Al-Farabi
Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (c. 872–950) was a Central Asian philosopher who worked in Baghdad and later at the court of Sayf ad-Dawla in Aleppo. He came to be called “the Second Teacher” — second only to Aristotle himself — because he was the first thinker in the Arabic tradition to synthesize Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic ideas into a coherent philosophical system that shaped everything that came after him. He was not primarily a physician, but his logic was adopted into Islamic seminaries, his theory of emanation was absorbed by Avicenna almost wholesale, and his classification of the sciences gave medicine its philosophical footing as a practical discipline under natural philosophy. He mattered to medicine through philosophy.
Life and Context
Al-Farabi was of a Turkish family of Transoxiana, but had studied in Baghdad under the Christian physician Yuhanna ibn Hailam.(OLeary, 2015) He shaped Arabic Aristotelianism at the court of Sayf ad-Dawla in Aleppo by building a philosophical system from Aristotelian and neo-Platonic material, leading to a form of Muslim neo-Platonism.(OLeary, 2015)
Al-Farabi belonged to the era of al-Kindi and the Arabic-speaking intellectual world of the Caliphate. Gutas explicitly contrasts this milieu with the later Persian Renaissance that produced Avicenna: al-Kindi and al-Farabi were “products of the golden era of Arabic,” writing in the language of the Abbasid court, while Avicenna emerged from a Perso-Iranian cultural revival a generation later.(Gutas, 2016) Al-Farabi’s intellectual formation was thus cosmopolitan in a different register — not Persian vernacular revival, but Arabic rationalism at the center of the caliphate.
He eventually moved to Aleppo, where he worked at the court of Sayf ad-Dawla, patron of Arabic literary and philosophical culture. He died around 950 CE in Damascus.
Black’s biographical reconstruction in the Nasr-Leaman History of Islamic Philosophy fills out the details of his early formation. Al-Farabi was probably of Turkish origin, born around 257/870 in Farab in Turkestan; the details of his early education are murky, but he is reported to have studied logic in Baghdad under the Christian scholars Yuhanna ibn Haylan and Abu Bishr Matta. The historian Ibn Khaldun credited al-Farabi’s logical achievements as the principal reason he was dubbed al-mu’allim al-thani, “the second teacher” — second only to Aristotle himself (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
Philosophical Contributions
The Second Teacher
The title “Second Teacher” was not accidental.(OLeary, 2015) Al-Farabi shaped Arabic Aristotelianism at the court of Sayf ad-Dawla in Aleppo by building a philosophical system from Aristotelian and neo-Platonic material, leading to a form of Muslim neo-Platonism.(OLeary, 2015) O’Leary notes that almost all the great scientists and philosophers of the Arabs traced their intellectual descent from al-Kindi and al-Farabi, a line that ran directly to Avicenna and Averroes.(OLeary, 2015)
The difficulty was that the Aristotle al-Farabi inherited was already tinctured with Neo-Platonism. A spurious abridgment of Plotinus’ Enneads (books IV–VI) circulated in Arabic as the Theology of Aristotle, accepted as genuinely Aristotelian.(OLeary, 2015) Al-Farabi did not separate these threads; he built his system with both, weaving an Aristotelian framework of logic, categories, and causal explanation together with a Neo-Platonic account of emanation and the hierarchy of intelligences. The result was what O’Leary calls “a kind of Muslim neo-Platonism.”
Logic
Gutas notes that early Arabic authors tended to give the place of honour to al-Farabi, but until more of his works come to light, we cannot judge his full contribution.(Gutas, 2016) However, Avicenna’s influence dominates every single subsequent book on the subject.(Gutas, 2016)
The scope of al-Farabi’s engagement with Aristotle’s logical corpus is documented by a manuscript note preserved in a Parisian copy of the Sophistici Elenchi: the copyist recorded that the manuscript from which he worked appeared to have been written in al-Farabi’s own hand, with the first part carefully written and correct but the second part faulty — vivid evidence that al-Farabi personally copied Aristotelian manuscripts as part of his scholarly practice.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) A connected tradition in Ibn Abi Usaybiah records al-Farabi’s account of how the Christian bishops of Alexandria had restricted the teaching of logic: they decreed that the Analytica Priora could be taught publicly only through the assertoric figures, since they believed that what lay beyond would harm Christianity, while the remaining studies were kept secret until Islam came.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) Al-Farabi traced the onward transmission of this suppressed logical curriculum from Alexandria to Antioch, then to Harran and Marw, and finally to Baghdad — a lineage he presented as the chain through which the full Aristotelian logic was at last made available for open study.
