Al-Farabi

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Al-Farabi (Abu Nasr al-Farabi, c. 872–950; Latin Alpharabius) was a philosopher of the eastern Islamic world whose synthesis of Greek thought set the agenda for philosophy in Arabic for centuries after him. Later tradition called him the Second Teacher — the first being Aristotle — and the title fixes his reputation precisely: the man who, more than anyone before Avicenna, made the inherited Greek corpus into a working system in a new language and a new faith.

The biographical record is thin and partly legendary. He is reported to have come from Farab in Transoxiana, to have worked in Baghdad among the Christian scholars who were then translating Aristotle into Arabic, and to have died in Damascus. Around that sparse frame later writers hung anecdotes — that he mastered many languages, that he played and theorised music, that he lived with monastic simplicity — which scholarship treats as portrait rather than fact. What survives securely is the work: commentaries and paraphrases of Aristotle’s logic, treatises on the harmony of Plato and Aristotle, and books on the ordering of the sciences, the intellect, and the ideal community.

His metaphysics is Neoplatonism rebuilt on an Aristotelian foundation. From the First, the necessary being beyond multiplicity, there proceeds a descending series of separate intellects, each turning the sphere assigned to it, down to the tenth — the Active Intellect, which governs the sublunar world and illuminates the human mind, enabling it to think. Knowledge, on this account, is the soul’s ascent toward that intellect; the philosopher who completes the climb attains a felicity that is the true end of human life. Al-Farabi held that the prophet reaches the same truths the philosopher reaches by demonstration, but receives them through a perfected imagination, in images the multitude can grasp — a reading that placed revelation and reason on one continuous ladder, and that later thinkers would find either illuminating or dangerous.

That continuity carried into his politics. In The Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City, he transposed Plato’s Republic into an emanationist key: the well-ordered city mirrors the well-ordered cosmos, and is ruled best by a philosopher-prophet who unites theoretical wisdom with the craft of legislation. The work catalogues the defective cities as carefully as the virtuous one, and its quiet implication — that a community’s health depends on the soundness of the knowledge at its head — gave the falsafa tradition a political theory to match its cosmology.

His influence ran in two directions. Avicenna built on his account of the intellects and his distinction between essence and existence; Maimonides praised his logic above all others; and through Latin translation he reached the medieval West as Alpharabius. The harmonising ambition that defined him — Plato with Aristotle, Greek philosophy with Islamic revelation, the cosmos with the city — is also what made him a target, and al-Ghazali’s later attack on the philosophers was in part an attack on the system Al-Farabi had done most to assemble.

→ Related: Arabic Falsafa Islamic Philosophy · Neoplatonism · Emanation · Nous · The One