The Rise of Islamic Philosophy: Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi

Islamic philosophy (falsafa) emerged from one of history's great translation movements, centered in Baghdad's Bayt al-Hikma ('House of Wisdom'), an institution patronized especially by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun in the early ninth century, though translation activity both preceded and outlasted his reign. Over roughly two centuries, translators, many of them Syriac-speaking Christians such as the celebrated Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his circle, rendered into Arabic the bulk of the extant corpus of Greek philosophy and science: nearly all of Aristotle's works, commentaries by late-antique Neoplatonists, Galen's medical corpus, and Neoplatonic texts, some of which, like the so-called Theology of Aristotle (actually excerpts from Plotinus's Enneads) and the Liber de Causis (drawn from Proclus), were mistakenly attributed to Aristotle himself and profoundly shaped how Aristotle was read in the Islamic world. This massive project of transmission preserved and transformed a large portion of the Greek philosophical heritage at a time when much of it was inaccessible in the Latin-speaking West, laying the textual foundation on which Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes would build.