Richard C. Taylor

Avicenna and the Avicennian Tradition

The scope of this chapter is dauntingly broad, since Avicenna was the central figure in the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy. Before Avicenna, falsafa (Arabic Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy) and kalām (Islamic doctrinal theology) were distinct strands of thought, even though a good deal of cross-fertilization took place between them. After Avicenna, by contrast, the two strands fused together and post-Avicennian kalām emerged as a truly Islamic philosophy, a synthesis of Avicenna’s metaphysics and Muslim doctrine. To talk about the sources, evolution, and influence of Avicenna’s ideas is, in fact, to talk about over two thousand years of philosophical activity. Avicenna’s sources begin with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. and include the late antique Greek Aristotle commentators, both Peripatetic and Neoplatonist. Avicenna himself was extremely prolific: between 40 and 275 titles have been attributed to him by bibliographers ranging from his student Jūzjānī to the late Egyptian scholar Georges Anawati, with approximately 130 reckoned to be authentic by the Iranian scholar Yahyā Mahdavī. What is more, his ideas evolved during the course of his career,with the result that, as with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, Avicenna’s philosophy will often resist our attempts to systematize it, and his position on a number of important philosophical issues will appear frustratingly underdetermined. As for Avicenna’s impact, it was felt acutely in both the Islamic world and in Christian Europe.

Al-Fāarābī and the philosophical curriculum

LIFE AND WORKS The philosophy of al-Fārābī stands in marked distinction to that of al-Kindī but is no less representative of the major trends of thought inherited by the Islamic world. His tradition is consciously constructed as a continuation and refinement of the neo-Aristotelianism of the Alexandrian tradition, adapted to the new cultural matrix of the Near East. The Neoplatonic element of al-Fārābī ’s thought is most obvious in the emanationist scheme that forms a central part of his cosmology, though that scheme is much more developed than that of earlier Neoplatonists in its inclusion of the Ptolemaic planetary system. His theory of the intellect appears to be based on a close reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias and develops the concept of an Active Intellect standing outside the human intellect. Above all, al-Fārābī ’s legacy to later thinkers is a highly sophisticated noetics placed within a rigorous curriculum of instruction in Aristotelian logic. Fārābī was above all a systematic and synthesizing philosopher; as such, his system would form the point of departure on all the major issues of philosophy in the Islamic world after him. The status accorded al-Fārābī’s intellectual legacy here stands somewhat at odds with what we can reconstruct of his life with any certainty. With the exception of a few simple facts, virtually nothing is known of the personal circumstances and familial background of al-Fārābī. The great variety of legends and anecdotes about this second major philosopher of the Islamic period is the product of contending biographical traditions produced nearly three centuries after his death.

Philosophy in Andalusia

From the first incursion of Islam into Spain in 710 until the eventual success of the Christian reconquest in 1492, the Iberian peninsula was partially or wholly under Muslim rule, the westernmost outpost of a sprawling Muslim empire. For many decades the intellectual and cultural climate of “al-Andalus” was thus subsidiary to that of the East. Philosophy was no exception: it came first from the East, but in time acquired an autonomous life. This is reflected in the history of Andalusian philosophy, which at first followed in the footsteps of al-Fārābī and Avicenna, but soon developed along two very different paths. On the one hand, the Andalusians took up al-Fārābī’s project of reconstructing and further developing the thought of Aristotle, a process that would culminate in the commentaries of Averroes. On the other hand, Andalusian philosophers were attracted by Sūfism. Most prominently, the mystic Ibn ‘Arabī hailed from al-Andalus. But as will be indicated below, even authors who worked within the falsafa tradition were not immune to the appeal of the Sūfīs. This chapter will illustrate these competing traditions in the thought and writings of the two most significant Muslim philosophers of al-Andalus prior to Averroes: Ibn Bājja (known as Avempace to the Latins) and Ibn Tufayl.