Falsafa (Islamic Philosophy)

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Falsafa — the Arabic borrowing of the Greek philosophia — names the tradition of philosophy written in Arabic from the ninth century onward, the work of thinkers who took the Greek inheritance as a living discipline rather than a closed antiquity. Its practitioners, the falasifa, held that the demonstrative reasoning of the Greeks and the truth delivered by revelation were ultimately one truth, reached by two roads.

The tradition rests on an act of translation. Under the early Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, a sustained movement rendered Greek science and philosophy into Arabic, often by way of Syriac — Aristotle above all, but also medical, astronomical, and mathematical works, and a body of Neoplatonic material whose origins were imperfectly understood. Two texts in particular shaped what the falasifa inherited: an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus that circulated under the title The Theology of Aristotle, and a compilation drawn from Proclus known as the Book of Causes. Both were taken for Aristotle’s own. The result was an Aristotle already fused with the Neoplatonic scheme in which all things flow from a single first principle — a misattribution with long consequences.

Four names mark the tradition’s spine. Al-Kindi, in ninth-century Baghdad, first argued that philosophy was compatible with Islam and worth pursuing. Al-Farabi built a full system, joining Aristotelian logic to a Neoplatonic cosmos of emanating intelligences and a Platonic theory of the ideal city. Avicenna — Ibn Sina — produced the tradition’s most ambitious synthesis, with its celebrated distinction between essence and existence and a proof of a Necessary Being from whom all else proceeds; his influence ran through later Islamic thought and into Latin scholasticism alike. Averroes — Ibn Rushd — wrote the commentaries on Aristotle that earned him, in the Latin schools, the title of “the Commentator.”

The tradition did not pass unchallenged. Al-Ghazali, himself trained in the philosophers’ methods, mounted in The Incoherence of the Philosophers a precise attack on points where their conclusions seemed to contradict revealed doctrine — the world’s eternity, God’s knowledge of particulars, bodily resurrection. Averroes answered with an Incoherence of the Incoherence. The exchange is often read as the moment philosophy lost its standing in the Sunni world, though scholarship now treats that verdict as too tidy: philosophical work continued, in new forms and within other disciplines, for centuries after.

The most visible afterlife was elsewhere. From the twelfth century, Latin translators in Spain and Sicily rendered Avicenna and Averroes into Latin, and through them a fuller Aristotle than the medieval West had possessed. The falasifa thus became interlocutors for Aquinas and the scholastics, and the Averroist reading of Aristotle a live and contested current in the universities. What had begun as Greek thought carried into Arabic returned, transformed, to shape the philosophy of Christian Europe.

→ In the library: Al-Ghazali — Confessions (Field, 1909) · Plotinos: Complete Works (Guthrie, 1918)

→ Related: Al Farabi · Neoplatonism · Emanation · The One · Arabic Hermetica · Nous