Quick Take: Without Al-Farabi, No Aquinas
A Brief Introduction to Medieval Muslim Philosophy
(This is a guest post by Eliyahu Rotenberg, who has studied philosophy for over 15 years, earning a degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently pursuing a master’s at Tel Aviv University. Eliyahu has been a learned, polite and frank commentator to some of my posts. In Substack, he writes “Ignatius of Zion,” where he explores diverse philosophical and theological topics for a general readership.)
The history of philosophy is a rather complex discipline. Trends in philosophy come and go, old questions emerge and are abandoned, and above all, we face questions and positions where we struggle to determine whether we have progressed in them, or perhaps gone backward.
The history of science works somewhat differently: we can, with some risk, formulate what people in the past thought about an issue we think about today, and draw a more or less unambiguous line of progress.
In these senses, medieval philosophy in general and Muslim medieval philosophy in particular present us with a double challenge: it is often difficult for us to understand whether we are facing a philosophical text or a scientific text, but beyond that, the Muslim heritage was received in the West through deep polemic with it, which sometimes conceals from us the real philosophical work that was done there.
Thus, for example, it is quite clear to us that in certain areas the progress of Muslims relative to the classical or Eastern heritage from approximately the eighth century to approximately the thirteenth century is unprecedented, and constitutes the background upon which European sciences developed hundreds of years later. In particular, al-Khwarizmi’s development of algebraic methods (a word itself borrowed from Arabic) that would take European thought several hundred years to “digest” in order to continue developing on its own, an absolute revolution in the ancient conception of optics closer to ours today by Ibn al-Haytham, and of course – the development and advancement of Galenic medicine.
In fact, it was this last channel, which included an initial formulation of functional classification of diseases based on experiments, discovery of new diseases and theoretical systematization of the medical field as a whole, that allows us to say that quite a few philosophers in the Islamic world from al-Razi to Maimonides made significant contributions, chief among them Ibn Sina (Avicenna), whose book on medicine continued to serve in Europe at least until the 15th century as the foundational text of the field.
But while discussions in the history of science are more unambiguous, philosophical discussions may serve us in understanding more central problems that still concern us today. As stated, here we face a complex challenge.
If we take for example the modern philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we see that in his lectures on the history of philosophy, the Middle Ages in general occupy a rather negligible place. Following the Renaissance attack on Christian scholasticism, only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did we manage to reach a more comprehensive understanding of medieval philosophy in general and Muslim philosophy in particular.
In particular, we know how to better trace today the enormous influence of medieval philosophy on the emergence of sciences in the early modern period. But beyond that, we know how to better identify the philosophical depth of the Muslim Middle Ages, to which Hegel devoted less than a chapter in his history – a chapter mainly composed of orientalist prejudices and an interesting reading mainly of Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed” – which was indeed one of the peaks of Muslim philosophy in the Middle Ages.
For Hegel, Muslim philosophy was linked, in a significant historical distortion, to the Oriental consciousness’s inability to be realistic about the real differences in the world. As we’ll see when we discuss the issue of the Active Intellect, this is simply a profound misunderstanding of the role of Muslim philosophy in the history of philosophy. To better understand how purely philosophical issues gained depth and recognition in the Muslim world, let us examine the ancient question regarding the universality of knowledge.
From its beginning, philosophy in the Muslim world was challenged by traditional authorities, whether through rationalist theologians (called the Mu’tazila) or more legal authorities who specialized in Muslim law (fiqh). There is no doubt that these challenges invited unique challenges to Muslim philosophy. An interesting point to start from is the debate that took place between Abu Bishr Matta, a not-so-experienced philosopher, and Abu Said al-Sirafi, an authority on Arabic grammar. The discussion took place before dignitaries and scholars in something that not coincidentally recalls the French salon culture that did so much to advance the ideals of the Enlightenment in European society hundreds of years later.
Abu Bishr was asked to defend his statement that it is impossible to know truth from falsehood, proof from sophism, doubt from certainty – except through the respected discipline of logic. But al-Sirafi, the veteran grammarian, resented this pretension of the philosophers and began a fairly organized attack on the pretensions of philosophers, and specifically logic, which as mentioned was particularly important to the development of medieval philosophy in Islam and later from the 13th century onwards – in the West. According to al-Sirafi, there is no reason to think that the Greeks possessed special wisdom, even if, as Abu Bishr said, they devoted themselves to philosophy. For their philosophy is relevant to the Greek language, and is not suitable for those who did not grow up in this language. Besides, grammar does not deal, as Abu Bishr said, with the “sounds” of language, but with its meaning, and therefore there is no need for the discipline of logic which is nothing but an abstraction of a living language like Arabic. Al-Sirafi’s discussion is impressive (and in fact, only his side of the debate was preserved beyond Abu Bishr’s brief statements), and we see well the logic that guides traditional suspicion toward the authority that logic claims for itself: universality that is not language-dependent, truth and falsehood that are not dependent on grammar.
According to historian Peter Adamson, the philosophical response from the Baghdad school to which Abu Bishr belonged came only later, in the thought of one of the great Muslim philosophers, Abu Nasr al-Farabi. Al-Farabi developed the position that logic actually deals with propositions that are not dependent on any specific natural language, although it is true that we express (most of) our thoughts in natural language. Hence its universality. However, since propositions are grasped as various objects, or things, in the world, this position required al-Farabi to give an account of what exactly in human thought is universal in a way that would allow the existence of something like logic, among other things. Al-Farabi’s solution, which followed developments in the interpretation of Aristotle up to his time, was to understand anew the status of something Aristotle mentioned in his work “On the Soul”: according to al-Farabi’s method, one of the things that existed as a result of emanation from the First Cause was the Active Intellect – which granted the “form,” or the intelligible part, to everything in our world. The Active Intellect actually explained, among other things, the persistence and universal accessibility of forms in our world.
