MWANAFALSAFA
Al-Kindi
أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الكندي
- Lifespan
- c. 800 – c. 870 (dates uncertain)
- Region & background
- Kufa or Basra, Iraq (sources differ) — worked in Baghdad
- Intellectual tradition
- Falsafa — early Arabic philosophy, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic
Key ideas
- Truth should be accepted from any tradition, including Greek philosophy
- God as the absolutely simple One, cause of unity and being
- Mathematics as a foundation for the sciences
- Ethics of the soul: freedom from sorrow by valuing lasting, intelligible goods
Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī was born around 800 — in Kufa according to many accounts, in Basra according to others — and died around 870, probably in the early 870s. Educated in Baghdad, he was close to the Abbasid court of al-Maʾmūn and al-Muʿtaṣim and helped oversee the translation of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic.
Later writers called him the “philosopher of the Arabs”. He combined Aristotle with Neoplatonic ideas, argued that truth should be welcomed whatever its source, and wrote on metaphysics, the intellect, the soul, ethics, mathematics, optics, music and medicine. His treatise On First Philosophy, dedicated to al-Muʿtaṣim, is his most important metaphysical work. A treatise on deciphering encrypted messages attributed to him is often cited as the earliest known description of frequency analysis.
Notable works
- On First Philosophy (Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā)
- On the Intellect (Fī al-ʿAql)
- On Dispelling Sorrows (Fī al-Ḥīla li-Dafʿ al-Aḥzān)
- Treatise on deciphering cryptographic messages (attribution generally accepted)