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Our course book is based on the idea of falsafa, which was the expression used by intellectuals of the medieval Near East to describe “philosophy”. Falsafa is the word used to refer to the primary description of a burgeoning intellectual movement in the Islamic world circa 800 C.E. Its primary impetus was from Greek philosophy and science, and in this way falsafa is the continuation and refinement of the Hellenic tradition. The other influences on falsafa originated from the indigenous religion of Islam, but still falsafa remained, for the most part, an independent intellectual endeavor.
With the emergence of falsafa in the medieval Near East came the great “Arabic translation movement” which must be considered one of mankind’s supreme achievements. The scale and magnitude of this enterprise was incredible. Among the first translated works of falsafa were those on Aristotelian logic, natural science, medicine, and metaphysics. It appears that the great translation movement might have originated from the need to engage Christian intellectuals in debate.
There were three distinct eras of translation. The first period was one of literal translation with many words just transliterated from the Greek; the second period, under the auspices of the caliphate of al-Mamun, was the high point of the translation movement; the third period saw revisions and school editions by the Baghdad Peripatetics appear. Thus, in a relatively short period of time, Arabic speaking peoples translated practically the entire Greek corpus, which included virtually all of Aristotle, the Laws and Republic of Plato, work of the Neo-Platonists, as well as works by Galen and Ptolemy.
In order to fully appreciate the intellectual world of the medieval Near East and their intellectual advancements, one must come to understand the thought of Aristotle and later developments that occurred in Greek philosophy and science. These thinkers are essential material to understand since these Eastern thinkers used an Aristotelian blueprint to form their own systems of natural philosophy and logic.
Logic itself was considered a tool whereby one could do science and philosophy. This way the individual would be correctly directed to the truth and would avoid fallacious reasoning. These tools, i.e. objects of logical reasoning, were the predicables: genera, species, differences, properties, and accidents. By using these predicables, the individual would develop their propositions. As a result, science and philosophy could develop concrete scientific statements.
To Aristotle, the category of substance was considered the primary category, and all other categories are mere “accidents”. Everything is dependent upon the existence of these primary substances. For instance, the fact that Socrates is snub-nosed is an accident, but Socrates himself is of substance. Furthermore, these categories provided Aristotle’s ontology of the world. For Aristotle and his followers, to exist as a substance is the primary way of existing. The other categories only indicated a qualified existence of a substance.
Importantly, in Aristotle’s Physics, he outlines his four types of causes that are investigated in all the sciences. The first is the material cause which is simply the stuff out of which a thing is made; the second is the formal cause which is the structure imposed upon the stuff; the third is the efficient cause which is that which imposes the structure upon the stuff; the fourth cause is the final cause which is the reason or purpose for imposing the structure upon the stuff.
The primary subject matter of physics is change or motion. The underlaying thing, or matter, undergoes this change. In the Mediterranean world of the time, the most primeval stuff of change was a mixture of the elements earth, water, air, and fire (and possible a substratum underlying these elements?). Aristotle noted that there must be a cause for this motion or change, and therefore Aristotle argues that the ultimate cause of change in the universe is an “unmoved mover” that provides first motion.
Another issue the Arabs were concerned with is the concept of time, especially the question of whether or not time is eternal or came into being. They take their cue from Aristotle. He argues for the eternality of the cosmos in two ways: first he argues that there cannot be a change in the unmoved mover and second that there can be no change before the first change. This would lead to an infinite regression. Time, therefore, is eternal.
Al-Kindi disagreed with Aristotle on this point. He upheld the belief that the cosmos were not eternal, but finite. To him, Aristotle’s argument contains an absurdity, namely that if the cosmos were eternal, then an infinite number of days would have passed, yet we can count today as a day. We therefore have only traversed a finite space and the universe is temporal.
On the other hand, there was much agreement concerning the universe’s geography. The Earth, unquestionably, was the center of the universe; for it is the heaviest of elements and thus it tends towards the center of the universe. Floating on top of earth is water and on top of water is air. Fire, being the lightest, extended to the sphere of the moon. Then there were the seven known planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with the final sphere composed of the stars. Notably, it was the turnings of the heavens that produced motions in the elements of the sublunar realm.
The soul also concerned the Arab Philosophers. Here too they once again took their cue from Aristotle, particularly his theory as postulated in the De Anima. Here Aristotle defined the soul as “the first actuality of an organic body having life in it potentially”. The soul is the reason for life. This also means that humans are not alone in having a soul; other creatures share this same designation. The nature of the soul was identified with the matter of the organism. To Greek philosophers and Arab ones too, the most pertinent issue was the unique qualities of the human soul, not the soul in a broader context.
In Aristotelian psychology, what is called “thinking” is when the human comes to the realization of a wholly immaterial form, which is a universal not a particular. So in thinking the intellect receives something immaterial, and thus some of the soul is immortal.
From this two major debates occurred. Aristotle’s text strongly suggests that humans have immortal souls. On one end of the spectrum, Alexander of Aphrodisias maintained that since the active intellect is a separate substance, then death would entail death of the soul as well. On the other end, is John Philoponus who states that a unique active intellect belongs to each human and thus a part survives the death of the corporeal body. The second debate was similar. Philosophers stringently debated whether or not the potential intellect also survives into the afterlife.
