”, where generations of translators offer to the thinkers of Arab language the major texts of ancient philosophy, medicine, of mathematics, without forgetting their many commentators. Here are which gives its style to Islamic philosophy until our days: she contemplates the metaphysics questions of the Neoplatonism and the cosmology of Ptolémée, of which she tries to reconcile teaching with that of Coran.
The tradition gréco-Moslem woman
On the one hand, it is a philosophy based on the unit of the systems of thought of Plato and Aristote, symbolized by the Arab version of Plotin, allotted wrongly to Aristote. This misunderstanding will facilitate the vast doctrinal synthesis which will culminate in the work of Avicenne (Abou Ali Al-Husayn ibn Sina, 980-1037). In addition, it is a prophetic philosophy. That wants to say that the same truth revealed by the Gabriel angel with the Mahomet prophet is revealed with the philosophers by an emanation of God who takes the name of “intellect agent”.
Thus the philosophers receive an illumination whose source is the divine light, remaining in the divine verb. While the prophetic language is made accounts and commands, the philosophical illumination leads the heart to discover the efficient, formal, material causes and finales which explain the world created. Contrary to modern Western philosophy, Islamic philosophy does not regard the reason the free examination of the things, but as the opening to truths understandable, conceptual, which do not differ from those that the prophets or the Imams of the Shiism received from God.
Thus, “philosophy” was conceived in terms broader than in the modern analytical tradition; it included great scientific questions. One rather distinguished it by way of “regular” sciences only because of his interest for the general principles of knowledge than for the details. The method of reasoning was the syllogistic logic of Aristote. As for the study of philosophy, it was supposed to have a serious practical objective: obtaining happiness for the individual and the company, by the application of wisdom to the life: to understand the universe and the place of the man in this one, in order to choose the best possible lifestyle.
The hierarchy of the universes
The first object of this illumination of the heart is the hierarchy of the universes: our sensitive world returns, as with its model, in the world of the heart, which reproduces in its turn the world of the intelligences. This higher world is that of the gasolines of what exists, and it expresses the need for being it divine. The world of the heart understands the cosmic hearts - which govern the movements of the concentric celestial spheres - and those which animate the plants, the animals and the men. The hearts are equipped with increasingly rich faculties. The men can have a heart whose intensity is more or less sharp, according to whether it more or less pure and is informed.
Lastly, the world of the natural bodies is divided into two areas: that of the eternal bodies (celestial spheres) and that of the perishable bodies. The philosophical illumination thus has another object that the revelation of the hierarchy of the universes: it transforms this knowledge into a personal safety. The ideal of the heart which must take care of itself is the union with “intellect agent”, i.e. with the eternal thought of God.
For Averroès (Abou Al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Ruchd, 1126-1198), this union is less one perpetuation of the individual heart that the return of this one to the universality of the understandable one; largest of the Arab philosophers of Andalusia its fame must in addition with its comments of Aristote which were, later, the primary source of the rebirth scholastic in the universities of Occident.
Speculations metaphysics
The first Arab philosopher, Abou Youssouf Yaqoub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (death in 867), shows some independence compared to the Greeks. He supports, for example, that the world was created starting from nothing and that he is not eternal. One raises the same independence of mind among other philosophers of the beginnings, such Razi or Rhazès (Abou Bakr Ibn Zakariyya Al-Razi, towards 860-923) which disputes Aristote on several points. The body of the tradition gréco-Moslem woman is established by Alfarabius (Abou Nasr Al-Farabi, towards 870-950), before being systematized by Avicenne. Al-Farabi is more rationalist and more Aristotelian, Avicenne tends to the mystic and the Neo-Platonism; their successors will still propose other alternatives. It is however possible to give a unified outline of this tradition.
The highest branch of philosophy was metaphysics. Broken with theology, the Arab philosophers conceived more clearly than Aristote the distinction between the gasoline and the existence, and understood that nothing, in an ordinary concept, implies the existence or the non-existence of its authorities. Avicenne saw there a proof of the existence of God: there must be a gasoline which is not logically contingent, but necessary in itself, in order to guarantee (to grant) the existence with all the other gasolines.
Natural philosophy included cosmology, general physics and psychology. The universe consists of eternal forms and eternal matter. Their combinations immutable in are empyrée of stars and the angels, but modifiable in the sublunary sphere where the Earth is. The man is composed of a mortal body and a heart of which the most subtle part - the heart - is immortal in a certain direction (heard various ways by the various philosophers). The Aristotelian “psychology” of the intelligence, as worked out by the late Greek commentators, was taken again and prolonged. The intelligence passive - or potential or material - of the man receives “information” by illumination of the active intellect which is apart from the individual and is attached to the sphere of the Moon.
Morals and policy
Philosophy took again on its account the spiritual vocation of Islam. Against those which thought that the cultural life was to be maintained within the wise limits of obedience to the religious law, the Moslem philosophers affirmed the independence of the speculation and the hello by the only ways of the enlightened intelligence. They also created an autonomous speech on the morals questions, and this starting from an original fusion between the tradition of Aristote, the data old of wisdom Persian and Arab ethics, but also of a whole reflection on the duties of the princes and the function of the State.
In front of the ruin of the caliphate, consumed by the Mongolian invasion, the Shiite philosophers, in particular in the Moslem East, sought to find the Platonic inspiration and to be reincarnated the king-philosopher in the person of the awaited Guide. This ethical and political meditation inspires also the immense company of Ibn Khaldoun (1332-1406); its Prolegomena with the universal history wants to base a new science, bearing on the whole of civilization.
Religious criticism and new syntheses
This “philosophy of perenniality” was criticized like nonIslamic by the theologists, especially by Abou Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), which attacked three doctrines more especially: the eternity of the world, knowledge by God of only universal (and not of the accidents), and the refusal of the resurrection of the flesh. The principal task of defense returned in Averroès which asserted that if one understood Aristote correctly and Coran, there was no dissension between them.
The following generations of Moslem philosophers diverged from the central tradition gréco-Moslem woman while following different tendencies. Averroès sought to return in Aristote of the origins. Ibn Al-Arabi (1165-1240) mixed intellectual mysticism with Islam, by regarding the man as the most reflection of divine nature, and Mahomet like the most perfect man. The Moslem theologists adopted the philosophical techniques of reasoning and analysis, without giving up however their traditional approach and their doctrines; it is the design of the world which Ibn Al-Arabi had who had the major influence on the thought arabo-Persian of the last centuries prémodernes.
Jewish philosophers expressed themselves in Arabic at the same time as the Moslems - in Spain especially -, and much of Moslems were subject to their influence. The problems of harmonization between Greek philosophy and the Judaism were of comparable nature and one belongs to remarkable parallels between the solutions of Maïmonide Brace (1135-1204) and those of Averroès.
Transmission in the world
When the philosophical studies renaquirent in Christian Europe of the XII E century, the Occident recovered the large texts of Greek philosophy via their Arab versions. One hastened to translate them into Latin, with the summaries and the comments which accompanied them; one also translated, in the tread, some works of Arab philosophy; Avicenne, Averroès and Maïmonide thus exerted a great influence on the medieval thought.
A good part of medieval Arab philosophy remained of a great interest: intelligent summaries of the Greek thought, vast syntheses of philosophy and mysticism, great controversy between Al-Ghazali and the philosophers, attempts to harmonize philosophy and the revealed religion. Islamic philosophy remains alive today, especially in Iran (Ispahan, Qom, Kerman).