Philosophy
c. 870 to 950, Farab, Transoxiana, to Damascus
The ‘Second Teacher’ after Aristotle, who mapped the sciences, built the philosopher’s virtuous city, married reason to revelation, and made the mind’s ascent to the Active Intellect the whole of human happiness.
Start learning Abu →Why the Islamic world crowned al-Farabi al-Mu’allim al-Thani , ‘the Second Teacher,’ after Aristotle the First: he recovered, ordered, and transmitted the whole Greek philosophical inheritance into Ara…
al-Farabi’s political masterpiece: the excellent city ( al-Madina al-Fadila ), modelled on the healthy body and the ordered cosmos, ruled by a philosopher who has reached the truth - and the ignorant, wicked, and…
al-Farabi’s influential and dangerous idea: religion is an imitation of philosophy - the same truths and the same happiness, taught by demonstration to the few who can follow proofs, and by images, symbols, and pe…
al-Farabi’s cosmology and its human payoff: how all things flow (emanate) from the perfect, self-sufficient First Cause down through a hierarchy of intellects to our world; how the last of them, the Active Intelle…
al-Farabi’s pioneering philosophy of logic: logic as a universal grammar of reasoning that governs thought in any language, standing to the intellect as grammar stands to speech; the ladder of arguments from demon…
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