AL-KINDI

ABU YUSUF YA’QUB IBN ISHAQ AL-

KINDI
(801 C.E.-873 C.E.)

PHI 107
LIFE
• Al-Kindi belongs to a noble family, Kinda tribe of Yemen.
• Received the honorific title “Faylasuf al-Arab” or the
‘Philosophers of the Arab”.
• Known as “Alkindus” in the west.
• Today, he was viewed as a bridge between Greek
philosophers and Islamic Philosophy.
• He was a philosopher, astronomer, physician,
matahematician, physicist, musician, and geographer.
ON GOD and the WORLD: “The first cause and the true one”
(1)

• In his kitab al-falsafa al-ula (On First Philosophy), after an

introduction on the meaning of philosophy, Al-kindi, begins
by arguing that all time, motion and bodies are necessarily
finite.
ON GOD: “The first cause and the true one” (2)

• The arab philosophers admitted the reality of nature

and created power. This position was clear with al-
farabi, but al-kindi seems to have hesitated. In his
Treatise on the Efficient Cause of the Flow, as the
title indicates, he attributes true causality to God
alone, who acts without anything else upon him.
• In his one book on cosmologiy and the second determinism, al-Kindi
explains that different things are causes of (asbab wa-’ilal) of one
another. Heavenly bodies, by the constant change of their positions,
are the proximate causes of all the changes of seasons and variety of
weather, and in this way of all life on earth.

• Al-kindi like most of arab philosophers, opted in principle for a

cosmological determinism. That was borrowed from Greek
commentators of Aristotle in Alexandria, who held that planetary
positions determine every event in this world.
The Human Soul
• The problem that al-Kindi and later philosophers faced was to
reconcile the immaterial activity of the intellect with the fact that the
human soul animates a physical body.
• He then connects this with a Neo-Platonist idea, by saying that our
soul can be directed towards the pursuit of desire or the pursuit of
intellect; the former will tie it to the body, so that when the body dies,
it will also die, but the latter will free it from the body and allow it to
survive "in the light of the Creator" in a realm of pure intelligence.
Four Intellects
• The intellect which always in act
• The intellect in potency
• The intellect that has passed from potency to act, having acquired
(mustafad)
• The manifest intellect (zahir)
“The analogy he provides to explain his theory is that of wood and fire.
Wood, he argues, is potentially hot (just as a human is potentially
thinking about a universal), and therefore requires something else which
is already hot (such as fire) to actualize this. This means that for the
human intellect to think about something, the First Intellect must
already be thinking about it. Therefore, he says that the First Intellect
must always be thinking about everything. Once the human intellect
comprehends a universal by this process, it becomes part of the
individual's "acquired intellect" and can be thought about whenever he
or she wishes.”

The Philosophical Works of Al-Kindi by Peter Adamson (2021), Oxford University Press
The Way to Happiness
• Al-Kindi adopts the idea of Plato that the human soul is a complete
and immortal substance, distinct from the body like the rider of a
horse. It even comes from the substance of God like a ray of light
from the sun. W
H ay
u to
Metaphysics
m ha
(God and the
an World)
pp
so in
ul es
s
• The difference of soul is manifested also in the intensity of their
imagination and intelligence in abstracting from the exterior senses
and being absorbed in thought, which can happen when they are
awake and when they are asleep as well.

• Soul has degrees of purification from its passions, such as lust and
anger.
Faith and Reason
• Faith and Reason are both the science of truth, while the truth is one.

• Al-Kindi did not accept the dogmas of Islamic faith and did not try to
challenge this by his Philosophy because “philosophy is inferior to
prophetic revelation, and prophetic revelation/ prophecy comes
suddenly without any effort of reasoning.”