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[ 82 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
several commentaries on them, and some Neoplatonic treatises. They did not
acquire nearly as many of the writings of Plato or the major Neoplatonists.
As a consequence, among Arabs Aristotle soon attained an authority beyond
what he had possessed in Greek antiquity. But their understandings of Aristotle
were colored by Neoplatonic interpretations and accretions, which they were
never able to eliminate entirely. Nevertheless, for them the Aristotelian corpus,
supplemented by medicine and mathematics, represented a complete encyclopedia
of learning. Galen, who had been strongly influenced by Aristotelianism, exercised
a profound influence on Arab medicine, and several of the most important Arab
thinkers combined philosophy and medicine in their work. The Aristotelianism of
the Arabs in turn exercised a powerful influence upon Jewish thought of the
later Middle Ages. In the Renaissance, Averroës’ response to the question of the
soul’s immortality became an important impetus to disengage philosophy from
theology.
The Persian philosopher al-Kindi (c. 800-866), who was the first to write phi-
losophy (
falsafah ) in Arabic, composed a philosophy of nature, the centerpiece of
which was the idea, derived from Aristotle but given a Neoplatonic interpretation,
that it is God’s mind and causal agency that is manifesting itself in the thought and
agency that apparently is generated by humans. Al-Kindi regarded the agent intel-
lect, which is the faculty of the human mind that enables us to formulate abstract
ideas and to understand the causes of things, as a separate spiritual entity or intel-
ligence that, in the chain of being, is above mankind. It is due to the presence of the
agent intellect in human minds that humans can think theoretically.
Inexplicably, al-Kindi (there is some dispute about whether it really was him)
translated parts of the
Enneads
of Plotinus and published them as
The Theology of
Aristotle, thereby creating a cloud of confusion that enveloped Arab philosophy
until well beyond its period of greatest creativity in the twelfth century. As a con-
sequence, after al-Kindi no Arab philosopher had a clear conception of what the
differences were between the views of Plato, the Neoplatonists, and Aristotle.
The Turkish philosopher al-Farabi (c. 878-950) wrote commentaries on Aristo-
tle in which he tried to harmonize Plato and Aristotle, especially with respect to
the issue of creation. He also formulated an influential psychology, based on a
Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle, that distinguished human mentality into the
potential intellect (the mind’s capacity to master a body of new knowledge), the
actual intellect (the mind in the process of acquiring that knowledge and hence
actualizing its potential), the
acquired intellect
(the mind considered as having
already mastered the knowledge), and the agent intellect
(a separate intelligence
that makes all of this intellectual activity possible). In opposition to al-Kindi and
Aristotle, al-Farabi argued that the agent intellect performs the role of the Platonic
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