Aristotle and the Arabs (The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam) by F. E.

Peters
Review by: Lenn Evan Goodman
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan., 1970), pp. 92-93
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1397664 .
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 92 Book Reviews

wholly from considerationof Western art forms. Yet it is precisely at this point
that he might have been more rigorous in differentiatingbetween those elements in
the theories he discusses which are obviously particularisticand those elements
which are universal. He is also not entirely convincing in his discussion of an
oppositionbetween art and religion in the cases of Zeami, Rikyu, and Bash6, who,
he contends,"wantedreligion for the sake of art, but religion, in turn, wantedthem
to give up their art" (p. 236). An examination of the arts of the no, the tea
ceremony, and the haiku from a different perspectivecould lead to precisely the
opposite conclusion: namely, that these arts flowered in the rich soil of Japanese
Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, and are as much in harmony with it as
medieval Europeanpainting and sculptureare in harmonywith Christianity.
Nevertheless, despite these few reservations about some of Professor Ueda's
conclusions,and several very minor factual and typographicalerrors (e.g., the date
of Henj6's retirementfrom the court on page 6 and "Tang" instead of the correct
"T'ang"on pages 82 and 233), it is clear that he has given us a superb volume, a
careful reading of which will amply reward both the specialist and generalist.
V. H. VIGT.TV-TMO
University of Hawaii

Aristotle and the Arabs (The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam), by F. E. Peters.

New York: New York University Press, 1968. Pp. xxiv + 303. $9.50.

Arabic philosophy was Greek from its beginning. There was, as F. E. Peters
observes, no Arab Thales to ponder whether all was sand. For the same reason, he
might add, there was no Arab Aristotle; there were Aristotelians. Philosophy had
a past when it reached the Arabs. Much in it was positive; great reaches of the
imaginative province of possibility had been preempted, others had been wasted or
ignored. What started as a quest had become a tradition and was received as such
by the peoples who spoke or wrote Arabic, with traditional Arab hospitality. It
was called the heritage of dead civilizations, a treasure house of truth, welcomed
intact but only gradually absorbed, for much in it was alien, much was dangerous,
much of hidden value.
Peters tells the story of Aristotle among the Arabs with learning and never
wholly bridled excitement. He starts with the founding of Aristotelianism in late
antiquity, passing swiftly to the Hellenistic east, the translation movement, the in-
fluence of the canon in structuring Islamic books and then Islamic thought, and
finally the achievement of Islamic philosophy and its detractors.
As Moses Hadas wrote, "The compound of elements in a culture must be
chemical rather than physical; the ingredients must coalesce until their separate
identities are no longer easily discernible. Indeed the degree of assimilation is
in inverse ratio to the ease with which an increment is recognizable. . ." One

Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion (New York: Columbia University Press,
1959), p. 3.

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93

thing at least to be learned from the synoptic view of the Middle Eastern career
of Aristotle afforded by Peters's book is the strength of the middle, the syncretist,
synthesist position, and the weakness of extremes. For if philosophy was not born
naturally in Islam, it also did not die there easily. Radical rationalist and ultrafun-
damentalist might battle until they destroyed each other, but every clash of more
moderate forces brought the Aristotelian and Islamic traditions closer together.
Ash'ari and Farabi are not worlds apart, and from Ash'ari and Farabi to Ibn Sina
and Ghazali is a great step, for Ghazali was a philosopher and Ibn Sina was a
mystic. Natural as it is to doubt that the impasse between Ghazali and Ibn Rushd
could utterly destroy the spirit of philosophy, it is still gratifying to see, as the
dust of the two Tahdfuts settles, that long generations of thinkers are still going
about their business, looking back, as Peters puts it, through Ibn Rushd and
Ghazali to Ibn Sina and the quest for an "oriental philosophy."
Aristotle and the Arabs deals not with the problems of philosophy, but with
the rubrics, catchwords, principles, and methods which are the historian's stock in
trade; its pages bristle with isms and proper names.2 The economies of such short-
hand enable Peters to mention everyone, but full due can be given no one.
Mulammad b. Zakariyya' ar-Razi is treated mainly as a Platonist; on the other
hand, Peters moves with ease and grace among the ghostly lesser lights from
Thabit to al-Farani. A student who mastered the factual content of Peters's book
would have become a scholar. A scholar who adequately understood all that is
programmatically set out in Peters's full references and bibliographies would have
confronted intellectually the whole philosophical history of Islam.

LENN EVAN GOODMAN

University of Hawaii

Idealistic Trends in Indian Philosophies of Education, by Kirti Devi Seth.

Allahabad: The Leader Press, 1966. Pp. xv + 510. Rs. 26/-.

This work, presented as a doctoral thesis in December, 1953, could as well be

titled "The Indian Philosophy of Education," so comprehensive is it in the field
of Indian education, both ancient and contemporary. It deals with idealism, as a
philosophy both East and West, in a historical context and traces its development
through such diverse philosophers as Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Whitehead in the
West, and the writers of the Vedas, the Sfitras, and the GItJ, in addition to Besant,
Tagore, Aurobindo, and Radhakrishnan, in the East.
Chapter 1 is devoted to the defining of such terms as 'philosophy' and 'education',
discussing their interrelationship, and evaluating such other philosophies of
education as naturalism and pragmatism.
Chapters 2-4 deal with idealism in the West, recounting, in perhaps unnecessary

2 Of misprints and minor errors, caveat lector; e.g., Ash'ari was defending not
causality
but rational argument at Isti.hsdn (Richard J. McCarthy, S.J., trans., The Theology of
al-Ash'ari [Beirut: The Catholic Press, 1953], p. 126); cf. Peters, p. 142, n.26.

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