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The Reception and al-Kindī

The Greek sciences came into Arabic under the ʿAbbāsids, above all in the first two centuries of their rule, from the eighth century on. Many of the translators were Syrian Christians; in the ninth century two groups stand out, the circle of al-Kindī and Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq with his son and associates, and in the tenth the Christian logicians of Baghdad, Abū Bishr Mattā and Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī.

The tradition told its own stories of how this came about. Ibn al-Nadīm, in a chapter of his catalogue headed “Mention of the Reason Why Books on Philosophy and Other Ancient Sciences Became Plentiful in This Country”, tells of the caliph al-Maʾmūn’s dream, in which Aristotle appears to him: “‘What is good?’ He replied, ‘What is good in the mind.’ I said again, ‘Then what is next?’ He answered, ‘What is good in the law.’ I said, ‘Then what next?’ He replied, ‘What is good with the public.’ I said, ‘Then what more?’ He answered, ‘More? There is no more’” (Fihrist 7, tr. Dodge). Ibn Khaldūn tells it otherwise: al-Manṣūr asked the Byzantine emperor for mathematical works and received Euclid, and al-Maʾmūn “sent ambassadors to the Byzantine emperors … to discover the Greek sciences and to have them copied in Arabic writing”; the Muslims then “contradicted the First Teacher (Aristotle) on many points” and “surpassed their predecessors in the intellectual sciences” (Muqaddimah VI, tr. Rosenthal). al-Fārābī gave the science a longer road: “It is said that this science existed anciently among the Chaldeans … then to Egypt … to the Greeks … to the Syrians, and then to the Arabs … expounded in the Greek language, later in Syriac, and finally in Arabic” (Attainment of Happiness 53, tr. Mahdi).

al-Kindī, who died after 866, set out what philosophy is at the opening of On First Philosophy: “the human art which is highest in degree and most noble in rank is the art of philosophy, the definition of which is knowledge of the true nature of things, insofar as is possible for man. The aim of the philosopher is, as regards his knowledge, to attain the truth, and as regards his action, to act truthfully” (tr. Ivry). Its highest part is “the First Philosophy, i.e., knowledge of the First Truth Who is the cause of all truth”. Its content is what religion also brings: “The knowledge of the true nature of things includes knowledge of Divinity, unity and virtue, and a complete knowledge of everything useful … It is the acquisition of all this which the true messengers brought from God.” To those who would forbid it he answered that they must say whether acquiring it is necessary or not; if not, “it is necessary for them to bring a cause of this, and to give a demonstration of this; and the presentation of cause and demonstration are part of the possession of knowledge”. The treatise On Definitions, from al-Kindī or his circle, gives six definitions of philosophy, among them the love of wisdom, the imitation of God’s acts as far as man can, concern with death, and the art of arts and wisdom of wisdoms; they draw on Greek sources, the introductions to philosophy of late antiquity.

For al-Kindī the work is done together and over time. “No man by the diligence of his quest has attained the truth … When, though, the little which each one of them who has acquired the truth is collected, something of great worth is assembled”, and it was assembled “in preceding past ages, age after age, until this our time”. So the truth is to be taken wherever it is found: “We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us”, min ayna atā, from wherever it comes. His programme was “presenting the ancients’ complete statement … and completing that which they did not state completely, following the custom of the language and contemporary usage”. His critics, he wrote, “traffic in religion, though they are devoid of religion … one who trades in religion does not have religion”.

Whether Greek logic belonged to everyone was argued out in Baghdad in 932, in a debate recorded by Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī. The logician Abū Bishr Mattā defined his art: “I understand by Logic an instrument whereby sound speech is known from unsound, and wrong sense from right: like a balance.” The grammarian Abū Saʿīd al-Sīrāfī asked: “If Logic be the invention of a Greek made in the Greek language and according to Greek conventions … whence does it follow that the Turks, Indians, Persians, and Arabs should attend to it, and make it umpire?” Mattā answered that “in matters apprehended by the intellect all men are alike, as for example four and four are eight with all nations”; al-Sīrāfī that “Grammar, then, is Logic, only abstracted from the Arabic language, and Logic is Grammar, only rendered intelligible by language” (tr. Margoliouth).