The logic he produced was not purely Aristotelian. Like the philosophy it served, it was Aristotelian logic read through Hellenistic Neo-Platonic commentaries. This meant it came with Neo-Platonic metaphysical commitments embedded in what looked like formal argumentation. The effect proved lasting: when Avicenna superseded al-Farabi as the dominant logical authority, he acknowledged his predecessor’s role even as he refined, corrected, and in some cases overturned his positions.
Black emphasizes the wider conception that organized al-Farabi’s logical writing. Throughout the linguistic works, al-Farabi treats logic as a sort of universal grammar — the rules that must be followed in order to reason correctly in any language whatsoever — while ordinary grammar provides the rules established by convention for the use of one particular language by one particular culture. As al-Farabi puts it, “the relation of the art of logic to the intellect and the intelligibles is like the relation of the art of grammar to language and expressions” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). The two arts are autonomous and complementary rather than rivals; logic does not displace grammar but does work that grammar cannot.
This conception of logic governs his hierarchical interpretation of the syllogistic arts. Demonstration is identified as the proper method of philosophy; all other arts — dialectic, rhetoric, poetics — are subordinate tools for non-philosophical communication. This strand, Black notes, is most evident where al-Farabi echoes the logical theory of the Alexandrian commentators. It is also closely linked to his personal teaching that religion is a popular imitation of philosophy whose tools are the non-demonstrative arts: religion uses rhetoric and poetics to make accessible to the many what philosophy demonstrates for the few (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
The theory of demonstration that follows from this hierarchy rests on two cognitive acts. Tasawwur (conceptualization) is the act by which simple concepts are apprehended; when complete, it enables the extraction of the essence of the object conceived. Tasdiq (assent) is a judgment of truth or falsehood; when complete, it yields certain knowledge. Al-Farabi defines absolute certitude in terms of what would now be called second-order knowledge: it comprises both a belief that the truth to which one has assented cannot be otherwise, and a belief, in addition, that no other belief than the one held is possible (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
Emanation and the Hierarchy of Intelligences
Al-Farabi taught that from the Necessary Being (God) proceeds a first intelligence through an act of reflection, and from that intelligence proceeds a second, and so on through a hierarchy of intelligences and celestial spheres until the Active Intelligence presides over the terrestrial world, giving forms to matter.(Gutas, 2016)
Avicenna adopted this framework almost wholesale. Gutas notes that it was Avicenna who received al-Farabi’s Neo-Platonic theory and systematized it further, and that the two thinkers jointly named the mediating agent of creation the “Giver of Forms” (Wahib al-Suwar) — known to Latin scholastics as the Dator formarum.(Gutas, 2016) This concept — the Active Intelligence as the entity that impresses forms on prepared matter — became foundational for Islamic philosophy and, through the Latin translations of the twelfth century, for scholastic natural philosophy as well.
