The Khorasanian philosopher known as al-Muʿallim al-Thānī — the Second Teacher, after Aristotle — whose synthesis of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics with Platonic political philosophy founded the falsafa tradition and gave Avicenna the conceptual resources to construct his system.
al-farabi
Khorasanian philosopher (c. 870–950) commonly regarded as the founder of Arabic-Islamic Aristotelianism, whose commentaries on Aristotle and original works of political philosophy, logic, and metaphysics established the Arabic falsafa tradition and supplied the framework Avicenna would systematize.
c. 870–950 CE; precise dates uncertain
Life
Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī was born around 870 CE in Wāsij near Fārāb in Khorāsān (in present-day Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan; the precise location is uncertain and has been debated by Dimitri Gutas and others). The biographical sources are late and largely anecdotal: the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm (compiled around 988), the medical-philosophical biographies of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (d. 1270) and Ibn Khallikān (d. 1282). Modern scholars including Joep Lameer and Gerhard Endress have shown that the most colorful biographical traditions — al-Farabi as Sufi ascetic wandering in green Sufi robes, as physician to caliphal courts — are largely later invention.
What appears reasonably secure: al-Farabi was Turkic by origin (his name al-Tūrkī appears in early sources, though his exact ethnicity has been debated); he received his philosophical training in Baghdad, then the dominant center of Arabic philosophical learning, under the Christian Aristotelian logicians Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān and Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus; he taught philosophy in Baghdad through most of his productive career; in his last years he moved to Damascus under the patronage of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla. He died in Damascus around 950, aged about eighty.
The Baghdad philosophical milieu in which al-Farabi worked was the inheritance of the great ninth-century translation movement — the project under the early Abbasid caliphs, organized largely by Syriac-speaking Christians like Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, that had rendered the major works of Greek philosophy and science into Arabic. By al-Farabi's generation the translations were largely complete; the task he and his contemporaries inherited was to digest, interpret, and develop the Greek inheritance as living philosophical work.
The Second Teacher
The honorific al-Muʿallim al-Thānī (the Second Teacher) was conferred on al-Farabi by Arabic philosophical tradition, with Aristotle as the First. The honorific reflects the depth of al-Farabi's commentary work on the Aristotelian corpus and the centrality of his readings to subsequent Arabic engagement with Aristotle. Avicenna, recounting in his autobiography his struggle with Aristotle's Metaphysics until al-Farabi's commentary unlocked it, witnesses to the standard role of the Farabian readings in the philosophical formation of the next generation.
The commentary work spans most of the Aristotelian Organon (the logical works), the Physics, the De Anima, the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric, and the Poetics. Much of this commentary survives only in fragments, in quotations by later authors, or in the surviving treatises that bear traces of the commentary work. Where the Greek philosophical inheritance was incomplete in the Arabic translation — al-Farabi did not have access to Aristotle's Politics, for instance — he composed original works to fill the gap, drawing on the Platonic Republic and Laws that the Arabic tradition did possess.
Logic and the Philosophy of Language
Al-Farabi's logical writings are extensive: short and long treatments of all the works of the Aristotelian Organon (the Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations), short treatises on isolated logical questions, and the Kitāb al-Ḥurūf (Book of Letters) — a philosophical lexicon that defines the technical vocabulary of philosophy in Arabic against the categories of ordinary language.
The Kitāb al-Ḥurūf is, in some respects, al-Farabi's most distinctive work. The book treats the philosophical use of language as inherited from Greek through Arabic translation, the categories of the Organon in relation to Arabic linguistic categories, and the historical development by which a philosophical vocabulary in any language is built. The text — edited by Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut, 1969) — has been read by Charles Butterworth, Deborah Black, and others as al-Farabi's most sustained reflection on the relation between philosophy and the cultural-linguistic medium in which philosophy must be expressed.
The context for this work was a famous Baghdad debate of 932 between al-Farabi's teacher Abū Bishr Mattā (a Christian Aristotelian) and the Arab grammarian Abū Saʿīd al-Sīrāfī, conducted at the court of the vizier Ibn al-Furāt and reported by the litterateur al-Tawḥīdī. Al-Sīrāfī had argued that logic was a Greek grammar, valid only for Greek, with no claim to universality; Mattā had replied weakly. Al-Farabi's logical and linguistic work answered the grammarian's critique in greater depth, defending the universality of logical structure against the particularity of grammatical accident.
Political Philosophy
Al-Farabi's most distinctive original contribution was political philosophy. Working without Aristotle's Politics but with the Arabic Republic and Laws, he composed a series of political treatises that integrated the Platonic philosopher-king with the Islamic prophet and the metaphysical hierarchy of the falsafa tradition.
