?? notes

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 6

4 min read

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 6

AL-FARABI, THE PERFECT STATE

Philosophy in the Islamic World:

  • Muhammad: 578-632; Quran: 609
  • philosophy supported by political figures; philosophers usually religious figures or judges
  • Baghdad, Persia, Spain are major centers
  • kalam: the word of good, exegesis, systematic theology
  • falsafa: Greek/Hellenistic philosophy translated into Arabic
  • many mixtures of Ancient Greek philosophy and Islamic theology

al-Farabi:

  • important in Latin Christendom
  • 870-950
  • Baghdad when he was young, Damascus later
  • metaphysics, ethics, physics, logic
  • important for Avicenna
  • had access to parts of Plato, most of Aristotle and the Neoplatonists

Works:

  • Enumeration of the sciences: used by Latin Christiandom, assigns order of learning the sciences (soul first)
  • Great Book of Music: important, philosophical, within the sphere of liberal arts
  • Commentaries on Aristotle: logic, practical philosophy
  • Summary of Plato’s Laws
  • Perfect State, etc.: works on ethics, society, religion…

Perfect State:

  • last work
  • interpretation of Plato’s philosopher-king
  • explains a whole cosmology, mixing in Neoplatonism, Aristotle and Plato

Supralunary world:

  • the cosmos, a space of stability and eternity
  • the first principle, the Neoplatonic One; unmoving, perfect, round
  • necessary emenations: lesser intellects, which out of necessity are derived from the One (10, for each planetary body)
  • ends in the Active Intellect, which is the last, thinking the first and itself, it’s what helps us think the source of all forms (thus our reason eminates from it)
  • Latin Christiandom contended the necessity of emenation, emphasizing God’s free will

Sublunary world and human beings:

  • also emanations from the immaterial world
  • formal and material components (soul & body)
  • human intellect is a tabula rasa with pure potentiality, that receives knowledge from the emination of prior Intellects
  • the Active Intellect acts upon our Material (Passive) Intellect, imprinting knowledge onto it
  • Representative Faculty: between sense and rationality, a memory bank of sensibles and their associations
  • First Intelligibles: principles of productive skills, principles by which one becomes aware of good and evil, principles for comprehending existents and first causes

Thinking & Happiness:

  • intelligbles supplied only for reaching eudaimonia
  • happiness is not needing corporeality for one’s existence, salvation
  • happiness is an intellectual state that helps you persevere into eternity
  • happiness means the uninterrupted contemplative life, being close to the Active Intellect
  • religion is all about rulers who prescribe the right moral maxims for acquiring true happiness & eternity

The Perfect State:

  • Aristotelian; humans cannot fulfill all their needs for the perfect life, they need a community

  • we possess only a potentiality for perfection, which can be realized in a state

  • religious and material ideas

  • the perfect city is one of people collaborating for happiness

  • religion = right opinions & actions

Less (imperfect) cities:

  • ignorant: ignorant of eudaimonia and eternity, only strives towards material goods [wrong opinions, wrong actions]; deceived by the ancients; only know strife and war (Hobbseian, animalistic)

  • wicked: knows true happiness, but doesn’t act for it [right opinions, wrong actions]

  • changed: used to be perfect, but has fallen

  • lost: deceived by a ruler

  • in the imperfect cities religion is merely deception, not a path to salvation

  • the perfect city is like a body where all the parts cooperate; the ruler is the heart ordering all other parts

  • excellent rulers make excellent cities, and keep them that way

  • so the ruler must be like the first existent, necessarily ordering all the others perfectly

The Ruler:

  • must be exceptional and predisposed; has reached perfection

  • he has an Actual Intellect, an intellect that is self-sufficient and ideal, better than the Material/Passive Intellect

  • he is someone capable of receiving revelation

  • 12 qualities needed for the ideal ruler

  • all rulers are so perfect that they’re all borderline the same person

  • people in the perfect city reach eudaimonia by perfecting that which is particular to all people, and that which is particular to their class

  • everybody needs to know: first cause, immaterial existents, celestial bodies, natural bodies, generation of man, first ruler and revelation, happiness and the city itself

  • difficult to learn, but all must do so

  • not everyone can learn things as they truly are (only philosophers), so most people have to rely on representations and imitations

  • representative faculty only imitates truth (like imagining that God has a body, even though he does not)

  • religion in the perfect state allows people to reach true happiness

  • via following the perfect ruler

  • it doesn’t matter which religion, as long as it brings people together in the way al-Farabi thinks they should be

Graph View