Black’s reconstruction specifies the dyadic mechanism of the emanation. As a result of God’s self-contemplation, there is an overflow (fayd) of a second intellect. This second intellect, like God, is characterized by self-contemplation; but it must, in addition, contemplate God himself. By virtue of its thinking of God it generates a third intellect, and by virtue of its self-contemplation it generates the celestial sphere that corresponds to it — the first heaven. Al-Farabi repeats this dyadic pattern for each sphere in the cosmology, arriving at a total of ten intellects other than God, with the tenth — the Agent Intellect — governing the sublunar world (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
Political Philosophy
Al-Farabi also wrote extensively on the ideal state — the “Virtuous City” (al-Madina al-Fadila) — in which he drew on Plato’s Republic and Laws to argue that the ideal ruler combines the qualities of prophet and philosopher. His summary of Plato’s Laws makes the philosopher-ruler’s qualifications concrete: the ruler must master arithmetic, geometry, and music, since only genuine philosophical training enables correct valuation and timely governance — just as a shepherd must not himself be a sheep, the ruler of people must be a divine man, and “the divine man is the philosopher.”(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) The enumerated chapter topics of his treatise on intellect theory reveal the full scope of this programme: al-Farabi systematically addressed the potential intellect, actual intellect, hylic intellect, passive intellect, and active intellect, along with their relations to will, choice, virtue, vice, and supreme happiness — the complete architecture of Aristotelian intellect theory as received and elaborated in Islamic philosophy.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) A companion set of chapter headings documents his parallel project in political philosophy: the inquiry into man’s need for social collaboration, the distinction between virtuous and non-virtuous social groups, the structure of the virtuous city, the qualities a virtuous ruler must develop from childhood through adulthood, and a typology of cities opposed to the virtuous city, including the ignorant city, the erring city, and the subtypes of ignorant government.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) The prophet grasps truth through intuition and imagination and presents it in symbols accessible to ordinary people; the philosopher grasps it through demonstration and presents it in logical arguments accessible to the educated. This double structure of the ideal political community, with its different modes of truth-communication for different audiences, was a deeply influential framework for thinking about the relationship between revealed religion and rational philosophy in Islam.(Gutas, 2016)
The argument is made most directly in the Tahsil al-Sa’adah (“Attainment of Happiness”), where al-Farabi defends the real and conceptual identity of the philosopher, the legislator, and the Imam. The diversity of these labels reflects nothing more than different emphases on distinct aspects of a single reality. Black draws out the practical consequence: in good Platonic fashion, those who do not attempt to apply their theoretical perfection to practical and political pursuits cannot claim to be true philosophers. The philosopher-prophet-imam ideal requires both theoretical perfection and the rhetorical and imaginative skills of prophecy (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
Al-Farabi’s typology of corrupt political associations carries the same Platonic inheritance. The corruptions of the ideal political union are organized into three general categories: ignorant cities, wicked cities, and errant cities. The ignorant cities all share a failure to comprehend the true nature of humanity, its place in the cosmos, and its natural end; al-Farabi distinguishes six varieties — indispensable cities (whose goal is mere subsistence), vile cities (whose goal is the accumulation of wealth), base cities (sensual gratification), timocratic cities (honor and fame), tyrannical cities (power and domination), and democratic cities. Wicked cities know the true end but deliberately abandon virtue; errant cities are those whose leader deceives the citizens with false images of the true end (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).
Music Theory
Avicenna defined music as a mathematical science concerned with harmony and discord, and after al-Farabi made the most valuable contribution to music theory, discussing its therapeutic value and its role in preparing the soul for wisdom.(Gutas, 2016)
Significance for Medicine
Al-Farabi was not a physician, and he did not write medical works. His significance for the history of medicine is indirect but real, operating through the philosophical frameworks he established that Avicenna then embedded in the Canon of Medicine.
The most important was his classification of the sciences. Al-Farabi’s Ihsa’ al-‘ulum (Enumeration of the Sciences) divided all generally known sciences into five groups: linguistics, logic, the mathematical sciences (arithmetic, geometry, optics, music, technology, and mechanics), the natural sciences and metaphysics, and politics with its subdivisions of jurisprudence and speculative theology.(Franz Rosenthal, 1965) Medicine fell within the natural sciences as a discipline whose principles, as Ibn Sina would later make explicit, are received from natural science itself. Al-Farabi produced in his Enumeration of the Sciences a systematic taxonomy of all the disciplines, placing medicine as a practical science under natural philosophy. This was not merely organizational — it meant that medicine received its theoretical foundations from natural philosophy and could not be understood apart from a philosophical account of matter, form, causation, and the soul. When Avicenna organized the Canon, he was working within this inherited framework, and the Canon’s opening sections on the elements, temperaments, and faculties of the soul follow the philosophical structure al-Farabi had established.
The second major influence was psychological. Avicenna’s account of the internal senses — the sensus communis, imagination, estimation, and memory — drew on al-Farabi’s psychology, though Avicenna departed from him on the seat of the sensus communis: al-Farabi, following Aristotle, placed it in the heart; Avicenna, following Galen, moved it to the brain.(Gutas, 2016) The stages of the theoretical intellect — the four-stage progression from potential to acquired intellect — derived partly from al-Farabi’s reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias and were transmitted to Avicenna through this channel.(Gutas, 2016) Avicenna’s account of the Active Intelligence was similarly indebted: he described it as analogous to the sun — illuminating potential intelligibles and making them actual — and his departure from the Peripatetic identity of intellect and intelligible in favour of Neo-Platonic emanation doctrine was a development the tradition al-Farabi had established, becoming prevalent among all Islamic thinkers after them.(Gutas, 2016)
Al-Farabi also shaped the theory of prophecy, presenting prophetic insight as a naturalistic achievement of the most perfect human intellect in contact with the Active Intelligence — not a supernatural interruption of nature but its highest expression.(Gutas, 2016) This framework gave both revelation and philosophy a coherent relationship, and it underwrote the medical-philosophical synthesis of Avicenna and his successors, in which the physician-philosopher was the natural interpreter of both natural and revealed truth.
