First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to logic, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval Neo-Platonist and Renaissance European philosophers.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are few good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (this is true of ancient Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity for the American student to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s most powerful and advanced civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the great multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of education and technology. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on European and modern society.
There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic. This is not because Muslims and Middle Eastern people are illogical, violent or authoritarian compared to Christians and Western people, but because Christian Europe viewed Islam as the enemy.
Here are some excellent ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran, which compliment this one-sided view.
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Many times after quoting lines such as these, I have been asked by students, and even some of my professors, how it is that Muslims can say such things if they also behave in such violent and authoritarian ways. The unfortunate truth is that this paradox makes Muslims our close relatives more than either the intelligence of these verses or the brutality of warfare alone. Humanity is always capable, and in each civilization openly displays, both intelligence and ignorance, both discovery and brutality. We should use the best and the worst of Islamic civilization to better understand the best and the worst of our own.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income and wealth. Jews and Christians who were not Catholic such as Nestorians fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thrived as a multicultural and cosmopolitan society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. Consider that the year 1492 was not simply the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the year that Spain and Portugal were reconquered from Muslims by Christian kings, as well as the first year of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous persecution of Jews and other groups deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Jews went from thriving and contributing much scholarship in Islamic Spain to outright persecution and secrecy underground in a year’s time. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 CE), the most famous Jewish medieval philosopher who lived much of his life in Cordoba, Spain, wrote that he read Aristotle but could not understand him until he read Al-Farabi.
ALGEBRA
Algebra is possibly the most useful device (if it can be called a device, though it is part device and part language) in human history. It is important for us to examine algebra because in the second half of the course logic like mathematics becomes an algebraic language of equations. In the ancient world, logic was intended to reveal the foundations of debate, but with Islamic and European developments it gradually became a specialized form of mathematics that was intended to reveal the foundations of not debate but mathematics itself.
Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system, along with the Indian numerals that became our Indian-Arabic numerals we use today, and began doing math in the form of equations we are all taught by law.
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through cities and towns with the latest things and systems of thought (books and printing come this way too into Europe from China). European Castles are modeled on Islamic Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian and Turkish society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful. Europe owes very much to Islamic mechanics and mathematics.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, logic and science that equations became the language for mathematical structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in long spoken form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas, but it can be quite anachronistic and misleading to do this without acknowledging Islamic contributions. For instance, the syllogisms of Aristotle seem much clearer and cleaner when presented in variables and equations of first India and then Islamic algebra.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosophers and scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language. Remember that in ancient cosmology, as well as medieval Islamic and European thought, the order of things was thought to be spoken downwards from the heavens. As Islamic scientists began using algebra to crack the codes of nature, they believed that they were finding the numbers that were the thoughts and speech of God. Islamic art, which makes much use of geometric patterns, reflects this too.
Algebraic equations allowed for Wittgenstein’s later truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Dogmatists and positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and we can acquire true knowledge of it, while skeptics and relativists say that mathematics is human modeling and it remains human perspective and opinion. Consider again the One Equals Two example, and how equations seem to function on their own until we find cases in which they break down.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed.
He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
When asked how he could perform miracles such as walking on water, he asked in return, “Are Stone, mud and gold all equal in your sight?”
When asked, “Teacher, who are the people of my race?”, Jesus replied, “All the children of Adam, and that which you would not have done to yourself, do not do to others”.
When asked “Who was your teacher?”, Jesus replied, “No one taught me, I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it”.
On scholarship and science, Jesus remarks, “How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!”
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
Islam has a long history of debate, called ‘Qiyas’ (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types of reasoning debated in the Islamic world: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. Notice that the Nyaya of India use all three in their proofs, and that Islamic thought and mathematics gathered much from India. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these three was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said inductive is the only one, rather skeptical of deduction and analogy as misleading, arguing the other two are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second. We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873) was a pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method. He was also one of the scholars that introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. He wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, he argued that time and space are relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later. Modern scholarship often says that he merged Neo-platonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950), who was either Turkish or Persian, took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides was much indebted to his work, and read his commentaries to understand Aristotle. Farabi paid much attention to imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and think critically, you can have greater and greater visions of the cosmos and its workings.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037) was the foremost doctor of his time. As a boy he learned Indian Arithmetic from an Indian grocer in his neighborhood. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, psychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing that microscopic organisms are the cause of disease. He was the first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’. He was also a pioneer of equations and propositional algebra, which would be developed later by Europeans into calculus.
Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars, so the universal group ‘cows’ or ‘numbers’ is up in the sky and is embodied in substances on the earth. Islamic philosophers increasingly turned to the human mind and imagination as the source of universals, though this was highly debated. Today, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical, but it is still highly debatable. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? Does the group ‘cows’ exist primarily in the physical set of animals, or in the line we draw around several animals in our heads? This was the big issue, and it still is.
Avicenna asks about unicorns and the phoenix, which he knows to be fictional animals made by the imagination out of the parts of real animals. He asks many probing questions about the reality of imagination, concepts and universals. Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that an imaginary horse does? Does the horse-ness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horse-ness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real and physical, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horse-ness’ are mental.
Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment is important for any Intro Philosophy class because it is strikingly similar to Descartes’ Deceiving Demon, one of the first major concepts of modern European philosophy. Avicenna, who worked with anesthetics in hospitals, asks us to imagine that we are slowly unable to feel our feet, then body, then sight and sensation, then memory and imagination. What is left, the last and most essential thing that is ourselves? Avicenna replies that it is consciousness, or awareness. With that, we still can be said to exist as self-aware. Without that, it can be said that we are no longer. Descartes, who we will study next week, has us imagine that there is a demon who is deceiving us and creating the world as an illusion, but the one thing the demon can not trick us about is that we are as we are aware of ourselves. Descartes concludes with his famous, “I think, therefore I am”.
Al Ghazali (1058-1111) was Persian and one of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism, Islamic mysticism. Like Heraclitus and Pyrrho, he was skeptical of human expertise and the ability to acquire absolute knowledge. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certainty. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of the negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), like Maimonides lived in Cordoba, Spain. he wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, and like Avicenna (notice that their two names are rendered in Latin) was central for Europe’s understanding of Aristotle. Against Ghazali, he wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence, arguing against skepticism for the pursuit of universal knowledge. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe largely followed him, arguing that universals are physical and not mental. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our understanding and science is today more like Avicenna and conceives of the universal as a mental and psychological phenomena, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as uselessly rigid that Europe turned from Averroism.
NEO-PLATONISM AND MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
First, Neo-Platonists would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. ‘Neo’ was adopted by modern scholarship to describe the later tradition following Plato’s thought just like the Neo-Confucianism of China. The tradition comes from Alexandria, Egypt where Greek Platonists were reading the Timaeus and participating in cosmological, religious and philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Turks and Persians. While the first Neo-Platonists were polytheists, it became with Aristotelianism the dominant philosophy of the three Abrahamic religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, identified with Thoth, from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance. We know today that these two texts were written or invented by Greek authors who were using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and the critical sources that Plato drew from to convey the wisdom and universal philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted (as it is in the movie I Heart Huckabees is, “The world is a sphere in which the circumference is everywhere and the center is nowhere. The Chaldean Oracles include many beautiful aphorisms, including:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism include the Fall and the Return, that the Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. In the Abrahamic tradition, this became identified with the fall of Adam and Eve from the primordial Garden of Eden. The cosmos, humanity, and the individual have to fall from grace and the whole such that things can be redeemed and made whole again. The system is a physics of the cosmos and psychology of the soul, an angelology and demonology classifying forces of the cosmos and the mind. The macrocosm is the cosmos, the microcosm the human scaled world. This was the vehicle for much of the ancient cosmology we discussed in the beginning of class and saw again with Plato. The small resembles the large. Opening up the mind and acquiring knowledge and wisdom is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
There are two motions of mind to develop, kataphania and apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting. To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up, understand, and become the whole. Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One. Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself. Time and space are the eternal moment, which in human fallen perspective is fragmented.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were Neo-Platonists for quite a while, including Augustine, Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico di Mirandola, Bruno, Michelangelo, Botticelli, as well as scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (354 - 430 CE) brought it into Christianity from earlier polytheist authors. One of the most important authors, philosophers and church fathers of Catholicism, he was North African. He made the gods of the polytheistic Platonists angels (each with a job in the cosmos) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (about 500 CE), or ‘Fake Dennis’, was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology and kataphania. He was thought to have been the original Dionysius, the first Catholic Bishop of Athens, but modern scholarship has shown that he could not have been based on his texts. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah). He was also the central angelologist of the Christian tradition in the Middle East and Europe.
