SAUDI ARABIA

PHILOSOPHERS
Rossite Novesteras-Ramilo
Ph. D., Educational Management
Asian/Oriental Philosophy
• Introduction to Islamic Philosophy
• Saudi Arabia Philosophers:
Al-Kindi
Avicenna
Mulla Sadra
EARLY ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
• Began in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic Calendar
(early 9th century CE) and lasted until the 6th century AH
(late 12th century CE).
• Also known as Islamic Golden Age for the achievements
of this period has a crucial influence on the development
of modern philosophy and science.
• The main sources of classical or early Islamic philosophy
are the religion of Islam itself (especially ideas derived
and interpreted from the Qur’an) and Greek philosophy
which the early Muslims inherited as a result of conquests.
• In the religion of Islam, two words are sometimes
translated as philosophy -- falsafa (literally
"philosophy"), which refers to philosophy as well as
logic, mathematics and physics);
• and Kalam is the philosophy that seeks Islamic
theological principles through dialectic. In Arabic, the
word literally means "speech".
• Islamic philosophy has also been described as the
systematic investigation of problems connected with
life, the universe, ethics, society, and so on as
conducted in the Muslim world.
al-Kindī - 801–873 AD (Islamic Golden Age)
• Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ
al-Kindī
• Was a polymath, mathematician,
physician and musician.
• known as "the Philosopher of the Arabs“
• Al-Kindi was unanimously hailed as the
"father of Islamic or Arabic philosophy“
for his synthesis, adaptation and
promotion of Greek and Hellenistic
philosophy in the Muslim world.
Philosophy
• His greatest contribution to the development of Islamic
philosophy was his efforts to make Greek thought both
accessible and acceptable to a Muslim audience.
• As well as translating many important texts, much of
what was to become standard Arabic philosophical
vocabulary originated with al-Kindi; indeed, if it had not
been for him, the work of other Islamic philosophers
like might not have been possible.
• He did make clear that he believed revelation
was a superior source of knowledge to reason
because it guaranteed matters of faith that
reason could not uncover.
• He successfully incorporated Aristotelian and
(especially) Neo-Platonist thought into an Islamic
philosophical framework. This was an important
factor in the introduction and popularization of
Greek philosophy in the Muslim intellectual
world.
METAPHYSICS
• According to al-Kindi, the goal of metaphysics is
the knowledge of God. For this reason, he does
not make a clear distinction between
philosophy and theology, because he believes
they are both concerned with the same subject.
METAPHYSICS
• Central to al-Kindi's understanding of metaphysics is
God's absolute oneness, which he considers an
attribute uniquely associated with God (and
therefore not shared with anything else). By this he
means that while we may think of any existent thing
as being "one", it is in fact both "one" and many".
• “I see an elephant”, by means “I see one
elephant”, but the term ‘elephant’ refers to species
of animal that contains many.
METAPHYSICS
• In addition to absolute oneness, al-Kindi also described
God as the Creator. This means that He acts as both a
final and efficient cause. al-Kindi conceived of God as
an active agent.
• The key idea here is that God "acts" through created
intermediaries, which in turn "act" on one another –
through a chain of cause and effect – to produce the
desired result. In reality, these intermediary agents do
not "act" at all, they are merely a conduit for God's own
action.
METAPHYSICS
• This is especially significant in the development
of Islamic philosophy, as it portrayed the "first
cause" and "unmoved mover"
of Aristotelian philosophy as compatible with the
concept of God according to Islamic revelation.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina) c. 980—1037
• Born in Afshana near Bukhara in
Central Asia.
• He is probably the most significant
philosopher in the Islamic tradition
and arguably the most influential
philosopher of the pre-modern era.
• He articulated a development in
the philosophical enterprise in
classical Islam and even analyze
and interpret Qur’an.
PHILOSOPHY
• Primarily a metaphysical philosopher of being
who was concerned with understanding the
self’s existence in this world in relation to its
contingency, Avicenna’s philosophy is an
attempt to construct a coherent and
comprehensive system that accords with the
religious exigencies of Muslim culture.
• The philosophical space that he articulates for God as
the Necessary Existence lays the foundation for his
theories of the soul, intellect and cosmos.
• Furthermore, he articulated a development in the
philosophical enterprise in classical Islam away from the
apologetic concerns for establishing the relationship
between religion and philosophy towards an attempt
to make philosophical sense of key religious doctrines
and even analyse and interpret the Qur’an.
Theory of Knowledge
• The second most influential idea of Avicenna is his
theory of the knowledge. The human intellect at birth is
rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is
actualized through education and comes to know.
• Knowledge is attained through empirical familiarity with
objects in this world from which one abstracts universal
concepts.
Theory of Knowledge
• It is developed through a syllogistic method of
reasoning; observations lead to prepositional
statements, which when compounded lead to further
abstract concepts.
• The intellect itself possesses levels of development from
the material intellect (al-‘aql al-hayulani), that
potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active
intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘il), the state of the human
intellect at conjunction with the perfect source of
knowledge.
METAPHYSICS
• In metaphysics, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) defined
truth as: "What corresponds in the mind to what
is outside it.“
• The knowledge of anything, since all things have
causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is
known by its causes.
MULLA SADRA
• c. 1571-1640 – Post Classical Islamic
Philosophy
• is arguably the most significant Islamic
philosopher after Avicenna in the
Muslim world in the last four hundred
years.
• He was later given the title of Sadr al-Muta’allihin
(Master of the theosists) for his approach to philosophy
that combined an interest in theology and drew upon
insights from mystical intuition.
• He became famous as the thinker who revolutionized
the doctrine of existence in Islamic metaphysics and
extended the shift from an Aristotelian substance
metaphysics to a (Neoplatonic) process metaphysics of
change, from a metaphysics grounded in the primacy
of substances as the stuff of existence to a metaphysics
founded upon and moved by acts of being.
PHILOSOPHY
• Common with other pre-modern traditions of
philosophy, Mulla Sadra conceives of philosophy as
more than a ratiocinative inquiry. It is a mode of being
and a way of life whose goal is wisdom and the
cultivation of a holy life in which the sage strikes a
resemblance to the divine (cf. Plato's Theaetetus).
PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophy is the pursuit of metaphysical truths that are
not merely understood and grasped through cognition,
but are lived realities, in which philosophers, again
following the Platonic tradition, are integrated souls
who combine theoretical and practical knowledge
and its implementation to effect a holistic ethics of
living.
• Mulla Sadra bought "a new philosophical insight in
dealing with the nature of reality" and created "a major
transition from essentialism to existentialism” in Islamic
philosophy, several centuries before this occurred in
Western philosophy.
• For Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and
is thus principle since something has to exist first and
then have an essence."
• Existence is pure goodness (Mulla Sadra 2001-5,
I: 395-7). Mulla Sadra reiterates this basic
Neoplatonic maxim. Existence is the ground for
all value and its absence constitutes evil.
Because existence is a primary concept without
which no other concept is meaningful, it is
rationally good.