For al-Farabi, as for other philosophers in the Islamic world following him, the cosmos consisted of a primary cause from which emerged separate intellects that guided the movement of the celestial spheres on which the stars were embedded and explained their movement. The last separate intellect was the one responsible for movement and forms on Earth and was called the Active Intellect. The Active Intellect, in turn, was the explanation for how the human soul comes to knowledge. In its regular state, the intellectual power in the soul is in potency, in potential, and is not actualized. But when the soul intellects something, it becomes identical with the Active Intellect that holds in its knowledge all the stable forms in the world that can be known. Al-Farabi’s engagement with the issue of the Active Intellect subsequently guided the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and shaped implications not only regarding the specific issue we looked at, the universality and persistence of forms in the world, but also in other issues where medieval philosophy made serious progress in understanding them.
Perhaps one of the most discussed features, understandably, in Muslim medieval philosophy is the relationship between faith and understanding. But I am misleading you. In fact, because in the Muslim Middle Ages the religions discussed more were Islam and Judaism – the subject that received the most attention was the relationship between religious law and reason. While there were also active Christian philosophers in the Muslim world, most of this literature did not focus particularly on Christian issues.
Therefore, the story of religion as faith, or as a system of dogmas, was secondary to the political way in which the religious issue was understood. Here too, the Active Intellect as shaped by al-Farabi and his successors has an important role. Since among Muslims and Jews the question of justifying the law became central, the question was asked of why religious law – or actually, any law – is justified. The answer given was a renewed understanding of prophecy. There were special people in the world who managed to interface with the Active Intellect perfectly or almost perfectly, understood human and political nature to its core, and legislated laws for humanity.
Al-Farabi was actually a key figure in this revolution. The authority of law was understood in rational terms, and political science became in effect the subject that the biblical prophets and of course Muhammad comprehended. The Muslim philosophers themselves labored over interpreting Plato’s Republic and often understood the prophet as being in the image of Plato’s philosopher-king. Thus was paved the way for an inherent tension between the school of philosophers in the Muslim world, called the Falsafa, and the more traditional authorities of Muslims and Jews. In brief, the Falsafa were characterized by realism regarding the nature of knowledge, in the sense that we grasp things in the world around us that are really there outside of us, and by rationalist naturalism regarding the nature of law. These tendencies were destined to have a decisive influence on Christian scholastic philosophy, and consequently on all of European philosophy. Let us next examine how things unfolded.
In the thirteenth century, philosophy in the West underwent a serious revolution. Until then, Christian philosophy or theology relied mainly on figures like Augustine or Boethius, who formed the stable basis for understanding Christian faith. However, the translation of Aristotle’s texts from Arabic to Latin presented serious challenges to Christian faith. Universities began teaching natural sciences, medicine, and other sciences that the Muslim world had developed. Exposure to the texts of Muslim philosophers began to develop in Europe a naturalistic movement that positioned the investigation of nature as a significant discipline, but also contained problematic implications regarding the status of Christian faith. The new mendicant monks – the Franciscans and Dominicans – responded to the challenge and entered the universities. One of the most central of them was Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas and other monks opened the discipline of theology in such a way that it could give the study of nature its proper place, but position it as a preparatory science for the truly meaningful study of Christian faith. Theology became in Aquinas’s hands a science dealing with the salvation of the soul.
To understand a little more deeply the depth of influence of Muslim philosophy on European philosophy, let us think a bit about the figure of Aquinas. Maimonides, for example, serves in Aquinas’s writing often under the simple title “the Rabbi” or “Rabbi Moses.” Ibn Sina, al-Farabi, and Ibn Rushd are all authorities whose positions Aquinas frequently discusses and shapes his own position sometimes in opposition to and sometimes in agreement with them. Neither the challenge Aquinas responds to, nor his thinking as we know it, would have been possible without the philosophy of the Muslim world. But the interesting change was deeper, and it concerns the intensive engagement of the Muslim world with the status of the Active Intellect. As we have seen, the Active Intellect was, among other things, a concept that allowed philosophers to solve problems concerning the status of knowledge. For a variety of reasons that this would not be the place to enter into – among them, theological ones, concerning for example the status of angels in Christianity versus Islam at that time – Aquinas and other scholastics lowered the status of the Active Intellect and made it, in various variations, a disposition of the concrete human being. That is, the door was opened to an attack on the universal status of knowledge. The discussion of the status of knowledge mediated through Muslim concepts continued to exist in the West for hundreds of years, and even gained considerable influence on modern philosophy.
The scholastic discussions continued, in fact, the discussions of Muslim philosophy on issues such as the status of universals (=concepts that apply to more than one thing in the world), and further opened issues in the theory of knowledge, which in the nineteenth century came to be called “epistemology” in the West, which would significantly characterize the philosophy of the modern era. As research into early modern philosophy continues, it deepens, for example, our understanding of the dependence of revolutionary figures like Descartes on their scholastic background (in Descartes’ case, Jesuit).
The move of incorporating the Active Intellect into the human individual created new challenges to the conception that there is something in knowledge that exists in the world above and beyond nominal human cognition.
In fact, to a large extent European philosophy internalized the discussion of the Active Intellect into the human being. In practice, it is impossible to imagine the focus of modern philosophy and philosophy of science on the theory of knowledge without the influence of Muslim philosophy, the challenges it provided, the discussions of knowledge it opened – and the concepts in the theory of knowledge that would serve European philosophy up to Kant himself, who presents his system in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason in terms of the difference between the active intellect and the contemplative intellect. Indeed, without al-Farabi we would not have Aquinas. But perhaps we wouldn’t even have Kant.
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