In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the “unmoved mover” is transformed into “Thinking Thought Itself”, a being that overshadows the physical world. This It sets the cosmos into motion since the cosmos desires to mimic It’s desire. This causes the material to rotate in place, and this is the reason why different mixtures make up our world.
Surprisingly perhaps, for all their aptitude for the Greeks, the Arabic Philosophers were generally not interested in Greek political or ethical thought. Instead, the Arabs preferred there native politics and ethics. If they took to any political writing at all, it was Plato’s Republic. The image and symbol of the “philosopher-king” provided some thinkers with the idea of the ideal caliph. But in all, falsafa was mostly concerned with logic, metaphysics, and science.
Although the Qu’ran was never intended to be a philosophical work, it still contains a good deal of philosophical material. For instance, the Qur’an maintains that God is the creator of the universe out of non-being at a first point in time, the soul is immortal, and that the body will be resurrected. Because of the Qur’an’s status as the principle religious text, it became virtually impossible for scholars to avoid its theology and philosophy. Many times philosophers felt obliged to reconcile their ideas with the Qur’an. The way that falsafa was frequently reconciled with theology was through a doctrine of metaphor.
In general, Islamic theology speculated on God, atoms, and accidents. God was always considered to be existing and to be the Creator. As for the physical world at large, Islamic speculators took the world to be a composite of atom and accidents. Atoms constituted the minimal units of quantity. Thus, atoms are indivisible and any determinations they do have are nothing but accidents. Yet atoms cannot exist separate from accidents for atoms have no determinate features of their own. God himself is constantly recreating these accidents at every moment to insure they endure. This recreation is called “occasionalism”. This means that atoms and accidents are not capable of causal interaction. Only God causes events, not causality.
These ideas permeated the falsafa movement to a certain extent, giving philosophers new challenges and competition. In all, it is hoped that the above summary will suffice for our purposes.
Not only do I hope this course will help me better understand the Near East and the Arab World generally, but I also hope that it will further cultivate my reading and writing skills. I would not say that I am a poor reader or writer, but I can definitely see room for improvement. I figured that by taking a difficult course like Arabic Philosophy my skills in reading and writing would be challenged and hopefully they will improve dramatically through practice.
For instance, by reading philosophers like Aristotle, Avicenna, al-Kindi, and others, I hope to make progress by stretching my current reading abilities to their limits. These men wrote complicated treatises and books, amongst the most complicated known to man, and these works require hours of contemplation and they command a great deal of attention. I am not accustomed to reading very difficult, philosophical work, let alone works of such technical prowess and intricacy. Just by spending time with these individuals’ work, I will be gaining a better command of language and analysis. By writing on these authors, I will be confronting some of the most puzzling and important questions known to man. Having to write on a topic as thick as “what is knowledge?” forces me to really understand what I am writing about and presenting. It forces me to think in a more logical manner. Writing a 3 to 5 page paper every week should greatly improve my skills.
Another thing I wish to take from this course is a solid knowledge of medieval Arab thought. I became interested in Arab thought after reading some of Borges’ work in which he incorporates Arab themes and philosophy. I thought it would be nice to know what Borges is trying to convey exactly, him being one of my favorite authors. So in the future when I confront a tale with Avicenna as a major character, I will better understand what is going on.
And finally, since I knew that the Arabs continued the legacy of the Greeks, at least in philosophy and science, I wanted to penetrate deeper into this area of scholarship. As a Classics major and a person taking Ancient Greek, I am very fascinated by Greek culture and by the legacy they left, whether it be Christian or Islamic. I hope this course will quench my thirst for answers and open up new avenues of thought.
According to Schopenhauer, “With the exception of man, no being wonders at his own existence”. Existence to other organisms, like chimpanzees and fish, is a unasked question; it just is, existence exists. Period. But to man, existence poses many problems, namely due to our curiosity about our place in the order of things. We, being inquisitive creatures, want to know: what is existence?
Throughout history many theories have been recycled, rejected, and formulated in order to answer this question. Yet none of them has unequivocally answered the question, however they all offer man an explanation. Of all these explanations, there have been two main schools of thought: the nominalists and the realists. I tend to veer towards the nominalist explanation of existence since they deny the existence of “real” universals. The nominalist explanation of things eliminates the abstract “universal” from the equation. Things here in existence do not correspond to abstractions. Instead, things correspond to themselves. What I mean by this, is that the individual entity, the “particular”, only exists, not the universal. The universals are nothing but empty names. For instance, words like “blue”, “metallic”, and “fish” do not exist as real, independent universals, but only exist in our intellects.
In a very general sense, the concepts of “blue”, metallic”, and “fish” exist as useable symbols in our intellects. These symbols, importantly, are taken from our empirical experience of being in the world rather being taken from an innate, universal abstraction. Without these empirically based symbols, we would be unable to transfer or translate knowledge. We need to have common mental ground taken from our common experience of being together in the world, thus the symbol.
Take the alphabet for instance. The letter “A” doesn’t have an independent universal which provides it with meaning, but as a symbol, people understand and give meaning to “A”. “A” is not given meaning through an abstraction, but through the collective intellects of its users. If the symbol “A” were forgotten and erased from the Earth, it would no longer exist since it would no longer have an empirical basis. Therefore, what is existence? Existence is when a thing has an empirical basis in reality. Things exist when they do not have to have reference to an abstraction. Rather a thing exists when it exists symbolically in the human intellect as well as in the empirical world.
