Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy is philosophy that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Two terms traditionally used in the Islamic world are sometimes translated as philosophy—falsafa, which refers to philosophy as well as logic, mathematics, and physics; and kalam, which refers to a rationalist form of Scholastic Islamic theology which includes the schools of Ash'arism, Maturidism and Mu'tazilism.
Early Islamic philosophy began with al-Kindi in the 2nd century of the Islamic calendar and declined with Ibn Rushd in the 6th century AH, broadly coinciding with the period known as the Islamic Golden Age. The death of Ibn Rushd effectively marked the end of a specific discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Islamic peripatetic school, and philosophical activity declined significantly in the west of the Islamic world, including al-Andalus and the Maghreb.
Islamic philosophy persisted for much longer in the east of the Islamic world, particularly in Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mughal Empire, where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Averroism, Illuminationism, mystical philosophy, transcendent theosophy, and the school of Isfahan. Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah, made important contributions to the philosophy of history. Interest in Islamic philosophy revived during the Nahda movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and continues to the present day.
Islamic philosophy had a major impact in Christian Europe, where translation of Arabic philosophical texts into Latin "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world", with a particularly strong influence of Muslim philosophers being felt in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics.
Introduction
Islamic philosophy refers to philosophy produced in an Islamic society. As it is not necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor exclusively produced by Muslims, many scholars prefer the term "Arabic philosophy."Islamic philosophy is a generic term that can be defined and used in different ways. In its broadest sense it means the world view of Islam, as derived from the Islamic texts concerning the creation of the universe and the will of the Creator. In another sense it refers to any of the schools of thought that flourished under the Islamic empire or in the shadow of the Arab-Islamic culture and Islamic civilization. In its narrowest sense it is a translation of Falsafa, meaning those particular schools of thought that most reflect the influence of Greek systems of philosophy such as Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism.
Some schools of thought within Islam deny the usefulness or legitimacy of philosophical inquiry. Some argue that there is no indication that the limited knowledge and experience of humans can lead to truth. It is also important to observe that, while "reason" is sometimes recognised as a source of Islamic law, it has been claimed that this has a totally different meaning from "reason" in philosophy.
The historiography of Islamic philosophy is marked by disputes as to how the subject should be properly interpreted. Some of the key issues involve the comparative importance of eastern intellectuals such as Ibn Sina and of western thinkers such as Ibn Rushd, and also whether Islamic philosophy can be read at face value or should be interpreted in an esoteric fashion. Supporters of the latter thesis, like Leo Strauss, maintain that Islamic philosophers wrote so as to conceal their true meaning in order to avoid religious persecution, but scholars such as Oliver Leaman disagree.
Formative influences
The main sources of classical or early Islamic philosophy are the religion of Islam itself and Greek philosophy which the early Muslims inherited as a result of conquests, along with pre-Islamic Indian philosophy and Persian philosophy. Many of the early philosophical debates centered around reconciling religion and reason, the latter exemplified by Greek philosophy.Early Islamic philosophy
In early Islamic thought, which refers to philosophy during the "Islamic Golden Age", traditionally dated between the 8th and 12th centuries, two main currents may be distinguished. The first is Kalam, which mainly dealt with Islamic theological questions, and the other is Falsafa, which was founded on interpretations of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. There were attempts by later philosopher-theologians at harmonizing both trends, notably by Ibn Sina who founded the school of Avicennism, Ibn Rushd who founded the school of Averroism, and others such as Ibn al-Haytham and Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.''Kalam''
ʿIlm al-Kalām is Islamic theology that seeks to establish principles through dialectical reasoning. In Arabic, the word literally means "speech".One of the first debates was that between partisans of the Qadar, who affirmed free will; and the Jabarites, who believed in fatalism.
