The first comprehensive survey of Islamic philosophy from the seventh century to the present, this classic discusses Islamic thought and its effect on the cultural aspects of Muslim life. Fakhry shows how Islamic philosophy has followed from the earliest times a distinctive line of development, which gives it the unity and continuity that are the marks of the great intellectual movements of history.

Introduction The editors of this volume hope that it will prove useful for the study of philosophy in the Middle Ages by virtue of the comprehensiveness of ...

Al-Kindi was influenced by two Greek traditions in his attempts to explain vision, light and color. Most obviously, his works on optics are indebted to Euclid and, perhaps indirectly, to Ptolemy. But he also knew some works from the Aristotelian tradition that touch on the nature of color and vision. Al-Kindi explicitly rejects the Aristotelian account of vision in his De Aspectibus, and adopts a theory according to which we see by means of a visual ray emitted from the eye. (...) But in the same work, al-Kindi draws on Philoponus. (shrink)

Originally published in 1958. This volume brings into focus an area of Islamic religio-philosophical thought to which relatively little attention has been paid by modern scholars of Muslim thought. The importance of the subject lies in the fact that it constitutes a central point at the confrontation of the traditional Islamic and Hellenic thought currents.

In his seminal 1935 study of the internal senses in medieval2 thought, Harry Austryn Wolfson presented a detailed account of the development of the "classification and terminology" of the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions on sensory powers which he called, "post-sensationary faculties,"~ that is, powers which are posterior to the five external senses. In explaining the complex development of teachings on the internal senses from Aristotle's texts, Wolfson recounted the Aristotelian understanding of Galen who specifically locates the OHXVOTl'ttKOV or (...) cogitative faculty in the middle ventricle of the brain and John of Damascus whose equally Aristotelian account follows the Stagirite in attributing judgments of goodand bad as well as combination and separation of ideas to the omvoTl'ttKTJ 'lfUXTt or the cogitative soul and to ouxvma or cogitation.4 One of the many fruits of Wolfson's discussion was an explanation of the development of the Avicennian doctrine of estimation as arising"out of a desire to supplement a deficiency which seemed to exist in Aristotle's account of the actual motion of pursuit and avoidance which is observed in both man and animal. "5 With wahm used to describe instinctive behavior consequent upon non-rational animal imagination analogous to human reasoning or deliberation, Wolfson wrote, the Arabic fikr now was tobe associated with imagination and no longer was to be seen as simply the power of combining and separating ideas. "In the case of ouivotcx combined with imagination, it is the combination and separation of images, i.e., the construction out of images of things existent, new composite images of things nonexistent, or the breaking up of images of things existent into images of things nonexistent."6 From this moment on, and not without some foundation in Aristotle's own texts as indicated, fikr/ cogitatio and their related derivative terms are used to characterize human rational powers which are essentially activities involving the bodyand bodily instruments insofar as imagination is necessarily bodily. (shrink)

Nella prima parte dello studio l'A. esamina i tre tipi di commentari averroisti ad Aristotele: i cosiddetti «brevi», «medi» e «lunghi», evidenziandone le specifiche caratteristiche. Viene poi brevemente esaminato il rapporto fra il commento medio e quello lungo al De anima, sottolineando la dipendenza del primo dal secondo. La seconda parte dello studio tratta del commentario breve al De anima. L'A. sottolinea gli elementi di peculiarità di questo testo, in particolare l'interesse per l'aspetto fisiologico dell'anima e le relazioni anima-corpo. Lo (...) studio dei sensi, della sensibilità, del medium, dell'immaginazione, della ragione, dell'intelletto, dell'Intelletto Agente e il problema dell'intelletto materiale sono i principali argomenti su cui verte il commentario. (shrink)

The distinction between the potential intellect and the active intellect was first drawn by Aristotle. Medieval Islamic, Jewish, Christian philosophers, and European philosophers in the sixteenth century considered it a possible key to deciphering the nature of man and the universe. In this book, Herbert Davidson examines the treatment of intellect in Alfarabi , Avicenna and Averroes , with particular attention to the way in which they addressed the tangle of issues that grew up around the active intellect.