Introductory

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.040

Chapter 39 - Introductory

from Part VIII - EARLY ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

A. H. Armstrong

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Summary

Approaches to the study of Islamic philosophy

It appears premature, at the present time, to embark on a history of Islamic philosophy in the Middle Ages. Too many of the basic facts are still unknown. New texts are constantly being discovered. Not all the manuscripts known are available in critical editions, or indeed published at all. Very few commentaries of any standing exist and scarcely any monographs on essential topics. Very few texts—apart from those translated centuries ago into medieval Latin—can be read in translation. It would be of some use, it is true, to survey the information available at present, to list the main facts which have been established beyond doubt and to show where future work should start and which are the most urgent tasks. But this would scarcely agree with the purpose of the present publication. It seems to be more appropriate to discuss the essence of what the Muslims called ‘philosophy’ (falsafa), to explain how, on one side, it depends on Greek thought as taught in the philosophical schools in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, and how on the other side it answers the needs and questions of a new and different world—whose inhabitants speak a different language, Arabic, and adhere neither to the religion of classical Greece nor to Christianity which had taken its place, but follow a Hebraic religion of a new type, Islam. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a minimum of indispensable general facts, so as to concentrate mainly on giving a fuller picture of one outstanding early Muslim philosopher, al-Fārābī, with a view to trying to indicate how and why philosophy never succeeded in reaching in the Islamic world the position which it had maintained in the ancient world for more than a thousand years.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 641 - 651

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.040 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1967

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