 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Aristotelian Society, the Baghdad School. As you've probably gathered, I'm the kind of guy who keeps his finger on the pulse of the younger generation. Many has been the time that I have found myself clubbing and have had a youngster come up to me and say, yo, aren't you the emcee who lays down that fresh podcast about the history of philosophy? Mad props. So, I'm always abreast of the latest slang that the hip kids are using out on the street. One example is old school, sometimes spelled with a K instead of a CH, with the insouciant disregard for orthography that makes the youth of today so charming. I am reliably informed that if you are old school, or indeed kickin' it old school with a K, this means that you are evoking an earlier era, for instance the early hip hop of the 1980s. Sometimes the trendiest thing is what existed before you were even born. In fact, nothing is more old school than kickin' it old school. They've been doing it pretty much ever since school was invented, and to be more specific, on the mean streets of 10th century Baghdad. Well, maybe not on the actual streets, to be honest, which were no doubt terribly crowded and noisy. As the center of the sprawling Abbasid empire, Baghdad was one of the largest cities in the pre-modern world and larger than any medieval European city. It attracted merchants and strivers from near and far, members of different language groups and faiths. Most importantly for our story, it became a meeting place for scholars and scientists, literary stylists and theologians. In this and the next few episodes, we'll begin in Baghdad and then cast a wider geographical net looking at aspects of the intellectual ferment of the 10th century. The wide range of possible philosophical approaches on offer in this period formed the background for the innovations of Avicenna, a thinker of such power and influence that he foreclosed many of those possibilities for future generations while opening new ones. Among the philosophical movements in the 10th century, the most old school, and the one most frequently criticized by Avicenna, was the so-called Baghdad Peripatetics. They were a group of mostly Christian thinkers who staged a revival of the philosophical activities of late ancient Alexandria. Unlike Al-Kindi and other scholars of the 9th century, the Baghdad school was able to draw in a full range of texts from the Aristotelian tradition. Of course, this included Arabic versions of Aristotle's own works, often made by members of the translation circle gathered around Hunayn ibn Ishaq. They also used translations of commentaries from the Alexandrian tradition and made their own contributions to the transmission of philosophy into Arabic. The man usually credited with being the founder of the group was Abu Bishr Matta, and the leading member of the school in the 10th century was Yahya ibn Adi. Both were Christians and both translated works by Aristotle and various Aristotelian authors like Alexander and Themistius. However, it seems that they were making their Arabic translations mostly or always from Syriac rather than Greek. This shows that among Christians, the Syriac language was still important for the study of Aristotelian thought right up into the 10th century. For the later tradition, though, the most famous member of this group was one who, exceptionally, was a Muslim, Al-Farabi. I suspect that his fellow Baghdad peripatetics would have been stunned to learn that of all the philosophers in the school, only his name would loom large in the history of philosophy. There are several reasons why he is better known than his Christian colleagues. For one thing, he was, unlike them, a major contributor to political philosophy. His writings on politics, and especially the relation between philosophy and religion, would have an impact on later thinkers in Andalusia, including the great Averroes and Maimonides. For another thing, his contributions in logic were outstanding enough to be commended by Avicenna, who was otherwise quite scornful of the output of the Baghdad school. Ultimately, some of Al-Farabi's works would be translated into Latin and used by medieval thinkers in Christian Europe, something we cannot say of Abu Bishr Mata or Yahya ibn Adi. It's interesting that the Baghdad school followed the lead of its Alexandrian model by bringing together philosophers of disparate faiths. Just as in Alexandria, the pagan Ammonius taught Christians like John Philoponus, so in Baghdad, Muslims like Al-Farabi could have Christian students like ibn Adi. Though none of the core members of the school were Jews, we can add that Yahya ibn Adi wrote replies to questions on philosophical topics sent to him by a Jew named Ibn Abi Sa'id al-Mausili. Their polite and learned correspondence can still be read today. As we'll see in a future episode, Al-Farabi's views on religion are perfectly designed to allow philosophers to exchange ideas at a universal level, which transcends sectarian disagreement. Yet, as in the case of late antiquity, this pleasant narrative of collaborative intellectual activity does not tell the whole story. We saw that pagans like Ammonius had to tread carefully so as not to annoy the Christian authorities in Alexandria, lest they suffer the same fate as the Platonists at Athens, who saw