Background
Al-Farabi was born in 872 in the Central Asia of Turkish parentage. His full name was Abu-Nasr Muhammad ibn-Muhammad al-Farabi.
(This long-awaited reissue of the 1969 Cornell edition of ...)
This long-awaited reissue of the 1969 Cornell edition of Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle contains Muhsin Mahdi's substantial original introduction and a new foreword by Charles E. Butterworth and Thomas L. Pangle. The three parts of the book, "Attainment of Happiness," "Philosophy of Plato," and "Philosophy of Aristotle," provide a philosophical foundation for Alfarabi's political works.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801487161/?tag=2022091-20
Al-Farabi was born in 872 in the Central Asia of Turkish parentage. His full name was Abu-Nasr Muhammad ibn-Muhammad al-Farabi.
Al-Farabi was studying in Baghdad, where most of his teachers were Christian Syrians who were expert in Greek science and philosophy.
Al-Farabi went to live with the sovereign of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawla and died in Damascus in 950. Farabi is reckoned among the greatest of Arab philosophers and honored by the epithet of "The Second Master, " the first being Aristotle.
After Kindi and before Avicenna, he was an eager student of Greek philosophy, especially of Plato and Aristotle, whose works he translated, epitomized, and imitated. Following the trend of the late Greek commentators on Aristotle, he believed that Aristotle and Plato substantially agreed and he tried diligently to reconcile their differences.
In sharp contrast to the empiricism of Rhazes, Farabi remained faithful to the deductive method; he maintained that the world was not eternal but created, endeavoring to prove that Aristotle had shared that view and that the gap between the absolute oneness of God and the multiplicity of the actual world is filled by a succession of emanations. He recognized in man a potential, an actual, and an acquired intellect, and he held that through the last insight into the Active Intellect, or God, may be reached.
Farabi is responsible for about one hundred works, many of which have perished, while others are preserved only in medieval Latin translations. In recent times some of his works have been discovered in their original Arabic texts. Among his most interesting writings is a book on The Perfect City, modeled upon Plato's Republic, and a Catalogue of Sciences, the first attempt made by an Arab to systematize human knowledge. Farabi cultivated science as well as philosophy and left a treatise on music, which has been translated into French, in which Greek theory is applied to Arabian practice.
(This long-awaited reissue of the 1969 Cornell edition of ...)
