This week we talked about the arabic philosopher Al-Farabi. Al-Farabi is being seen as the father of the islamic neoplatonism and as the second master (the first one was Aristotle). He was polymathic, a concept that is hardly seen nowadays because of our focus on specialization and the earlier focus on becoming a better person through studying.
In this week’s blog I will discuss whether Al-Farabi was a more important/better philosopher than Avicenna. Al-Farabi was inspired by Aristotle and Plato and introduced logic and reason into the islamic culture. He can be held responsible for bringing the islamic religion and philosophy together. For Al-Farabi, philosophical knowledge is more valuable than religious revelation, since knowledge focusses on verifiable truth whereas religious texts are incomplete when it comes to real knowledge. Al-Farabi does think that God is above all knowledge, the human reason is the way to get to knowledge.
Avicenna had to use Al-Farabi’s criticism to really understand Aristotle’s metaphysics. His main contribution to philosophy nowadays are his translations of Aristotle, Galenus and Euclid. Furthermore, Avicenna continued on Aristotle’s philosophy by giving it a whole new ‘being’, so that God would fit into Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics.
In my opinion, Al-Farabi’s contribution to philosophy is more important than Avicenna, in the way that Al-Farabi seems to have introduced philosophy into his religion in a way that no one has ever really done before. Avicenna’s translations and his view on Aristotle’s philosophy have been important for the contemporary philosophy as well, but it seems to be a greater accomplishment to create an entire new philosophy within a religion than it would be to translate other people’s philosophy. In the end, I think both philosophers were important for what philosophy is nowadays, but it feels more rightful to give Al-Farabi the first place when it comes to importance and put Avicenna in a nice second place.
Medieval Philosophy Blog 