Abstract
In this chapter we introduce the thought of al-Kindi—almost unanimously taken to be the first of the great Falasifa—and present him as a successful salesperson for Falsafa in the Muslim world. Even if his arguments are not all entirely successful, they are all ingenious. We present his thought as unified under the banner of what we call Evidentialism—a thesis that later became an axiom of the Enlightenment and, which, along with his take on Greek philosophy set the rough contours of, and opened a fertile intellectual terrain to, the ensuing tradition of Falsafa.
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Notes
- 1.
The “rightly guided” Caliphs are those four or three who immediately followed Muhammad, and were either close companions of his, or his genetic descendants. Here, of course, is where the split between Sunni and Shiite Islam occurs—the former acknowledging the Prophet’s nephew ‘Ali as a legitimate Caliph, and maintaining that the Caliphate should have been hereditary in the first instance (‘Ali the only hereditary candidate was not immediately installed as Caliph), while the Sunnis deny this.
- 2.
For an account of why this might have been politically expedient, see Gutas (1998).
- 3.
Incidentally, we do not know the chronology of al-Kindi’s works. All we have of his works are collected in one single manuscript discovered by Helmut Ritter and which is now held in Istanbul. We know that he wrote other works from a contemporary book-merchant’s book list, but again we do not know the chronology of them.
- 4.
- 5.
I take the coffee example from Linda Zagzebski (2003).
- 6.
Though recall the controversy as to what exactly Aristotle meant by “substance”.
- 7.
Time, according to Aristotle in the Physics, enumerates motion and so change.
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Booth, A.R. (2017). Al-Kindi and the Rise of Falsafa. In: Analytic Islamic Philosophy. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54157-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54157-4_3
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