On alchemy, al-Farabi held a permissive position — he counted it as a legitimate possibility — while Avicenna explicitly repudiated the entire enterprise.(Gutas, 2016) This divergence is one of the clearest markers of Avicenna’s selective and critical attitude toward his predecessor. A comparable divergence appears in the philosophy of time: Avicenna developed a three-fold classification of time — zaman (ordinary time), dahr (eternal duration corresponding to the permanence of time), and sarmad (absolutely fixed and unchanging) — departing from al-Farabi’s conception and building on it.(Gutas, 2016)
Legacy
Avicenna’s Debt
Avicenna had read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times and still could not understand its purpose.(Gutas, 2016)[good-av13-ch01-006] A book dealer pressed on him al-Farabi’s small work On the Objects of Metaphysics for three dirhems.(Gutas, 2016)[good-av13-ch01-006] Avicenna brought it home, read it, whereupon the whole purport of Aristotle’s treatise was revealed to his mind, and he distributed alms in gratitude.(Gutas, 2016) Goodman’s account adds the detail that Avicenna initially refused the book, thinking metaphysics must be worthless, and was pressed by the bookseller to take it.[good-av13-ch01-006]
This is not merely anecdote. It tells us that al-Farabi had worked out how to read Aristotle’s Metaphysics in a way that no existing commentary had, and that his interpretation was the key that made Aristotle’s metaphysics teachable in the Arabic world. Avicenna then spent the rest of his career building on that foundation.
Avicenna’s Arabic philosophical writing surpassed al-Farabi’s in clarity and terminological range. Gutas attributes this partly to method: al-Farabi had followed one set of translators consistently, limiting his terminological options, while Avicenna compared multiple translations and chose the best terms.(Gutas, 2016)
Al-Ghazali’s Critique
Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers (1095) targeted not Aristotle directly but the Islamic philosophers who had claimed to follow him. Al-Ghazali named both al-Farabi and Avicenna as the primary targets of his attack on three points: the eternity of the world, God’s knowledge only of universals rather than particulars, and the denial of bodily resurrection.(Gutas, 2016) Al-Farabi was thus still alive in the philosophical controversy a century and a half after his death — and still charged with the most serious heresies.
The report that al-Farabi had written in a lost commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics that all hopes of happiness beyond this life are “senseless ravings and old wives’ tales” — preserved by Ibn Tufayl — would have made him, if the account is accurate, even more radically naturalistic than Avicenna on the question of the afterlife.[good-av13-ch03-005] Whether that reflects al-Farabi’s genuine view or an exaggeration by a later reader remains debated.
Latin Reception as Alpharabius
Gerard of Cremona, the most prominent translator at Toledo, produced as many as eighty translations, including works by Avicenna, which led to Avicenna being studied in European centers within about a hundred years after his death.(Gutas, 2016) Burnett’s analysis of the Toledo program identifies al-Farabi’s On the Classification of the Sciences as its intellectual template: the text not only defined the subjects to be covered in a course of Aristotelian philosophy but also supplied a checklist of the specific textbooks to be translated, dividing natural science into eight “enquiries” with specific Aristotelian texts assigned to each.(Burnett, 2009)
Al-Farabi’s name was also attached, in a fictitious narrative, to the transmission of Greek philosophy and medicine from Alexandria to Baghdad — a text Gutas identifies as anti-Byzantine propaganda presenting Muslims as the true heirs of Greek science, casting Christians as having abandoned intellectual study before Oribasius rescued the tradition for Arabic culture.(Gutas, 1998) Whatever its origins, the narrative reflects al-Farabi’s symbolic standing in the Abbasid intellectual world. The Buyid era (945–1055), during which al-Farabi’s influence continued to shape Baghdad’s philosophical culture alongside the rising star of Avicenna, saw continued and arguably increased interest in the translated sciences alongside a flourishing of original scholarship — demonstrating how thoroughly the translation movement had seeded a self-sustaining intellectual culture.(Gutas, 1998)
Additional Philosophical Positions
Demonstration Versus Opinion
Al-Farabi introduced an important refinement into Islamic philosophy’s account of what philosophy is. He accepted the broad definition of philosophy as wisdom, but added to it a distinction between philosophy based on certainty — the kind achieved through logical demonstration — and philosophy based on widely-held opinion or dialectical persuasion.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) This distinction organized his hierarchy of the logical arts, in which demonstration holds the highest position and dialectic, rhetoric, and poetics are its subordinate instruments for communicating truth to audiences incapable of following demonstration.
