 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, The Second Master, Al-Farabi. One of the things I like about working on the history of philosophy is that it naturally leads you to work on all areas of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy is so specialized that it is becoming rare for one and the same person to work on, say, ethics and metaphysics, never mind these two areas plus epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and so on. But specialists in the history of philosophy often work on many or all of these areas. In fact, you're almost forced to do this if you are researching the most outstanding historical thinkers. Part of their greatness is often their ability to make innovations within many branches of philosophy, and to show how these branches are part of the same tree. You can't really understand Plato's ethics without understanding his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, nor can you work on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without grasping how it prepares the way for the Kantian ethical teaching. The first Muslim philosopher to offer us this kind of holistic and original philosophical system is Al-Farabi. We did see al-Kindi tackling a wide range of topics in philosophy, but it's up to the reader to figure out how his ideas on these topics might fit together. Ar-Razi seems to have been more systematic, but the loss of the writings in which he put forward his daring cosmology leave the interpreter with even more work to do, never mind the additional task of relating that cosmology to his surviving ethical treatises, which we'll be coming to in a later episode. From al-Farabi though, we have ambitious treatises which set out and interrelate views on metaphysics, theology, human nature, ethics, and political philosophy. He also produced more technical work in logic, and even that aspect of his thought clearly does relate to the rest of his system. In this, al-Farabi makes an interesting contrast not just to the earlier Muslim thinkers we've examined, but also to his Christian colleagues in the Baghdad school. Of these, the most significant is Yahya ibn Adi. More research is needed into ibn Adi, especially in light of new writings of his that have only recently been discovered in a manuscript preserved in Tehran. We might, for instance, come to a better understanding of how his treatises on Aristotelian philosophy relate to his Christian theological output. But my impression is that ibn Adi was more like al-Kindi, writing occasional works on well-defined topics and rarely giving us a view of the bigger picture. al-Farabi's system-building ambitions allowed him to exercise a much greater influence, to the point that he was honored with the title the Second Master. The First Master, of course, was Aristotle, who provided the frame within which al-Farabi hung his big picture theories. Because of his philosophical achievement and his influence, it would be nice if I could paint you a detailed picture of al-Farabi's life, but we unfortunately don't know much about that. His name provides a first clue and indicates that he came originally from Central Asia, either from Farab in Khorasan or Fariyab in Turkestan. We already saw that he was associated with the Baghdad Peripatetic School and in particular that he was the teacher of Yahya ibn Adi. This was not his only important Christian colleague. He tells us himself that he studied with another Christian named Yuhanna ibn Haylan. We also know that later in life he traveled to Syria and Egypt. He died in Damascus in the year 950 or 951. Here he enjoyed the patronage of Saif al-Dawla, who fought wars with the Byzantines and other enemies to establish a kingdom in northern Syria with Aleppo at its center. With his itinerant career and his dependence on the support of warlords, al-Farabi's biography anticipates that of Avicenna, who was likewise forced to spend his life moving from one city and patron to another. The broad outlines of Avicenna's philosophical system also look back to al-Farabi. Both were enthusiastic and talented logicians who wholeheartedly embraced the late ancient idea that philosophy must be grounded in the study of logic. From al-Farabi, Avicenna took over an understanding of God as a first cause who creates the rest of the universe by emanating it from himself. This process of emanation occurs necessarily and is achieved through a series of intermediaries. Al-Farabi also anticipates Avicenna by integrating his theory of knowledge into that emanationist system and making one and the same separate intellect responsible for both human knowledge and the forms of things down here on earth. There can be no doubting Avicenna's originality, but some of what seems to be new with him is actually original with al-Farabi. Avicenna and later thinkers like Averroes and Maimonides in Andalusia single out al-Farabi as the most important thinker of the early Arabic tradition and mostly ignore or disdain other predecessors. Modern scholars have unfortunately tended to follow suit and given little thought to al-Farabi's own intellectual context, but he was in some respects a typical member of the Baghdad school, even if he went beyond their core project of imitating the late ancient commentators on Aristotle. He did write commentaries of his own. These include a now-lost treatise devoted to Aristotle's ethics and numerous surviving writings