At the 2nd century of the Hijra, a new movement arose in the theological school of Basra, Iraq. A pupil of Hasan of Basra, Wasil ibn Ata, left the group when he disagreed with his teacher on whether a Muslim who has committed a major sin invalidates his faith. He systematized the radical opinions of preceding sects, particularly those of the Qadarites and Jabarites. This new school was called Mu'tazilite.
The Mu'tazilites looked in towards a strict rationalism with which to interpret Islamic doctrine. Their attempt was one of the first to pursue a rational theology in Islam. They were however severely criticized by other Islamic philosophers, both Maturidis and Asharites. The great Asharite scholar Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi wrote the work Al-Mutakallimin fi 'Ilm al-Kalam against the Mutazalites.
In later times, Kalam was used to mean simply "theology", i.e. the duties of the heart as opposed to fiqh, the duties of the body.
''Falsafa''
Falsafa is a Greek loanword meaning "philosophy". From the 9th century onward, due to Caliph al-Ma'mun and his successor, ancient Greek philosophy was introduced among the Arabs and the Peripatetic School began to find able representatives. Among them were Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes. Another trend, represented by the Brethren of Purity, used Aristotelian language to present a primarily Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean worldview.During the Abbasid caliphate, a number of thinkers and scientists, some of them heterodox Muslims or non-Muslims, played a role in transmitting Greek, Hindu and other pre-Islamic knowledge to the Christian West. Three speculative thinkers, Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Al-Kindi, combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam.
Ahmad Sirhindi, 17th century Indian Islamic scholar, has viewed that the Greek philosophy about creations are incompatible with Islamic teaching by quoting several chapters of Quran. Furthermore, Sirhindi criticize the method of interpretating the meaning of Quran with philosophy.
End of the classical period
By the 12th century, Kalam, attacked by both the philosophers and the orthodox, perished for lack of champions. At the same time, however, Falsafa came under serious critical scrutiny. The most devastating attack came from Al-Ghazali, whose work Tahafut al-Falasifa attacked the main arguments of the Peripatetic School.Averroes, Maimonides' contemporary, was one of the last of the Islamic Peripatetics and set out to defend the views of the Falsafa against al-Ghazali's criticism. The theories of Ibn Rushd do not differ fundamentally from those of Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Tufail, who only follow the teachings of Avicenna and Al-Farabi. Like all Islamic Peripatetics, Averroes admits the hypothesis of the intelligence of the spheres and the hypothesis of universal emanation, through which motion is communicated from place to place to all parts of the universe as far as the supreme world—hypotheses which, in the mind of the Arabic philosophers, did away with the dualism involved in Aristotle's doctrine of pure energy and eternal matter.
But while Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and other Persian and Muslim philosophers hurried, so to speak, over subjects that trenched on traditional beliefs, Ibn Rushd delighted in dwelling upon them with full particularity and stress. Thus he says, "Not only is matter eternal, but form is potentially inherent in matter; otherwise, it were a creation ex nihilo". According to this theory, therefore, the existence of this world is not only a possibility, as Avicenna declared, but also a necessity.
Logic
In early Islamic philosophy, logic played an important role. Sharia placed importance on formulating standards of argument, which gave rise to a novel approach to logic in Kalam, but this approach was later displaced by ideas from Greek philosophy and Hellenistic philosophy with the rise of the Mu'tazili philosophers, who highly valued Aristotle's Organon. The works of Hellenistic-influenced Islamic philosophers were crucial in the reception of Aristotelian logic in medieval Europe, along with the commentaries on the Organon by Averroes. The works of al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and other Muslim logicians who often criticized and corrected Aristotelian logic and introduced their own forms of logic, also played a central role in the subsequent development of European logic during the Renaissance.According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Important developments made by Muslim logicians included the development of "Avicennian logic" as a replacement of Aristotelian logic. Avicenna's system of logic was responsible for the introduction of hypothetical syllogism, temporal modal logic and inductive logic. Other important developments in early Islamic philosophy include the development of a strict science of citation, the isnad or "backing", and the development of a method to disprove claims, the ijtihad, which was generally applied to many types of questions.