their academy shut down by imperial edict. The Christians at Baghdad were under no comparable pressure from Muslim political authorities, as far as we know, but there is evidence of heated inter-religious debate as well as inter-religious cooperation. When discussing al-Kindi, I mentioned a short work in which he used Porphyry's logical introduction to attack the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. His arguments are preserved only because they were quoted by Yahya ibn Adi in a counter-refutation. Ibn Adi also seems to have had a surprisingly intense interest in Islamic theology, or kalam. He discusses kalam arguments in several works, including another refutation of the doctrine of acquisition. According to this doctrine, God creates the actions which humans then acquire so as to bear moral responsibility for those actions. Again, we'll be looking at that in a future episode. Not enough work has been done on Ibn Adi for us to be sure why he engages with Islamic theologians in this way, but he doesn't seem to be too impressed. More generally, it is certainly not the case that the Baghdad peripatetics all understood philosophy to reside at a lofty height of abstraction transcending religious concerns. Ibn Adi wrote numerous treatises defending his conception of the Trinity. If I can ask you to kick it old school for a moment, please cast your mind back to our discussion of the Trinitarian debates of late antiquity. As we saw, those debates featured two opposed views about the person of Christ. On the Monophysite view, Christ was a full unity of man and God. The Monophysite position was diametrically opposed to that of the Nestorians, for whom Christ had two natures and two so-called hypostases, a duality that could preserve Christ's full humanity and full divinity. Centuries later, Ibn Adi is still fighting the same battle, writing apologetic works in Arabic that use Aristotelian philosophical ideas to defend Monophysite Christianity and criticize Nestorianism. Another example of someone who fused philosophical and theological activity into one career was Abul Faraj ibn Atayeb, who lived well into the 11th century. In fact, he died a few years after Evasenna did. That makes him the last member of the Baghdad school. Before he turned out the lights and locked up, he found time to write commentaries on books of the Bible and also on Aristotelian logical works. Good follower of the Alexandrian tradition that he was, he devoted his attention to the first two works you would have studied in late antiquity—Porphyry's Introduction and Aristotle's Categories. His commentaries on both texts survive. Though they do contain some new material, Ibn Atayeb depends extensively on the previous commentary tradition, and there are many passages which are little more than Arabic versions of the remarks of earlier Greek commentators. That this was still possible in the early 11th century vividly demonstrates the continuing vitality of late ancient Aristotelianism. The most famous single event associated with the Baghdad school once again highlights the tensions that could exist between members of different faiths at this time, even as it illustrates the possibility of interreligious intellectual exchange. For this event, we need to go back a century or so from the later Ibn Atayeb back to the school's founder, Abu Bishr Matta. We have a report of a public debate involving Abu Bishr held at the court of a vizier named Ibn al-Furat. It seems to have begun as a social gathering to exchange ideas and rhetorical flourishes called a majlis, a talking session that was a very rough equivalent of the salons of 17th century France. For another example of a majlis, think of the full and frank exchange of views in which Abu Bakr al-Razi defended his five eternal theory against his Ismaili opponent Abu Hatim al-Razi. Unlike the argument of the two Razi's though, Abu Bishr was drawn into a more formal debate when the vizier asked those present whether someone would be willing to step forward and refute the grand claims Abu Bishr made for the Aristotelian science of logic. Unfortunately for Abu Bishr, the man who volunteered was the highly articulate and capable Abu Said al-Sirafi. He was a learned expert on the Arabic language, one of many scholars who were, at that time, pushing forward the study of grammar. Also, unfortunately for Abu Bishr, our surviving account of what then transpired comes down to us from reporters who were much more sympathetic to al-Sirafi's side of the debate. So, we do not hear much of the case for logic, but instead get an amusing and detailed tirade from al-Sirafi, which explains that a knowledge of Arabic grammar makes the study of Greek logic superfluous. Adherents of Aristotle are simply being pretentious when they extol the power of logic, priding themselves on mastering this art from another culture. As al-Sirafi points out in a dig at Abu Bishr's Christian beliefs, all this expertise in logic hasn't prevented him from thinking that the same thing can be both one and three. Al-Sirafi's arguments are not merely ad hominem insults, though. He wants to break down Abu Bishr's stated view, according to which linguistic expressions are mere representations of thoughts. For Abu Bishr, what happens at the level of thought is universal and shared by all mankind, and logic is the