The major political works:
Arāʾ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila (Principles of the Views of the People of the Virtuous City, also translated as The Virtuous City) presents the metaphysical-cosmological framework (the First Cause and the procession of intellects, the soul and its faculties, prophecy as the highest cognitive achievement) and the political theory (the virtuous city as the polis ordered to the perfection of its inhabitants under the rule of a philosopher-prophet).
al-Siyāsa al-Madaniyya (The Political Regime) develops similar themes with greater attention to the typology of defective regimes (the ignorant city, the wicked city, the city of necessity, the city of vile pleasure) and to the role of religious symbols in communicating philosophical truths to the multitude.
Taḥṣīl al-Saʿāda (The Attainment of Happiness) integrates ethics and politics, arguing that human happiness consists in theoretical and practical perfection achievable only in a community properly ordered by philosophical wisdom.
The distinctive Farabian doctrine: the philosopher-prophet. The supreme ruler of the virtuous city possesses both philosophical perfection (the perfection of the rational faculty by union with the Active Intellect) and prophetic perfection (the perfection of the imaginative faculty by reception of intelligibles through divine emanation). The combination allows the philosopher-prophet to know the truth philosophically and to communicate it to the multitude through religious symbols, narratives, and laws. The historical exemplar of this combination is Muhammad; the philosophical paradigm is Plato's philosopher-king.
Muhsin Mahdi's Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Charles Butterworth's translations, and the recent work of Joshua Parens, Christopher Colmo, Damien Janos, and others have produced the framework within which al-Farabi's political thought is now studied.
Metaphysics and Cosmology
The metaphysical framework that al-Farabi developed and that Avicenna would systematize involves several connected doctrines. The First Cause (al-sabab al-awwal) is the absolute, simple, necessary existent from which all that is proceeds. From the First Cause emanates a First Intellect; from each intellect in turn proceed a further intellect and a celestial sphere; the procession terminates in the Tenth or Active Intellect, which governs the sublunary world and serves as the source of intelligible forms for human cognition.
The scheme is Neoplatonic in inspiration, drawn principally from the Theology of Aristotle (the Arabic paraphrase of selected Plotinian Enneads misattributed to Aristotle) and from the Liber de Causis (the Arabic Proclean text similarly misattributed). Al-Farabi's distinctive contribution was the systematic integration of this Neoplatonic emanation with Aristotelian categories of substance, form, matter, and cause.
The psychology that follows: the human rational soul is initially the material intellect, mere potentiality for thought. Through reception of forms from the Active Intellect it becomes the actual intellect, then — in the rare case of philosophical perfection — the acquired intellect, capable of intellectual union with the Active Intellect and a foretaste of immortal contemplation. This account, transmitted through Avicenna to the Latin West, shaped Aquinas's psychology of cognition and the subsequent Latin debates on the unity or plurality of the intellect.
Reception
Within the Islamic philosophical tradition, al-Farabi's role was foundational. Avicenna built directly on the Farabian framework; the broader falsafa tradition treated al-Farabi as the second teacher whose interpretations and conceptual resources defined the subject. Maimonides, in a famous letter to the translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, recommended al-Farabi as the only philosophical writer whose works could be read with complete confidence: "all that he composed is pure flour." The Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bajja (Avempace, d. 1138) developed al-Farabi's political philosophy in his Tadbīr al-Mutawaḥḥid (Governance of the Solitary), and through Ibn Bajja the Farabian framework reached Averroes.
The Latin reception of al-Farabi was less direct than that of Avicenna or Averroes. Some of his shorter logical and metaphysical treatises were translated into Latin in twelfth-century Toledo (the De Intellectu, the De Ortu Scientiarum) and were known to the early Latin Scholastics. The political works were not translated and remained largely unknown in the Latin West until the modern period.
The modern recovery of al-Farabi as a major political philosopher owes much to the work of Leo Strauss (whose 1945 article "Farabi's Plato" inaugurated the modern American Straussian engagement with medieval Islamic political philosophy) and his student Muhsin Mahdi, who produced critical editions and translations of the major political works over a fifty-year scholarly career. The contemporary Farabi scholarship is divided between the Straussian school (interested in the political-esoteric reading) and the historical-textual school (interested in the metaphysical and logical works), with Charles Butterworth, Deborah Black, Damien Janos, Olga Lizzini, and others contributing significant work to both.
Significance
Al-Farabi's importance is fourfold. As commentator on Aristotle, he supplied the conceptual resources that made Aristotelian philosophy newly intelligible to the Arabic-speaking philosophical community of the tenth century and to later generations. As logician and philosopher of language, his work on the Organon and the Kitāb al-Ḥurūf established the technical vocabulary of Arabic philosophical Arabic. As political philosopher, he originated the tradition of philosophical-prophetic statecraft that runs through Avicenna, Ibn Bajja, Averroes, and Maimonides. And as metaphysician, he constructed the framework of First Cause and emanating intellects that Avicenna would systematize and that became, through Avicenna and Averroes, one of the foundations of the Latin Scholastic metaphysics of God and creation.
See Also
Aristotle · Plato · Avicenna · Maimonides