Abstract

In the ninth century, Arabic philosophy was in ferment, and an inquisition of heretics was in process. Al-Kindi, a court scholar, physician, and philosopher functioning at Baghdad, courageously produced, in that context, a treatise, Fi al-Falsafah al-Ula, in which he attempted to unify the philosophical tradition, starting from Aristotle, with basic Islamic concepts. Part One of the treatise is here published for the first time in a non-Arabic language. Al-Kindi, in this treatise, tries to show, by philosophical reasoning, that the world could not have come spontaneously into being ex nihilo, that there must be a unique, eternal being, and that the ad hoc unity and plurality of individual things rest on a prior, creative, self-subsisting, and eternal unity, which is the Ultimate Cause. This volume contains a résumé of al-Kindi studies, a description and analysis of the text, On First Philosophy, a "reevaluation" of al-Kindi’s relation to the Mu'Tazilah sect of Moslem theologians, a translation of On First Philosophy, and a learned passage-by-passage commentary on it, with perspicuous discussions of nuances in Arabic terminology. This is primarily a book for medieval specialists, but students of ontology and theology will find some of al-Kindi’s argumentation relevant to their concerns.—W.G.