Al-Farabi
- The Inventor -
Al-Farabi (872/950 AD - 259/339 AD) was born near the city of Farab in Transoxiana, a region of Central Asia. Few details of his life are known. It seems that his father was an army officer of Turkish or perhaps Persian origin. It is also known that, while still young, he moved to Baghdad, where he spent most of his life. In that city, Al-Farabi learned the Arabic language, having as his first tutor the Nestorian Christian Ibn Haylan. Later, Al-Farabi studied logic, grammar, philosophy, music, mathematics and all the sciences of the time.
Al-Farabi embodied the figure of the great sage. Although he wrote on political topics, everything indicates that he did not hold administrative positions. An admirable musician, he lived in Cairo and also in Aleppo under the protection of Prince Saif al-Dawlah, a promoter of the arts and literature of that time. In the last years of his life, we find Al-Farabi in Damascus, Syria, where he worked as a garden keeper.
Al-Farabi's ideas promoted a leap in falsafa. He was mainly responsible for the most original and creative philosophical theories among the Arabs. In addition, he was an eminent logician known for a series of commentaries on Aristotle's work. In his Treatise on the Intellect, he proposed an epistemology according to a division of the intellect that influenced not only falsafa itself but was also one of the best-known works in the medieval Latin West. Alongside his logical profile, he did not fail to permeate a great spirituality in his theses.
Al-Farabi knew Greek philosophy in detail, its evolution and the transmission of this knowledge through other centers of study, tracing a path of the history of thought beginning among the Chaldeans, transmitted to the Egyptians, from them to the Greeks, passing through the masters who succeeded Plato and Aristotle, through the thinkers of Alexandria, highlighting the transmission of knowledge to Antioch in Syria, recognizing the role of Christians in the transmission of philosophy to the Arabs and, finally, citing the main thinkers who preceded him in the recent past. This stance of universal vision and impregnated with the history of philosophy explained, in part, why Al-Farabi understood that he, too, was a continuer of the heritage of knowledge of his time.
If the falsafa began with Al-Kindi, it gained more defined contours with Al-Farabi, and to him we owe the main pillars that supported it from then on. The so-called "second master" – Aristotle being the "first master" –, at a time when the assimilation of philosophy was already a reality in the Arab world, found a more favorable moment to develop his theses with greater depth, creativity and originality.
The presence of Al-Farabi's theses was comprehensive and in several directions, having profoundly influenced many thinkers who succeeded him not only in the East but also in the medieval West. In the field of metaphysics, inspired by Aristotle's logical observation that the notion of what a thing is does not include the fact that the thing exists, Al-Farabi established an important milestone in the history of philosophy by highlighting the distinction between the notion of essence and existence.
Visit the Muslim Philosophy website where some of Al-Farabi's books are available in Arabic or in translations into modern languages, as well as articles and commentaries by other scholars.
Source ©: Al-Farabi commemorative stamp. USSR, 1975. Detail.
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The Excellent City of Al-Farabi
The Excellent City is one of the most important works of the falsafa, written in the period of Al-Farabi's maturity, summarizing his ideas in all areas of philosophy, as a kind of seal with which al-Fārābī interconnects the various areas of philosophy in unison.
The Excellent City begins with metaphysics, in which the primordially existent is affirmed as the ultimate foundation of existence. This reality, in its most radical uniqueness, unfolds and causes a series of other existents to flow from it. After describing the existential flow of the existents that are pure intelligence, the text enters the field of Cosmology, presenting the constitution of the heavens, the planets and the movement of the stars. With the engendering of Nature, minerals, plants and animals precede the human being at the top of the scale of complex combinations from the elements water, earth, fire and air. The study of human faculties begins with the external senses, passing through the imagination until reaching intellection, which occupies the central part of the book. From then on, the types of human groupings are studied so that the human being reaches its highest perfection, that is, happiness. Such a task cannot be accomplished by a human being alone, but needs to be in the city, but not just any city, but one that seeks excellence in both action and understanding of the set of enigmatic things that are presented in the Universe, including the human. The Excellent City is presented, in part, based on the categories found in Plato's Republic, but Al-Farabi develops his book in a very particular sense, articulating a series of other sources, whether Peripatetic, Neoplatonic, or from the Arab and Islamic tradition itself, which are presented in a new way for the period, configuring a kind of recasting of much of the previous philosophical tradition. Al-Farabi's philosophical system is largely creative and original. It is not too much to say that much of the vocabulary and many of the main ideas of the falsafa are present in this book by Al-Farabi. Even if it was to follow or criticize it, both later Arab philosophers and many scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages were never indifferent to it. In this legacy of wisdom, the “second master” encompasses the main subjects of philosophy and its developments in the search of understanding, bringing everything together with great mastery.