on logic. Many of these are just summaries or paraphrases of the sort that was produced in antiquity by the rhetorician Themistius, remember him? and which will be produced again in the 12th century by Averroes. But we do have al-Farabi's full commentary as well as his paraphrase for Aristotle's On Interpretation. Inevitably, this leads al-Farabi to tackle our favourite philosophical puzzle from Aristotle's logic, the sea battle argument for determinism. We saw last time that Ibn Adi devoted a treatise to this argument, and although I'm aware that its familiarity may now be breeding contempt, it's worth looking briefly at what al-Farabi has to say too. I promise not to bring it up again for a while, in fact not until we get to Latin medieval philosophy. In his commentary on Aristotle's On Interpretation, al-Farabi challenges the usual assumption that Aristotle is trying to defeat an argument for determinism. That can't be right, because determinism is a topic that would be appropriately discussed in physics or metaphysics, whereas here Aristotle is doing logic. So we should understand things the other way around. When Aristotle denies that the present truth of propositions about the future shows that future events are necessary, he is simply assuming that the future events are not necessary. According to al-Farabi, this is blindingly obvious and the sort of thing only doubted by the more disreputable sort of Islamic theologian. As we'll see later, Islamic theology and disrepute are rarely far apart, as far as al-Farabi is concerned. On al-Farabi's interpretation, Aristotle is bringing up the deterministic argument only to make a point about the truth of propositions, which is relevant in logic. The point would be that propositions about the future cannot yet be settled as true or false, since otherwise the absurd consequence of determinism would follow. al-Farabi admits though that this solution will be awkward for someone who thinks that God knows the future. After all, if there is no truth now about whether I'll keep my promise to shut up about the sea battle until I get to Latin medieval philosophy, how can God know now whether I will keep that promise? It's actually not clear whether al-Farabi would accept that God knows such things. It may well be that he anticipates abbessena yet again in thinking that God in a sense lacks knowledge of particular events in our world, and that's something I do promise to say more about soon. Nonetheless, al-Farabi now offers a second solution of his own which I think has great philosophical merit. He says that present truths seem to make future events necessary only because the occurrence of those events is implied by the truth of the present propositions predicting them. In other words, if I say there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then that of course implies that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. But although there is a necessary connection between the statement and the event, the truth of the statement itself is not necessary. Rather, my statement, there will be a sea battle tomorrow, is contingently true, if it is true at all. So, if it is true, it only implies that the sea battle will take place contingently, not necessarily. By contrast, if I say 2 plus 2 will equal 4 tomorrow, what I say now is necessarily true because what it predicts is necessary. As we know from past episodes, Aristotelians had always discussed knowledge within the rubric of Aristotle's logic, and reasonably enough, since the posterior analytics, the crowning glory of his logical writings, is the closest thing we have to a work by Aristotle on epistemology. We have a detailed paraphrase of it by al-Farabi, and also a fascinating little treatise called On the Conditions of Certainty. Here, he lays out the various kinds of belief we can have, culminating in the perfectly certain beliefs envisioned by Aristotle in the posterior analytics. According to al-Farabi, we should only count ourselves as absolutely certain when what we believe is necessarily, essentially, and permanently true. Notice that this seems to suggest there is no absolute certainty about future events like sea battles, since those are certainly not permanent or essential. And, as we just saw, they are not necessary either. That's one reason I suspect that al-Farabi wasn't really worried about God's knowledge of the future. If future events aren't the sort of things one can know with absolute certainty and all God's knowledge is absolutely certain, then future events just aren't part of what God knows. al-Farabi also draws on the posterior analytics when he lays out his conception of the philosophical curriculum as a whole. He does this in several of his works, for instance in his Philosophy of Aristotle, an overview of Aristotle's philosophical writings. As we saw, al-Kindi also wrote a work along these lines, but al-Farabi seems to be considerably better informed. He's more in the dark when it comes to Plato, but that didn't stop him from writing a companion piece to this work on Aristotle called the Philosophy of Plato. As I mentioned before, Plato's dialogues were probably never known in complete translations in Arabic, though some were known in paraphrase summaries. Al-Farabi is likely not even using such summaries, but rather a translation of an ancient introduction to Plato. He simply goes through the dialogues title by title, often