Building The Library Of Arabic Philosophy. Platonism And Aristotelianism In The Sources Of Al-Kind?

Abstract

It is true that since early Hellenism, philosophy itself competed with the individual sciences for recognition of a professional status in society, and sought to found its claim on the unconditioned knowledge of the principles. The conception of philosophy in Aristotle and the old Peripatetic school had embraced, ideally at least, applied sciences these in turn being regarded as elements of a paideia in the sense of propaedeutics to philosophy; a stage in philosophical education leading the way to the advanced level of dialectic, the « science of sciences ». Beyond the decline of the philosophical schools in the civilization of late Hellenism, philosophical doctrine of the principles and cosmos survived in the gnostic Platonism of the natural sciences, in the Neoplatonism of the mathematicians, in Peripatetic cosmology of Ptolemy, as also but this is a different matter both socially and ideologically in elementary logic readings of the Christian schola . Keywords: Aristotle philosophy; elementary logic readings; gnostic Platonism; Hellenism; Neoplatonism; old Peripatetic school; philosophical education; propaedeutics