The Ammonian Synthesis and Islamic Aristotelianization
Al-Farabi’s philosophical inheritance was shaped by a decisive development in late Alexandrian philosophy. Ammonius (5th–6th century CE), the head of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria, reportedly reached an agreement with Christian authorities that allowed him to continue teaching Aristotle in exchange for moderating the pagan religious dimensions of Neoplatonic philosophy.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) This “Ammonian synthesis” involved two parallel moves: Neoplatonizing Aristotle’s metaphysics (reading the unmoved Mover as a Neoplatonic One) and, correspondingly, Aristotelianizing Neoplatonic metaphysics (grounding the emanation hierarchy in Aristotelian causal logic).(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Al-Farabi, working with the Aristotelian tradition as transmitted through this Alexandrian synthesis and through the Syriac schools, inherited a corpus in which Platonic and Aristotelian elements were already intertwined. The Persian element was also decisive: Persian cultural intermediaries ensured that the encounter between Greece and Islam involved not just Greek texts but a Persian intellectual tradition that had already processed them.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)
The Development of the Concept of the One
Al-Farabi was part of a progressive development in Islamic philosophy’s account of divine unity. Al-Kindi had first named God the “True One” or “First Cause” in Plotinian terms; al-Farabi refined and systematized this account; and Ibn Sina developed it further into the famous distinction between the Necessary Existent (whose existence is required by its own nature) and possible existents (which exist only contingently).(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) This progressive refinement of the concept of absolute unity was one of the central achievements of Islamic philosophical theology and directly shaped the medieval scholastic tradition.
Islamic Humanism and the Farabist School
Al-Farabi was the intellectual ancestor of the Islamic humanist movement that reached its peak in the 10th century. The group of thinkers called “Islamic humanists” — including Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, his teacher al-Sijistani, and Ibn Miskawayh — traced their philosophical lineage to al-Farabi through a chain of teachers and students.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) The key link was al-Farabi’s student Yahya ibn ‘Adi, the Jacobite Christian who taught in Baghdad for the rest of the century and transmitted al-Farabi’s methods and questions to the humanist circle.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) The Neoplatonic framework of emanation provided the theoretical basis for the humanist understanding of how reason, through progressive perfection, participates in the higher intellects and ultimately in the divine — making philosophy itself a path of spiritual transformation.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996)
The Soul’s Mortality: Al-Farabi Versus Avicenna
One of the most significant points of divergence between al-Farabi and his successors concerns the immortality of the soul. Al-Farabi held, following Alexander of Aphrodisias, that only the human soul that has achieved genuine intellectual actualization survives death; souls that fail to develop their intellectual capacities do not persist as individual souls after the body’s dissolution.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Avicenna departed sharply from this position, arguing that the rational soul is immaterial and indestructible regardless of the degree of intellectual development achieved — a position with very different implications for the religious doctrine of personal resurrection and divine judgment.
Sufi Practice
Despite al-Farabi’s identity as the founder of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, he was also a practicing Sufi whose musical compositions are still performed in Sufi ritual orders.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) This biographical detail signals that the conventional opposition between philosophical rationalism and Sufi mysticism was not felt as a personal contradiction by him. His musical theory and composition were continuous with his interest in the soul’s perfection and its relationship to number, harmony, and the celestial spheres.
See Also
- avicenna
- aristotle
- al-kindi
- islamic-medicine
- canon-of-medicine
- aristotelian-tradition
- translation-movement