restricting himself to a dubious etymological explanation of each title. By the way, there's a third work often considered to form a trilogy along with the works on Plato and Aristotle, which argues for the harmony between the teachings of these two philosophers. But I think fairly convincing arguments have been made that it is either inauthentic or an early work whose contents al-Farabi later came to reject, so I won't say any more about it here. In the Philosophy of Aristotle, and in another work called the Attainment of Happiness, al-Farabi sets out his understanding of the late antique philosophical curriculum. In his version of this course of study, one should unsurprisingly begin with logic, thereafter progressing to physics and then metaphysics. Finally, one should turn to the practical subjects of ethics and political philosophy. This is where the posterior analytics becomes important. There, Aristotle explained how philosophical sciences can be built one upon another. Higher sciences provide the principles, or assumptions, on which lower sciences are built. A common example is that geometry provides the principles for the subordinate science of optics. That is, we need to use geometry to study things like reflections in mirrors, whereas the reverse is not true. Geometers have no need to know about optics. Ideally, the whole body of possible human knowledge can be envisioned as a hierarchy of sciences, with metaphysics, or first philosophy, establishing the highest principles upon which all other sciences depend. Talk about systematic. So why don't we start at the top, by doing metaphysics instead of logic and physics? Because, as Aristotle also pointed out, what is primary to us is usually not what is primary in itself. The most dramatic example is God. He is the first among causes, but certainly not the first cause we are aware of, or the easiest cause for us to understand. Rather, we begin with the everyday physical objects in the world around us, and, having understood these, work our way up towards understanding more fundamental principles, including God. But Al-Farabi resists the temptation to say that first philosophy is simply the study of God as first cause of all things. In a little essay he wrote on the purposes of Aristotle's metaphysics, Al-Farabi remarks that many people have been confused by this work because they assumed first philosophy must be nothing other than theology. Al-Kindi is an obvious culprit. He said precisely this at the beginning of his On First Philosophy. Instead, Al-Farabi wants to insist Aristotle's metaphysics is devoted to all the topics that are most primary among the sciences. That includes theology, insofar as God is the first cause of being for all other things, but also such principles as the law of non-contradiction, which Aristotle duly tackles in the fourth book of the metaphysics. Brief though this little essay is, Avicenna found it invaluable. He tells us that he read the metaphysics dozens of times, but never understood it until he came across Al-Farabi's little explanation. Presumably, what he found so helpful was Al-Farabi's rejection of the purely theological reading of Aristotle that was so prevalent in the Arabic tradition. So, now we know what Al-Farabi would like us to do—fully realize our potential for knowledge by working our way up from familiar things to genuinely primary things, and grasping all the sciences as one interlocking system. This constitutes what he calls ultimate happiness for mankind, hence the title of his work The Attainment of Happiness. But how do we get from where we are now, as mere podcast enthusiasts, to where Al-Farabi would like us to be? To answer that question, we need to turn from his systematic account of his philosophical curriculum to his systematic account of the universe. We find this laid out in his two most ambitious works, which have the not particularly punchy titles Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, and the Political Regime. These are the texts I mentioned earlier, which begin with accounts of the entire cosmos before moving on to discuss mankind and the ideal political arrangements in our cities. In these works, Al-Farabi begins not from what is familiar to us, but from what is truly primary. In just a few brilliantly innovative paragraphs, Al-Farabi begins by fusing together the emanationist scheme of Neoplatonism with ideas taken from Aristotle. You'll probably remember that, for Aristotle, God is a pure mind, which is the first cause of motion for the entire universe. You may not recall, though, that Aristotle posits not just this highest, separate intellect, but one intellect for each of the simple motions of the heavenly bodies. Broadly following this idea, Al-Farabi tells us, without argument, that every heavenly sphere has its own intellect. The Neoplatonic part comes in when he adds that these intellects and spheres descend from God in a kind of cascade of causation. God begins this cascade by emanating a first intellect, which is associated with the outermost sphere of the heavens. This sounds a lot like Plotinus, who believed that an intellect came forth from his first principle, the One. But unlike Plotinus, Al-Farabi has a whole series of celestial intellects, proceeding one by one, each one giving rise to the next, much as the first intellect came from God. The intellects are associated with the nested heavenly spheres, which