study of this translinguistic kind of intellectual activity. Though our account doesn't give him a chance to explain this in detail, he seems to mean that a given philosophical demonstration will be sound so long as its premises are true and its argumentative structure valid. It is irrelevant which language one uses to then state the demonstration. Here, Abu Bishr would be thinking of a passage in Aristotle's On Interpretation, which says that what happens in the soul is the same for everyone, but linguistic utterance varies from one person to another. Against this, al-Sirafi argues, quite plausibly, that even if logical inferences have some kind of universal validity, those inferences will do no good unless we are in a position to express them in precise Arabic, Greek, or whatever. This task is not the child's play or afterthought Abu Bishr would like us to think it is. It is a matter of fine judgment and expertise to know the right way to express a given logical relation in Arabic. Furthermore, language has a powerful effect on our thought, since it is full of ambiguity and subtle differences in meaning. In an Arabic-speaking culture, it is therefore expertise in Arabic that will save you from making mistakes, both as you put your own thoughts into language and as you try to understand what is meant by the expressions used by other people. He proves this with a series of linguistic puzzles which trick Abu Bishr into making basic conceptual errors. For instance, Abu Bishr admits that it is fine to say in Arabic something like Zaid is the tallest of his brothers, but this would imply that Zaid is his own brother. The conclusion is obvious. If you only have enough dirham in your bank account to afford one course of instruction in 10th century Baghdad, you'll be much better off spending your hard-earned cash at As-Siddafi's grammar school than Abu Bishr's logical academy, no matter how old-school it is. As I say, our evidence concerning this debate is written by partisans of As-Siddafi, but it seems quite likely that the whole event really was a public relations disaster for Abu Bishr. This is shown by the reaction among what the hip kids might call his posse of logicians. Both Al-Farabi and Ibn Adi have some scornful things to say about grammar, and it is easy to imagine that they are trying to win the debate for Abu Bishr after the fact. Al-Farabi makes two improvements to Abu Bishr's rather naïve claim that logic transcends language completely and operates at the level of thought. First, he points out that thought itself is linguistically structured. He uses the phrase interior discourse to describe what is happening in the mind. Second, he says that logic operates both with this kind of interior discourse and at the level of the external speech we use to communicate with one another. Yet logic remains universal, just as Abu Bishr said. When it deals with actual linguistic expressions, it concentrates on features that occur in all languages. It simply ignores those features that are specific to the language being used, which are the object of grammar. These are indeed a potential source of confusion, but no part of the rigorous search for truth. Thus, grammar is relegated to the study of the parochial and superficial, leaving logic to be the indispensable tool for all mankind. What Al-Farabi is saying here has several advantages over what we find ascribed to Abu Bishr in the record of the debate with As-Siddafi. For one thing, he avoids an implausibly sharp distinction between language and thought. Also, his view makes better sense of what Aristotle says, always a big advantage for members of the Baghdad school. After all, the organon, as Aristotle's logical works were collectively called, is full of observations about language and not only about logical validity. As we saw when we looked at ancient Aristotelianism, there was then a debate about the subject matter of the first work of the organon, the categories. Is it about words or things? The prevailing view was the compromise offered by porphyry. It deals with words insofar as they refer to things. This is still the formulation we find in the Baghdad group so that they could hardly exclude the analysis of language from the study of logic. This comes through strongly in Yahya ibn Adi's contribution to the debate about the relative merits between logic and grammar. He wrote a short treatise devoted specifically to this topic. He admits that grammar and logic have a lot in common, as they both deal with verbal expressions. They differ in their goals, however. Grammar is, again, a relatively superficial and unimportant discipline. It ensures that we follow conventional rules. He has in mind things like agreement between subject and verb or, in languages such as Arabic, making sure that feminine nouns get modified by adjectives that are also feminine. But grammar, by itself, will not help you say anything true. If you ask a grammarian whether you can say, Buster Keaton is a giraffe, he will give you the go-ahead because what you have said is not grammatically wrong. This is not ibn Adi's example, by the way. Logic, though, is the study of, you guessed it, verbal expressions insofar as they refer to things, and has as its objective the production of demonstrations and hence of truth. That might make it sound as if logic is not just indispensable to philosophy but is in fact simply the same thing as philosophy. If I can attain demonstrations of the truth by using logic, then what else is left for the rest of philosophy to do? That impression might also be given by a slogan about logic, which is found in ancient commentators and then repeated by Abu Bishr and other members of the Baghdad school, Logic is an instrument by which one knows true from false and good from bad. As grand as that sounds, it's important to note that it is still only an instrument. