Falsafa

The claim

Philosophy and revelation reach the same truths by different routes. Demonstration is the route for those capable of it; scripture uses images and stories for everyone else, and the two cannot conflict.

What it held

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries almost the entire Greek philosophical and scientific corpus was translated into Arabic, and falsafa is what was built with it. It is not commentary. Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina produced systems that go substantially beyond their sources.

Al-Farabi, called the Second Teacher after Aristotle, worked out a political philosophy in which the prophet and the philosopher are the same office described twice — the prophet being one whose imagination can translate demonstrated truth into images a city can act on. It is a theory of religion that neither dismisses nor simply accepts it.

Ibn Sina's contribution is the distinction between essence and existence, and the proof of the Necessary Existent that follows from it: everything whose essence does not include existence must be caused, and the chain must terminate in something whose essence is to exist. That argument travelled to Aquinas, to Duns Scotus and into every subsequent theistic metaphysics.

The flying-man thought experiment is also his: a person created suspended in void, without sensation, would still affirm his own existence — six centuries before Descartes.

How it argued

Demonstration in the Aristotelian sense, applied to metaphysics, and a Neoplatonic emanation scheme in which ten intellects descend from the first cause.

What it was arguing against

The theologians, on whether kalam is a genuine science; and eventually the target of al-Ghazali's attack, which the tradition never entirely answered in Arabic.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the world is eternal, which the falasifa affirmed and revelation appeared to deny. Whether God knows particulars or only universals — Ibn Sina's position here is what al-Ghazali found most damaging.

Common misconceptions

That the Arabic philosophers merely preserved Greek texts for Europe. Ibn Sina's metaphysics is original enough that Latin scholastics debated him as a contemporary, and the essence-existence distinction has no Greek source.

How it began

The translation movement under the Abbasid caliphs, funded on a scale that has few parallels — Greek manuscripts sought out, and translators paid in gold.

What became of it

Declined in the Arabic-speaking west after al-Ghazali and Averroes, and continued transformed in Persia as Illuminationism and later Transcendent Theosophy.

Lasting influence

Latin scholasticism reads Avicenna and Averroes constantly. The distinction between essence and existence is the hinge of Aquinas' metaphysics. Much of what Europe knew of Aristotle for two centuries came with Arabic commentary attached.

Why it still matters

The problem it took as central — whether a religion and a demonstrative science can both be true of the same subject — is not a medieval problem.

Put another way

A library translated into a new language and then argued with rather than shelved.

Where to start

Al-Farabi's Virtuous City. Shorter than Ibn Sina, and the argument about religion is startling.

The surprising bit

Ibn Sina wrote that he read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it, then bought a commentary by al-Farabi from a bookseller for three dirhams and understood it immediately.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism), Neoplatonism

Opposed by

Ash’arism

Influenced

Avicennism, Averroism, Illuminationism (Ishraqism), Jewish Aristotelianism, Thomism

The verdict

The most productive encounter between Greek philosophy and a monotheistic religion, and the one whose results Europe inherited without always noticing.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy