Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy

By Kennedy-Day, Kiki

In Arabic, Aristotle was referred to by name as Aristutalis or, more frequently, Aristu, although when quoted he was often referred to by a sobriquet such as ‘the ...

Simplicius (fl. first half 6th century AD)

By Wildberg, Christian

Simplicius of Cilicia, a Greek Neoplatonic philosopher and polymath, lived in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. He is the author of the most learned commentaries on ...

Illuminationist philosophy

By Ziai, Hossein; Leaman, Oliver

Illuminationist philosophy started in twelfth-century Persia, and has been an important force in Islamic, especially Persian, philosophy right up to the present day. It presents a critique of ...

Occasionalism

By Hasker, William

Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect ...

Islamic philosophy

By Leaman, Oliver

Islamic philosophy may be defined in a number of different ways, but the perspective taken here is that it represents the style of philosophy produced within the framework ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Platonism in Islamic philosophy

By Burrell, David

Plato seems to have been more an icon and an inspiration than an authentic source for Islamic philosophers. So far as is known, the only works available to ...

Ibn Sab‘in, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Haqq (1217–68)

By Omran, Elsayed M. H.

Ibn Sab‘in is well-known in Islamic philosophy for presenting perhaps the most radical form of Sufism. He argued that everything is really just one thing, part of the ...

Mechanics, Aristotelian

By Franklin, Allan

The central feature of Aristotle’s mechanics is his discussion of local motion, a change of place, which he categorizes as either natural or violent. He further divides natural ...

Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy

By Black, Deborah L.

The major Islamic philosophers produced no works dedicated to aesthetics, although their writings do address issues that contemporary philosophers might study under that heading. The nature of beauty ...

al-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’ (d. 925)

By Walker, Paul E.

Perhaps the most famous and widely respected Islamic authority on medicine in the medieval period, al-Razi also aspired to a comparable achievement in philosophy and the other sciences ...

al-Muqammas, Daud (fl. 9th century)

By Stroumsa, Sarah

Daud ibn Marwan, called al-Muqammas, is the first Jewish thinker known to have written in Arabic and one of the earliest Arabic speaking theologians whose work is extant. ...

Orientalism and Islamic philosophy

By Nooruddin, Ubai

Orientalism is the concept that there is something very special and different about the thought of those living in the East, which can be discovered through the methods ...

Aristotle Commentators

Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century bc, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The ...

Aristotle Commentators

By Sorabji, Richard

Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century bc, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The ...

Aristotelianism, medieval

By Jordan, Mark D.

Although there are many possible definitions, ‘medieval Aristotelianism’ is here taken to mean explicit receptions of Aristotle’s texts or teachings by Latin-speaking writers from about ad 500 ...

Aristotle (384–322 BC)

By Irwin, T.H.

Aristotle of Stagira is one of the two most important philosophers of the ancient world, and one of the four or five most important of any time or ...

Greek philosophy: impact on Islamic philosophy

By Fakhry, Majid

During the Hellenistic period (323–43 bc), classical Greek philosophy underwent a radical transformation. From being an essentially Greek product, it developed into a cosmopolitan and eclectic cultural ...

Occasionalism

By Schmaltz, Tad

Occasionalism was a theory of causation that played an important role in early modern metaphysics. In its most radical form, this theory holds that God is the only ...

Islam, concept of philosophy in

By Leaman, Oliver

There is no generally accepted definition of what Islamic philosophy is, and the term will be used here to mean the sort of philosophy which arose within the ...

Albert the Great (1200–80)

By De Libera, Alain
Translated by Murphy, Claudia Eisen

Albert the Great was the first scholastic interpreter of Aristotle’s work in its entirety, as well as being a theologian and preacher. He left an encyclopedic body of ...

Soul in Islamic philosophy

By Inati, Shams C.

The discussion of the human soul, its existence, nature, ultimate objective and eternity, occupies a highly important position in Islamic philosophy and forms its main focus. For the ...

al-Sijistani, Abu Sulayman Muhammad (c.932–c.1000)

By Atiyeh, George N.

Al-Sijistani was one of the great figures of Baghdad in the fourth century AH (tenth century ad). He assembled around him a circle of philosophers and ...

Averroism, Jewish

By Leaman, Oliver

Averroism was enthusiastically taken up by many Jewish philosophers and adapted in a number of ways that extended its scope beyond mere repetition of Averroes’ own arguments. Jewish ...

Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy

By Netton, Ian Richard

Islamic Neoplatonism developed in a milieu already saturated with the thought of Plotinus and Aristotle. The former studied in Alexandria, and the Alexandrine philosophical syllabus included such figures ...