Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy

The Aristotelian science as a systematic whole, ruled by demonstration and made available together with Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Galen, paved the way for al-Farabi to build up the project of a curriculum of higher education, which was meant to subsume the native Islamic sciences in the broader system of the liberal arts and philosophical sciences. Both the cross-pollination of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions of the Kindian age, and the rise of a complete system of rational sciences in the light of Farabi’s educational syllabus of the philosopher-king, lie in the background of Avicenna’s program to provide the summa of demonstrative science—from logic to philosophical theology—as a necessary step for the soul to return to its origin, the intelligible realm. When Averroes, two centuries after the end of the age of the translations, resumed the project of building up the demonstrative science as a systematic whole, he had recourse to the Greek sources in Arabic translation which were available in the Muslim West, mostly Aristotle and his commentators.