are like transparent glass balls, one inside the other. Their motions around the earth are revealed to us by the visible planets seated upon them. This goes on until we arrive at the lowest of the intellects, which has responsibility for our world down here below the heavens. With all due respect to the Farabian God, the lowest separate intellect is arguably the most important and interesting entity in his entire system. Okay, it is not the first cause of all things, but it plays crucial and unique roles both in Al-Farabi's cosmology and in his theory of knowledge. It is able to carry out these two roles because, not unlike Plotinus's single intellect, it is thinking about the whole range of universal, intelligible forms that can be exemplified in our world. It has a perfect understanding of these forms, so that it is like a complete library of possible knowledge. But since it is a thinking intellect, if we compare it to a library, we should imagine it as a library that is always reading its own books. Its cosmological function, then, is to bestow its forms upon things here on earth, which are made of the four elements. When elemental matter is suitably mixed together so that it is prepared to be a baby giraffe, for instance, the intellect emanates the form of giraffe onto the matter. Zoo-keepers will scoff at this. They will insist that in their experience you get giraffes from mother and father giraffes, not from celestial intellects. But Al-Farabi knows better. What mother and father giraffes do, perhaps after a romantic candlelight dinner of dried grass and lukewarm water, is prepare some matter to be just right for receiving the form of giraffe, and that form is emanated from the lowest celestial intellect. This idea was extremely influential on Avicenna and others. In Arabic philosophical literature, the intellect is often honored with the phrase wahib as-suwār, which came into Latin as dāto'a for marum, the giver of forms. Influential or not, I suspect that Al-Farabi's theory will strike you as being nuttier than the snacks at an elephant's birthday party. But it actually solves a philosophical problem that rumbled along through antique philosophy. Plato introduced his infamous theory of forms, in part because he wanted to explain the one over many phenomenon. All giraffes participate in the one form of giraffe, which explains why they have a shared nature distinct from the one shared by elephants. But Al-Farabi is well aware of Aristotle's searching critique of the theory of forms, and agrees that we should not posit a second, transcendent world of perfect exemplars to solve the one over many problem. Because his own theory, with its giver of forms, is introduced in the context of a theory of emanation, it is often described as being neoplatonic or Platonist. But Al-Farabi himself would see it as anti-Platonist. According to his account, unity is provided not by Platonic forms, but by forms that are simply ideas in a mind, albeit that this mind is a single transcendent one. Furthermore, Al-Farabi's theory offers an explanation of the most controversial passage in all of Aristotle's writings, the fifth chapter of Book III of On the Soul. There, we are told that there is an eternally active separate intellect, which makes other kinds of thinking possible. Unlike me, Al-Farabi is pretty sure what Aristotle is talking about here, the giver of forms, which he therefore also calls the active intellect. As Al-Farabi explains in his letter on the intellect, the human mind goes through several stages as it works towards realizing its capacity for knowledge. It begins in a state of potentiality and is actualized through philosophical inquiry. Though he follows Aristotle in recognizing a role for sense experience in this process, ultimately Al-Farabi believes that the high grade of necessity and certainty required for true knowledge can only be secured through another sort of emanation from the giver of forms. This time, the forms will not be bestowed upon appropriately prepared matter, but instead on the appropriately prepared human mind. In part, what Al-Farabi is saying here was already stated by al-Kindi in his own letter on the intellect, which likewise spoke of a transcendent intellect that actualizes the human mind. But al-Kindi did not have the idea of giving the active intellect a cosmological role as well as a function in bringing about human knowledge. By making that move, al-Farabi is able to explain why my mind's receiving the form of giraffe or elephant from a separate intellect should allow me to know about the physical giraffes and elephants we see in zoos. In both cases, the same form is derived from the same source. It's just that in the knowledge case, that form is actualizing the potential of my mind, whereas in the zoo case it's actualizing matter's potential to become an animal. And al-Farabi makes one more innovative move we have not found in al-Kindi or anyone else thus far. He uses his theory of the intellect to explain prophecy. A prophet, he thinks, is basically someone whose mind has been fully actualized by the active intellect and who is in a position to share the resulting knowledge with the rest of mankind. How exactly does the prophet do this, and what are the consequences for al-Farabi's understanding of religion and society? Actualize your potential to find out by joining me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.