Eriugena (815 - 877 CE) was Irish and was called to the French court of Charles the Bald to translate Plato and Dionysius. He merged the work of Augustine and Dionysius, working them together with many other authors, to create a dialectical system of kataphania and apophania. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History of Philosophy, “With him, true philosophy first begins”, tracing the evolution of philosophy up to himself. I wrote about the similarities of Eriugena and Hegel for my master’s thesis. Eriugena was one of the only people in Europe who could read Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles from the Pope, who charged him with heresy and pantheism, in exchange for translating and commentary. Augustine was cannon for the Church, and Eriugena argued that the ecstatic unknowing of Dionysius and Augustine are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as Hyper-Ousia, Super-Being, the sum of all being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of Dionysius and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos. For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself and fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (which Eriugena refers to as the worm and the angel). He also, like some Muslim philosophers, argued that authority comes from reason, not the other way around.
Aquinas (1225-1274) lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna. Augustine was the bringer of Plato back into Christian Europe, and Aquinas was the bringer of Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Because he was brilliant, the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. According to the legend his brother’s brought him a prostitute, but he drove her away. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
Aquinas was primarily influenced by Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom were critics of Avicenna. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but later the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge. 50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council (1868) he was pronounced the central thinker of the Catholic Church.
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like later European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel later). Descartes follows Aquinas’ argument for a highest, most necessary being.
William of Ockham (1288-1348), unlike Aquinas, followed Avicenna and argued that only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. He is sometimes called the first modern thinker because of this, but Avicenna put this idea forward centuries earlier. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our labels. Just like Avicenna, he argued that only Being (God) is not contingent, not dependent on other things. Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct. This fits with his Avicenna-like position: if how a thing works is a conception in our heads, then the simplest conception will often be the most useful.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181 - 1226 CE), later San Francisco in Spanish, wanted to join the crusades to help convert Muslims to Christianity, but after spending time at a Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi-like vision of the brotherhood of all of humanity: All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, and contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, he said, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464 CE) was a philosopher and mystic who read and supported Eriugena. He argued that the known and unknown, the finite and infinite, dwell together in the forms of this world, using the example of a circle which is endless right in front of our eyes. He also, like Jesus, used the example of a mustard seed. Imagine a mustard seed, and that we have unlimited water, earth, space and light to give it to grow. One seed is potentially infinite, with no limit to its growth through the number of new plants and seeds that it spawns. Cusa argues that not only is the physical seed infinite, but so is the seed in our minds, in our imagination, showing that the mind is potentially infinite as well.
The Renaissance (1400s -1500s CE)
‘Italy’ was not something that Renaissance people would have known, and neither would they have heard the French word ‘Renaissance’, given to the period hundreds of years later by a French historian. Florence, the city state, was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such. The central power of the Pope had withered, and city state trade created competing cultures. The Florentines imported Islamic merchandise, including the texts of Greek thinkers such as the Neo-Platonists and Aristotelians. The Vatican Library catalog shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 but quickly caught on. In 1443, the library, the most impressive and extensive in Europe, had 2 Greek books out of 340 books total. In 1455, twelve years later, there were 400 Greek books out of 1200 total. In 1484, forty years later, there were 1000 Greek books out of 3650 total. In forty years the library grew ten times in size.
It is frequently assumed by scholars that the Renaissance was a celebration of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major philosophers of the Renaissance and thus patriarchs of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom texts were given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462. It was not a building but a regular meeting of scholars and Ficino soon rose through the ranks to lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Plato was thought to be a follower of Hermes and Zarathustra, and this wisdom was one and the same as the teachings of Jesus. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion between balance and order, but it is similar to the Dao in China as the principle of balance and order of the cosmos.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Egyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks. Ficino gave Europe the first Latin translations of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true philosophy, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus. Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, placing the Egyptians first, not the Persians. These remained the debated opinions for centuries. Bruno and Masons follow Pico in upholding Egypt as fountain of all the world’s wisdom. Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the three Persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and non-being. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was based on earlier Egyptian sources.