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek word organon. It does not identify truth or the good by itself, but is the indispensable tool that helps us to do so. How exactly does it help? For a well-considered answer, we can turn to another short treatise by ibn Adi. He explains that logic allows us to extend what we already know to be true by combining together these truths to reach new conclusions. Logic will tell you for instance that if you know that A is B and that every B is not C, then you can infer that A is not C. But that won't provide you with any truths about the world until you substitute in verbal expressions for the variable letters. For instance, if you already know that Buster Keaton is a silent movie comedian and that every silent movie comedian is not a giraffe, this logical scheme will allow you to infer that Buster Keaton is not a giraffe. Try doing that with grammar. Ibn Adi was nicknamed the logician, from which you might already expect that this defense of logic over grammar was not his only contribution to the field. Another interesting logical work of his is called On the Nature of the Possible. It is devoted to dealing with an argument that will be something of a golden oldie for regular listeners to this podcast, the sea battle argument that Aristotle discusses in On Interpretation. Very unusually, Ibn Adi combines an independent treatise on the deterministic argument with a commentary on the relevant chapter from Aristotle. To remind you, the argument is that if there are already truths now predicting what will happen in the future, then the future events cannot help occurring. They will be necessary. For Ibn Adi, what this means is that there will be nothing that is merely mumkin, an Arabic word that is usually translated possible but could be more exactly rendered as contingent. What is mumkin, or contingent, is neither impossible nor necessary. For instance, we naturally think that it is merely contingent and not necessary that you are listening to this right now. You could have done something else, after all. Like the late ancient Christian thinker Boethius, Ibn Adi is particularly concerned with the version of the sea battle argument that invokes God's knowledge of the future rather than truths about the future in general. And, like Boethius, he says that what God knows can be merely contingent even though God's knowledge has the full force of necessity. For, the features of the knower are not shared with the features of what is known. He adds an example. Without changing, God can know about things that involve change. For instance, he has eternally and unchangingly known about your listening to first the beginning, then the middle, and now nearly the end of this episode. And God knows you won't stop listening now. If this is right, then God can likewise know necessarily things that are in themselves contingent. So, the only reason to fear that God's knowledge makes things necessary would be if God actually caused them to happen by knowing them. This is, however, not the case, as Ibn Adi shows by going through the four types of cause recognized by Aristotle—form, matter, final cause, and efficient cause—and showing that God's knowledge does not fall under any of the four types. There was no Latin Arabic translation movement for Ibn Adi to draw on, so obviously he is not here being influenced by Boethius. The overlap between their solutions is instead explained by the fact that both are making careful use of the Greek texts written at the end of antiquity by Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle. In fact, these two Christians, Boethius and Ibn Adi, are, ironically enough, making use of a distinction originally introduced by the arch-pagan Neoplatonist, the Amblicus. It was he who first argued that the features of knowledge—for instance, necessity or immutability—are those appropriate to the knower, not to what is known. The remarkably close engagement of the Baghdad school with these late ancient scholars is also abundantly clear from one of the most fascinating manuscripts we have for this period of philosophy. Held in the Dutch city of Leiden, it contains an Arabic translation of Aristotle's physics, further translation of comments by Greek thinkers like Philoponus, and additional commentary by the Baghdad Peripatetics. With texts like this, the old school of Alexandria was revived in the new school of 10th century Baghdad. The Aristotelians of Baghdad may not have had a lighthouse to look at like they did in Alexandria, but they did have a philosophical heavyweight. He was their star pupil, and before we graduate to another topic, I'd like to give him a close examination. So bring an apple, or if you prefer, a PC, to class next week and join me for Al-Farabi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.