary from al-Fārābī to Averroes, man's ultimate happiness is intellectual: the perfection of the human intellect as it conjoins with the . The latter is a separate intelligence that brings our thinking from potentiality to act, as light makes colours visible. Philosophy is not one way of life among others but the completion of human nature, of which moral virtue is the precondition.
al-Fārābī, The Attainment of Happiness · Ibn Bājja, The Governance of the Solitary
Justification
transposes 's republic into the Islamic city: the is governed by a ruler who unites philosopher and prophet, able to grasp the truth through the intellect and to translate it into symbols for all. also wrote a commentary on the Republic, a sign that the ideal of government by knowledge is shared across the school.
al-Fārābī, The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City · Averroes, Commentary on Plato's Republic
Justification
Already for , religion expresses in symbols what philosophy establishes in concepts; turns this into an explicit legal and hermeneutical doctrine. Revelation and demonstration state one and the same truth to different audiences: the multitude is persuaded by images and rhetoric, the philosopher convinced by (, reasoning from certain premises). When a verse seems to contradict a demonstrated conclusion, it is the text that must receive a figurative interpretation, not reason that must yield. The "double truth" later ascribed to the Latin Averroists distorts this thesis, which on the contrary asserts the unity of truth.
Averroes, The Decisive Treatise · al-Fārābī, Book of Religion
Justification
grounds God's existence in the analysis of being alone, without starting from motion as Aristotle had. A thing is when nothing in its nature requires it to exist: if it exists, a cause makes it exist. Even the totality of possible beings, taken as a whole, still depends on a cause that cannot itself be merely possible; there must therefore be a being , the (), whose essence is to exist. Together with the , this argument passed to and the whole of Latin metaphysics. would object that, in a world assumed to be eternal, the philosophers can establish neither a true Creator nor his oneness.
Avicenna, The Book of Healing, Metaphysics, I.5-7 and VIII.1-3 · Avicenna, Remarks and Admonitions
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
↓ Influence exerted
- challenged byal-GhazālīAl-Ghazālī refutes twenty theses of the falsafa philosophers, notably the eternity of the world and the necessity of the causal link, and declares three of them incompatible with Islam: the eternity of the world, divi…Read
- continued byMaimonidesMaimonides thinks within the framework of falsafa: he recommends al-Fārābī above every other author and takes up his conception of the prophet as a philosopher endowed with a perfect imagination.Read