Encyclopedia of Philosophy: AL-KINDÏ

Arabic philosophers drew extensively, then, on Aristotle’s work and thought. Yet they were not Aristotelians in the strict sense of the word. This is already clear in the work of the first of them, Abti Ytisuf Ya‘qtib ibn Ish.aq al-Kindï (born end of second century/beginning of eight century; died after 256/870) ([2.19], [2.11]). Al-Kindï was a philosopher, no doubt; but he was primarily a wide-ranging scholar and scientist (and it was just as such that, half a thousand years later, Ibn Khaldtin would remember him). The biographer and bibliographer Ibn al-Nadïm (fourth/tenth century) provides a catalogue raisonné of his works: almost 250 of them in all, of which only about a tenth survive. Ibn al¬Nadïm divides them into seventeen categories. Classifying them, rather, by subject areas, we find that al-Kindï devoted about 50 treatises to philosophy and logic, but nearly a hundred to the various branches of mathematics (including astrology), and 35 to medicine and the natural sciences. The others do not concern us here. His scholarly and scientific work was thus extensive and varied; we might mention, for instance, in passing his contributions to optics and pharmacology. As a philosopher, he quotes by name hardly any authors besides Plato and Aristotle. We do not know precisely how great his knowledge was of Plato, but he wrote a treatise listing the works of Aristotle ([2.23]). Of the major works only the Politics is, as we should expect, absent. The list includes two apocrypha (On Plants, On Minerals), but not the Theology of Aristotle, a work by an unknown author, probably Porphyry, consisting of considerably adapted extracts from Plotinus’ later Enneads. Its absence is all the more striking because al-Kind( had corrected an Arabic translation of it made by Ibn N&‘ima for the son of the caliph al-Mu‘tas.im (218/833 to 228/842). And indeed al-Kind(’s philosophy is a branch of Neoplatonism, but not one which is disguised by being based on Aristotelian apocrypha of Neoplatonic origin.