Islamic Philosophies

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870–950) likely worked for the greater part of his eighty-year lifespan in Baghdad, where he was a student of logic with the Christian Yuhanna ibn Haylan and taught the Christian Yahya ibn 'Adi, who came to be a leading philosophical figure in Baghdad. Al-Farabi was thoroughly engaged in the great project of the establishment of a new Alexandrian Aristotelianism in the Arabic philosophical context. His apparently enormous literary output, of which only a modest portion survives, includes sophisticated paraphrases and commentaries on Aristotle's logical works as well as lost commentaries on Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption and Nicomachean Ethics, innovative emanationist accounts of principles governing the universe and human societies (The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City and The Political Regime or the Principles of Beings), a set of works on Plato and Aristotle (The Attainment of Happiness, The Philosophy of Plato, The Philosophy of Aristotle, The Harmony of Plato and Aristotle), complex works on the nature of metaphysics, logic, and language (On One and Unity, The Book of Letters, and The Purposes of Metaphysics), and more.

Al-Farabi worked to build a coherent understanding of philosophy as a systematic discipline founded on Platonic insights and Aristotelian principles. At the foundation of this was his apparent correction of the view of al-Kindi and his group that the end of philosophy and religion is the same, namely the knowledge of divine unity and truth. In his Intentions of Aristotle's Metaphysics, al-Farabi argues for metaphysics to be understood not as a special science dealing primarily with God, as in al-Kindi, but as a general science dealing with the principles of being. On this understanding the study of God and higher causes (special metaphysics) is understood as encompassed within general metaphysics, which deals with all being and unity. Since metaphysics deals with the more universal causes of beings of the material world, al-Farabi does not neglect special metaphysics but rather sets out to explain that causality by way of an account of emanation following Ptolemaic astronomy in The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City and The Political Regime or the Principles of Beings. From the noetic activity of the First Cause, which in Aristotelian fashion is self-thinking thought, another emanates and from this there emanate both another intellect and the outermost celestial sphere, a process that continues giving rise to intellects and planetary spheres terminating with the final and lowest intellect, the agent intellect (al-'aql al-fa"al), which oversees the sublunar realm, the matter for which comes from the celestial spheres. This last intellect in the emanative hierarchy al-Farabi identifies with the agent intellect that Aristotle posited in De Anima 3.5 to account for the understanding of intelligible universals in contrast with sensation and imagination, which apprehend only particulars. In his Treatise on the Intellect based on his study of Alexander of Aphrodisias rather than the De Anima directly (Geoffroy 2002), he explains that human happiness lies in the transcendence of the body and some degree of immaterial noetic identity with the agent intellect. The separate agent intellect enables abstraction and brings the potential intellect to act with intelligibles in actuality existing in individual minds. When the acquired intellect has been perfected by the understanding of universal principles, the philosopher no longer requires the body and is able to associate with the separate agent intellect. Although this doctrine of intellectual perfection plays an important role in al-Farabi's teachings, Averroës, Ibn Bajjah, and others report that he abandoned this view that a generated human knower could become immortal and eternal in his lost Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics as an old wives' tale.

Al-Farabi's account of intellect and the knowledge of universal principles provides the noetic account essential for his understanding of human beings and society. Just as with Plato, who singled out the philosopher-king to rule because of his highest, most perfect knowledge in the ideal city-state of the Republic, so too according to al-Farabi the rightful place of rule belongs to the philosopher-king, who has exact scientific knowledge through philosophical demonstration and proof, not the mere dialectical accounts of poetry and rhetoric. While these are understood to be included in the Organon with Aristotle's logical works, they aim only at persuasion by the prompting of images in the hearer and not at the rigorous truth of demonstration. Ideally the images of religion conveyed by a prophet and taught by an imam work to prompt those receiving them into action in accord with the end of human beings, which is happiness in perfection of intellect. Yet few are intellectually capable of this, so rhetoric, poetry, dialectic—all of which are contained in religion and revelation—provide a way for the truth (which is known to the philosopher directly but to the others in the emotive movement of the soul's imagination) to be shared with the community. This allows for the prophet-imam-philosopher to guide the community toward its perfection, which is the perfection of individual human beings to the point that they ascend to the level of the agent intellect. In accord with this, al-Farabi says at the beginning of his Book of Religion, "religion is opinions and actions, determined and restricted with stipulations and prescribed for a community by their first ruler, who seeks to obtain through their practicing it a specific purpose with respect to them or by means of them" (al-Farabi, 2001, p. 93). Thus rather than being one with philosophical metaphysics as al-Kindi had it, religion is concerned with particular human responses to the general end of human intellectual perfection. For al-Farabi, metaphysics and philosophical theology concern the intellectual study of the essential matters of being, unity, and its causes, while religion is concerned with particular and varying ways for the establishment of the conditions for highest human intellectual fulfillment on the part of select individuals.

This was a period of great intellectual diversity and creativity at Baghdad and elsewhere. The renowned physician Muhammad Ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (d. 925) wrote a wide range of works in philosophy, theology, cosmology, medicine, and more; he gave an account of creation as the fall of soul infused with knowledge by God and permitted to fulfill its yearning to be in matter, space, and time. It is likely that at about this time at Basra the Brethren of Purity (Ikhawan al-Safa) crafted and assembled much of their collection of treatises drawing upon Aristotle and the Arabic Plotinus to weave a view of philosophy as an essential part of the religious goal of the saving of the soul. But much of the work of this era was dwarfed and nearly forgotten in the shadow of Islam's most influential philosopher, Avicenna.